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What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer.
In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, "Catron melds science and emotion beautifully into a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation" (Bookpage). She delves back to 1944, when her grandparents met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver. She uses biologists' research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from. And she tells the story of how she decided to test an experiment that she'd read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.
"Perfect fodder for the romantic and the cynic in all of us" (Booklist), How to Fall in Love with Anyone flips the script on love. "Clear-eyed and full of heart, it is mandatory reading for anyone coping with—or curious about—the challenges of contemporary courtship" (The Toronto Star).
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 27, 2017 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781501137464
- File size: 2217 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781501137464
- File size: 3154 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 1, 2017
One woman ponders what it means to be in love.When Catron's parents got divorced after three decades of marriage, the event caused her to take a closer look at her own faltering relationship, which had continued for almost 10 years. When she first got together with Kevin, life had stretched ahead of them with infinite possibilities, but after so much time as a couple, she wondered if she had settled for a life and a person that were not quite right for her. "It had never occurred to me," writes the author, "that you could love someone the way I loved Kevin--that you could want to wake up with him every morning and go to bed with him every night--but not know if you wanted to commit the rest of your life to him." Their breakup was slow and fitful, but eventually they parted ways, leaving the door open for new relationships and questions about what it means to fall in or be in love. Catron uses her own romantic relationships and the marriages of her parents, grandparents, sister, and friends to question how and why we fall in love, what it means to share a life with someone without tying the knot, and how we use our relationships to show a certain side of ourselves to the world. Catron touches on a variety of disciplines, including history, psychology, literature, music, movies, and human biology, showing readers how love consists of numerous choices that influence us and help us overlook the small details about a person that become irksome. The author also includes her original essay on love, which was one of the most popular in 2015 in the New York Times, as well as 36 questions to ask a potential partner. Personal musings and reminiscences paired with solid research provide an interesting stroll through an abstract topic.COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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