How to Fall in Love with Anyone

How to Fall in Love with Anyone
Author: Mandy Len Catron
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2017-06-27
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1501137468

“A beautifully written and well-researched cultural criticism as well as an honest memoir” (Los Angeles Review of Books) from the author of the popular New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy. 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).

Open Love

Open Love
Author: Axel Neustädter
Publisher: Bruno Gmuender
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2018-10
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9783959852838

Who do we love? Who can we love? And how many? With Open Love, Axel Neustadter explores the possibilities and reveals the secrets of non-monogamous gay love. Fuck buddies, platonic friendships, spiritual partnerships: these are some of the possibilities beyond the traditional monogamous couple. Above all, however, it s the open relationship that has always posed special challenges for people willing to step outside the monogamy template. Neustadter tackles all the important questions asked by anyone who s yearned for a relationship with that certain extra quality: How do you open up a relationship without drama? What about jealousy? Is sex outside the relationship the new fidelity? Why are open relationships the new way to be safe? How gay is polyamory anyway? This book is a guide to the freedom and joy of alternative relationships. At the same time, it offers words of caution about excessive expectations and the pitfalls that can lead to disappointment and failure in free love."

How to Love Yourself (and Sometimes Other People)

How to Love Yourself (and Sometimes Other People)
Author: Meggan Watterson
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1401948049

Are you trying to find love – and beginning to suspect you’re not looking in the right place? This wise, hip guide gives you a new map for the journey to happiness in relationships of all kinds, starting in your own heart. Told from the alternating vantage points of authors Meggan Watterson and Lodro Rinzler, How to Love Yourself (and Sometimes Other People) reminds us that love isn’t something we have to earn. All of us are deeply and intrinsically worthy of love – not only the love we hope to receive from others, but the love we give to ourselves – and this book offers the insight and practical tools we need to stay firmly grounded in self-love as we ride out the natural (and often stormy) cycles of relationships. Meggan and Lodro’s unique perspectives as teachers and scholars of Christian mysticism and Buddhism respectively make for a rich and lively dialogue that draws on wisdom sources like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Four Noble Truths, along with funny, revealing stories from their own love lives and their deep friendship with each other. You’ll find guidance for embracing single life, dating with an open heart, and thriving in lasting love; meditations and practices for calm abiding, "disciplined hope," and connecting to the source of love within you; and tips on everything from sex, self-worth, and nourishing friendships to navigating breakups and learning to truly love yourself. Ultimately, you’ll be able to see your ideal partner in a new light – not as someone who "completes" you, but as someone who mirrors back to you your own wholeness.

Love In Abundance

Love In Abundance
Author: Kathy Labriola
Publisher: SCB Distributors
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2011-03-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0937609471

Beyond the basics of polyamory lies a complex web of negotiations, agreements, pitfalls and rewards. Kathy Labriola, a relationships counselor who has worked for many years with singles, couples and groups in polyamorous and open relationships, sets forth some of the realities of alternative lifestyles: dealing with some of the common relationship-disrupters, managing jealousy, choosing compatible partners, combining BDSM with polyamory, distinguishing between sex addiction and polyamory, and much more.

Let Love Find You

Let Love Find You
Author: John Selby
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2011-08-31
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1446458725

You are looking for love, but never seem to meet the person of your dreams. Where are you going wrong? How can you invite true love and sexual satisfaction into your life? John Selby has the answers to these and any other questions you may have about improving your love life and creating relationships that work. With tried-and-tested techniques, expert guidance and inspiring examples, he explains how you can overcome the barriers that lie between you and the love of your life. You will discover how to heal past hurts; boost your sex appeal; give out all the right signals; make the most of each encounter and find the partner who is right for you. Your perfect lover is out there, somewhere - Let Love Find You will show you how to bring that special person into your life.

Big Love

Big Love
Author: Scott Stabile
Publisher: New World Library
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2017-08-21
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1608684946

“I look to Scott for wisdom and leadership and he has delivered both with Big Love. This book opened my heart and mind and I’m forever grateful.” — Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Love Warrior What happens when you fully commit yourself to love? Endless good, insists Scott Stabile, who found that out by overcoming plenty of bad. His parents were murdered when he was fourteen. Nine years later, his brother died of a heroin overdose. Soon after that, Scott joined a cult that dominated his life for thirteen years before he summoned the courage to walk away. In Big Love, his insightful and refreshingly honest collection of personal essays, Scott relates these profound experiences as well as everyday struggles and triumphs in ways that are universally applicable, uplifting, and laugh-out-loud funny. Whether silencing shame, rebounding after failure, or moving forward despite fears, Scott shares hard-won insights that consistently return readers to love, both of themselves and others.

