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December 15, 2025
What if the intensity you’ve chased in relationships wasn’t love, but dopamine?
Amanda McCracken is an award winning journalist, endurance athlete, and intimacy researcher who was diagnosed with ADHD at 36, long after she had built a successful career.
From the outside, her life looked accomplished and disciplined. Inside, she struggled with distraction, emotional intensity, anxiety, and a lifelong pattern of romantic fixation. In this episode, Amanda shares how ADHD showed up quietly in her life, from trichotillomania and overthinking to using extreme exercise as a form of self regulation, long before she had language for what was actually happening.
The conversation centers on limerence, a psychological state of intense romantic longing marked by obsession, idealization, and emotional highs and lows. Amanda explains how limerence thrives on uncertainty, making it especially powerful for ADHD brains that crave novelty and fast dopamine.
Tracy and Amanda explore how rejection sensitivity, perfectionism, and trauma can blur the line between desire and self worth, and why many women mistake intensity for connection. Amanda also shares how chasing emotionally unavailable partners became an organizing force in her life, and how that pattern kept her stuck in fantasy instead of intimacy. She also had to confront a deeper truth: real intimacy feels quieter than fantasy.
Today, Amanda is married to a securely attached partner and is the author of When Longing Becomes Your Lover, a deeply personal exploration of limerence, ADHD, and what it takes to receive love instead of chasing it.
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“The clearest sign medication was helping was that I stopped pulling out my eyebrows and eyelashes, something I had been doing to manage stress and focus.”
- Amanda McCracken
“Limerence is a psychological state of persistent, sometimes obsessive rumination about a romantic interest you have idealized.”
- Amanda McCracken
“Because limerence feeds on uncertainty, dating apps and hookup culture can intensify it, especially for someone with ADHD.”
-- Amanda McCracken
"I realized that a lot of the time I wasn’t in love with the person. I was in love with what being chosen by them would say about me."
-- Amanda McCracken
"I had to accept that nobody could perfect me, and that being imperfect with someone else was actually okay."
- Amanda McCracken
"One of the most powerful things I did was repeatedly writing, “I am ready for and worthy of a deeply loving relationship,” even before I believed it."
- Amanda McCracken
"ADHD allows me to think metaphorically and make connections quickly. I just needed better structure so other people could follow."
- Amanda McCracken
"Exercise helps me think in ways I can’t when I’m sitting still, and it helps regulate my anxiety and focus."
- Amanda McCracken
"Writing things down gets them out of my head so I don’t have to hold everything at once."
- Amanda McCracken
- Amanda McCracken was diagnosed with ADHD at 36 after her parents noticed relationship struggles, revealing lifelong daydreaming, emotional dysregulation, and trichotillomania.
- She self-medicated through long-distance running and triathlons, with hyperactivity spiking whenever she tapered before races.
- Limerence, the obsessive longing for idealized, unavailable partners, became her dopamine-fueled ADHD coping mechanism that prevented real intimacy.
- Raised as an "alpha female" athlete, Amanda chased emotionally unavailable men as goals to win, rejecting anyone "too easy" as unworthy.
- She reserved virginity until 41 as protection from rejection and a perfectionist standard, likely rooted in early trauma from her mother's stroke at birth.
- Limerence thrived on uncertainty and rejection sensitivity, with Amanda romanticizing crushes through creative work and justifying chaos as artistic fuel.
[00:50:30 - 01:05:06] Meeting Dave, Breaking Patterns, and Finding Easy Love
- Amanda met husband Dave when exhausted by the chase, finding his availability "boring" because she trusted him first—reversing her usual pattern.
- After hitting rock bottom flying to Detroit for a man who ghosted her, she committed to change through daily affirmations and giving herself grace.
- Her book When Longing Becomes Your Lover (Feb 10) combines memoir and research on breaking limerence, with podcast The Longing Lab exploring obsessive longing.
ADHD isn’t a productivity problem. It’s an identity problem.
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