Katie Couric Had Blunt Advice for a Late-Life Virgin

Katie Couric once gave a TV guest behind-the-scenes advice so blunt it "felt like a slap in the face," the woman recalls. Amanda McCracken, who didn't have intercourse until age 41, says she appeared on Couric's talk show in 2014, when she was 36, for a segment on adults who were still virgins. When taping stopped, McCracken tells USA Today, Couric told her to abandon what she called a "fairy-tale princess syndrome" and have sex, because no storybook rescuer was coming.

McCracken says she came to realize later that she had a different kind of syndrome, one referred to as limerence. It's often characterized by an intense longing for unavailable partners and storybook romances. What may sound harmless can be debilitating because it prevents people from developing relationships with available partners. Now 48, McCracken has written about it in the book When Longing Becomes Your Lover: Breaking from Infatuation, Rejection, and Perfectionism to Find Authentic Love: A True Story of Overcoming Limerence, released in February. Couric didn't respond to a request for comment. Read more about limerence.