How To Fall In Love With Anyone: Essays

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Synopsis

“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).

Chapters

  • How to Fall in Love 01 open

    Duration: 30s
  • How to Fall in Love 02 dedication

    Duration: 07s
  • How to Fall in Love 03 intro

    Duration: 05min
  • How to Fall in Love 04 The Exploded Star

    Duration: 43min
  • How to Fall in Love 05 The Football Coach and the Cheerleader

    Duration: 58min
  • How to Fall in Love 06 Coal Miner's Daughter

    Duration: 48min
  • How to Fall in Love 07 Girl Meets Boy

    Duration: 35min
  • How to Fall in Love 08 The Problem of Deservingness

    Duration: 57min
  • How to Fall in Love 09 The Black Box

    Duration: 41min
  • How to Fall in Love 10 I'm Willing to Lie

    Duration: 25min
  • How to Fall in Love 11 Okay Honey

    Duration: 34min
  • How to Fall in Love 12 If You Can Fall

    Duration: 50min
  • How to Fall in Love 13 The Pleasures of Ordinary Devotion

    Duration: 49min
  • How to Fall in Love 14 To Fall in Love

    Duration: 10min
  • How to Fall in Love 15 Arthur Aron's 36 Questions

    Duration: 05min
  • How to Fall in Love 16 Acknowledgements

    Duration: 05min
  • How to Fall in Love 17 close

    Duration: 51s