Open

Open
Author: Jenny Block
Publisher: Seal Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2009-02-10
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0786744340

Finally, a book about open marriage that grapples with the problems surrounding monogamy and fidelity in an honest, heartfelt, and non-fringe manner. Jenny Block is your average girl next door, a suburban wife and mother for whom married life never felt quite right. While many books on this topic presuppose that the reader is ready to embrace an “alternative lifestyle,” Block operates from the assumption that most couples who are curious about or engaged in open marriages are in fact more like her — normal people who question whether monogamy is right for them; good people who love their spouses but want variation; capable parents who are not deviant just because they choose to be honest about their desires. Open challenges our notions of what traditional marriage looks like, and presents one woman's journey down an uncertain path that ultimately proves open marriage is a viable option for her and others.

The Four Noble Truths of Love

The Four Noble Truths of Love
Author: Susan Piver
Publisher: Lionheart Press, a division of the Open Heart Project
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1732277613

"Susan Piver consistently offers what so many of us seek: A generous, caring, loving teacher, someone with an open heart and a clear mind, eager to help us find our own way forward." —Seth Godin, author of Linchpin Broken hearts, resentment, affairs, divorce. Why is it so hard to make relationships work? New York Times bestselling author and mindfulness expert Susan Piver applies classic Buddhist wisdom to modern romance, including her own long-term relationship, to show that ancient philosophies have timeless—and unexpected—wisdom on how to love. The Four Noble Truths of Love will challenge the expectations you have about dating, sex, and romance, liberating you from the habits, traumas, and expectations that have been holding back your relationships. This mindful approach toward love will help you open your heart fearlessly, deepen communications with your partner, increase your compassion and resilience, and lead you toward a path of true happiness. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain: expansive, real love for yourself and others.

Conversations on Love

Conversations on Love
Author: Natasha Lunn
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0593296583

An investigation of love in all its forms, featuring conversations with Lisa Taddeo, Esther Perel, Emily Nagoski, Kate Bowler, Alain de Botton, Stephen Grosz, Roxane Gay and others Journalist Natasha Lunn was almost 30 when she realized that there was no map for understanding love. While she was used to watching friends fall in and out of love, the older she got the more she had to acknowledge: her friends' relationship struggles could no longer be chalked up to youth, and the more she learned about her parents, grandparents, work colleagues, and mentors the clearer it became that age had not brought any of them any closer to understanding this elusive, transformative, consuming emotion. One night during the months she found this realization settling over her, she sat up in bed and jotted three words in a notebook: conversations on love. In that moment, Lunn understood that she didn't want advice about love, she wasn't looking for the answers, or evergreen wisdom but she craved candid, wide-ranging, sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the parts of love that often don't make it into our everyday discussions of marriage, sibling relationships, friendships, or mother/daughter bonds. Conversations on Love started as an experiment aimed at interviewing experts about what love meant to them, in all of it's messiness, and quickly blossomed into a newsletter that attracted thousands of subscribers and a prestigious range of interviewees. It turns out that Lunn wasn't the only person ready to talk more openly and expansively about love. Interweaving personal essays and revealing interviews with some of the most sough-after experts on love, journalist Natasha Lunn guides us through the paradoxical heart of three key questions about love--How do we find love? How do we sustain it? And how do we survive when we lose it?--to deliver a book that is a solace, a beacon, a call to arms, a tool-kit. The real-life love stories in these pages will leave you hopeful and validated, while the insights from experts will transform the way you think about your relationships. Above all, Conversations on Love will remind you what love is: fragile, sturdy, mundane, beautiful, always worth fighting for.

Open

Open
Author: Rachel Krantz
Publisher: Harmony
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2024-06-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593139577

An award-winning journalist chronicles her first open relationship with “breathtaking honesty” (Los Angeles Times) in this “sexy, messy, necessary look at polyamory” (The Advocate). FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Them When Rachel Krantz met and fell for Adam, he told her that he was looking for a committed partnership—just one that did not include monogamy. Intrigued and more than a little nervous, Krantz decided to see whether their love could coexist with the freedom to date other people. Could they strike an exquisite balance between intimacy and independence, and find a way to feel passion for each other once the honeymoon phase ended? Krantz documents her dive into polyamory, from Brooklyn sex parties to swinging and beyond, in her extraordinary debut memoir. As she attempts to write a new plot for her love story with Adam, she runs up against miscommunications, gaslighting, and ancient power dynamics, and seeks solid ground in a relationship where the rules are ever-shifting. An award-winning journalist, she interviewed scientists, psychologists, and people living and loving outside the mainstream as she searched to understand what polyamory would do to her heart, her mind, and her life. With an unflinching eye and page-turning storytelling, Open is groundbreaking in both its documentarian approach to polyamory and its explicit subject matter. From debilitating anxiety spirals to heart-opening connections with the men and women she dates, Rachel puts her whole self on the line as she attempts to redefine what a relationship is—or could be.