When Longing Becomes Your Lover
Breaking from Infatuation, Rejection, and Perfectionism to Find Authentic Love
I should say up front that I knew Amanda McCracken before she had a thesis about her own desire. The gods of student housing brought us together as hallmates and next-door neighbors as college freshmen. So by happenstance and by choice, we were in the same close circle of friends during our college years. When I reached the chapters about that time in When Longing Becomes Your Lover, I read not as a critic but as a witness: The campus she describes was my campus too, and the recognition was uncomfortable in the way only accurate things are.
After college, McCracken continued her elite running career and also became a journalist and teacher. All three pursuits shape the book, as does the impulse to look back over one’s life and ask, “How did I end up this way?” For McCracken, “this way” refers to her realization eight years ago that she was a 39-year-old virgin who had dated more than 100 men and seemed unable to find a love match. The question itself landed her in a therapist’s office, where she was offered a term for what ailed her: limerence, Dorothy Tennov’s term for the obsessive infatuation with an idealized other, a state that mimics love but runs on fantasy. This term reorganized how McCracken thought about her past. Rather than being unlucky in love, she had been faithful to the idea of longing itself.
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This faithfulness to longing had its origins in her childhood church. At age 16, she pledged celibacy before her congregation and donned a purity ring in the shape of an infinity symbol. The purity movement of the 1990s promised that deferral was investment, not deprivation. God was writing her love story, and the longer she waited (to infinity!), the more luminous the payoff. What it trained, she argues, was not chastity but an erotic posture. Desire was aimed permanently at an idealized future man who was savored precisely because he never arrived. This deferral fuels the fantasy, which in turn fuels detachment. And McCracken notes that the same detachment from intimacy drives hookup culture. The swipe left or right and the purity ring are twins, not opposites. Each makes fantasy safer than a real human relationship.
Here the conclusion is mine, not McCracken’s. A theology that spends that much energy policing purity and difference erodes the one thing love requires: empathy, or the capacity to see the other as a person rather than a type or a prize. Her 100 men are, in this light, not 100 misfortunes but 100 screens. Limerence is what empathy becomes when you have been trained to love the idea of a person instead of the person. You can ache for a man across the world because distance keeps him ideal and keeps you from beholding someone close enough to disappoint you.
The book evokes a question that it doesn’t answer: Does McCracken’s childhood version of the church not teach about forgiveness? Purity culture is an economy of merit in which you earn your love story by waiting, and worth accrues only by withholding. There is no grace in that arithmetic; only a running tally and the shame awaiting anyone who falls short. A faith ordered around forgiveness would run on a different economy—one in which worth is given rather than earned, failure is not the end of the story but the beginning of restoration, and forgiveness of imperfect others and the imperfect self breaks the fantasies that limerence feeds. McCracken ends up finding this forgiveness—this grace—in her therapist’s office, in somatic work, and in a real and imperfect marriage, since the church that taught her to funnel her desire into longing has no sacrament of mercy for the journey back.
That open question is the book’s provocation for readers of this magazine. Christianity has never treated longing as merely a disorder to be cured. Desire shows up in biblical poetry consistently, most famously in the Song of Songs, in which longing is not love’s enemy but its compass. But when read through spiritualized lenses, this desire is exclusively for God rather than for one’s own earthly object of love, who God created. McCracken’s own longing and her difficulty with intimacy depict the long-term harm that purely spiritualized readings of biblical texts can cause, especially when they are not balanced by other viable interpretations. One wonders if emphasizing the polyvocality of biblical texts could have created enough friction to puncture the limerent fantasies from which McCracken suffered for years.
As a theologian and pastor myself, I must contend with one of the suppressed claims of McCracken’s book: the church took the curiosity and desire of a young person and shaped it into a tool for self-oppression, and then left her to fend for herself and figure herself out. Thank God psychotherapy and other secular tools were helpful for her. It was a long journey that she is courageous enough to share with us. We should learn from it, so that our churches don’t undersell forgiveness of the polyvocality of human experience as an expression of God’s love.
