When Longing Becomes Your Lover: Breaking from Infatuation, Rejection, and Perfectionism to Find Authentic Love: A True Story of Overcoming Limerence

Journalist McCracken (The Longing Lab) provides a candid examination of limerence, or an obsessive, unreciprocated infatuation with a romantic interest whom one has “illogically placed on a pedestal.” Tracing her own experience with romantic infatuation, McCracken recounts how she sought solace from early attachment issues by falling for emotionally unavailable men whose unattainability fueled obsession but precluded real-life intimacy. Limerence, she writes, was partly a way of insulating herself from having to make real-life romantic decisions. More broadly, it was also a result of Hollywood-influenced expectations of romantic perfection and a purity culture that disempowers women from listening to their bodies and promotes passive longing. The author, who began to recover from her romantic obsessions at age 40, explains how readers can do the same by learning to tolerate imperfection and genuine intimacy; creating more realistic narratives about past heartbreaks; and engaging in mindfulness and body-based therapy practices. McCracken draws from psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality to illuminate how longing can function as both self-protection and self-sabotage, but it’s her refreshing vulnerability that lends the narrative its openhearted relatability and insight. Readers of Glennon Doyle will especially appreciate this. (Feb.)