Whether yours is a happy Valentines, or an unhappy Valentines (sob), there's a book on love on our list that will suit you perfectly.
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F*ck Love: One Shrink's Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship, by Michael Bennett, MD, and Sarah Bennett
About the book: From the New York Times bestselling authors of the “refreshingly blunt” (Harper’s Bazaar) F*ck Feelings—this seriously irreverent roadmap reveals the essentials to look for when you're done being suckered by the promise of true love and want help seeking a real, lasting relationship.
Many people have opinions on the subject of romantic relationships—why they’re so hard to find, so difficult to maintain, so easily analogized to planets and pets—but the real source of trouble isn’t too complicated: it’s that we are choosing our partners based on love, excitement, lust, attraction, neediness…on feelings.
Instead of helping readers find true love (also known as “total bullshit”), Dr. Michael Bennett and his comedy-writing daughter Sarah reveal the practical, commonsense criteria for good partnerships that will allow real love to develop, even after the romance has died down or been buried completely. Finding a good partner involves losing preconceived notions about who your dream date might be, so the Bennetts helpfully appraise the pros and cons of eight traits people most commonly seek: charisma, beauty, chemistry, communication, sense of humor, family stability, intelligence, and wealth. They suggest you’ll have better luck finding a partner in a bar, online, or on a date arranged by your chiropractor if you focus on ideas like mutual attraction and respect and common interests and common goals. With helpful quizzes, case studies inspired by Dr. Bennett’s practice, and unscientific flow charts, F*ck Love is packed with enough advice and wisdom to help you avoid the relationship nightmares that led you to this book in the first place.
Why we’re taking notice: Because not enough self-hope books are co-written by comedy writers. This book sounds fun.
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Juliet's Answer: One Man's Search for Love and the Elusive Cure for Heartbreak, by Glenn Dixon
About the book: Eat, Pray, Love (from a man’s perspective) meets Under the Tuscan Sun—a fresh, heartwarming story about a man who travels to Verona, where he answers letters addressed to Shakespeare’s Juliet, all in an attempt to understand heartbreak, to heal and to find love again.In fair Verona where we lay our scene…
When Glenn Dixon is spurned by love, he does something unusual. He travels to Verona, Italy, to become a scribe of Juliet, Shakespeare’s fictional character, all in an attempt to understand his heartbreak. Once there, he volunteers to answer the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to Juliet, letters sent from lovelorn people all over the world who long to understand the mysteries of the human heart.
Glenn’s journey takes him deep into the charming community of Verona, where he learns the traditions of the townspeople and becomes involved in unravelling the truth behind Romeo and Juliet—Did these star-crossed lovers actually exist? Did they live in Verona? Why have they remained at the forefront of hearts and minds for centuries? And what can they teach us about love? At the same time, we learn about Claire, Glenn’s unrequited love, the source of his heartbreak. Was she truly his soul’s match, or was she, like Rosalind in Shakespeare’s classic play, a mere infatuation who pales in comparison the moment his real Juliet enters his life?
When Glenn returns home to Canada and resumes his duties as a Grade 10 English teacher, he undertakes a lively reading of Romeo and Juliet with his students, engaging them in passions past and present. But in an intriguing reversal of fate and fortune, his students—along with an old friend—instruct the teacher on the true meaning of love, loss, and moving on.
An enthralling tale of modern-day love steeped in the romantic traditions of eras past, this is a memoir that will warm your heart.
Why we’re taking notice: We're taking the word of Stacey May Fowles in The Globe and Mail who writes, "With Juliet’s Answer, Dixon has gracefully entered into the tradition of travel writing meets memoir and despite his driving belief that he knows so little about the subject, he writes about love with admirable generosity, sensitivity and insight."
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What Love Is: and what it could be, by Carrie Jenkins
About the book: What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life’s perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety-inducing heart palpitations); we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently changed to be more accepting of homosexual, interracial, and non-monogamous relationships and how they will continue to evolve in the future. Full of anecdotal, cultural, and scientific reflections on love, What Love Is is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to say “I love you.” Whether young or old, gay or straight, male or female, polyamorous or monogamous, this book will help each of us decide for ourselves how we choose to love.
Why we’re taking notice: Jenkins is a polyamorous philosopher who, according to her twitter bio, is 'Putting the "fun" in "fundamental questions."' Okay!
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What the Mouth Wants: A Memoir of Food, Love and Belonging, by Monica Meneghetti
About the book: The redefinition of family values as seen from the eyes of a polyamorous, queer Italian Canadian obsessed with food. This mouthwatering, intimate, and sensual memoir traces Monica Meneghetti's unique life journey through her relationship with food, family and love. As the youngest child of a traditional Italian-Catholic immigrant family, Monica learns the intimacy of the dinner table and the ritual of meals, along with the requirements of conformity both at the table and in life. Monica is thirteen when her mother is diagnosed with breast cancer and undergoes a mastectomy. When her mother dies three years later, Monica considers the existence of her own breasts and her emerging sexuality in the context of grief and the disintegration of her sense of family.
As Monica becomes an adult, she discovers a part of her self that rebels against the rigours of her traditional upbringing. And as the layers of her sexuality are revealed she begins to understand that like herbs infusing a sauce with flavour; her differences add a delicious complexity to her life. But in coming to terms with her place in the margins of the margins, Monica must also face the challenge of coming out while living in a small town, years before same-sex marriage and amendments to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms created safer spaces for queers. Through risk, courage and heartbreak, she ultimately redefines and recreates family and identity according to her own alternative vision.
Why we're taking notice: "Written with the precision of a recipe and the lyricism of a poem," according to award-winning writer Sierra Skye Gemma, "What the Mouth Wants approaches difficult or misunderstood topics—the death of a parent, childhood and ancestral trauma, bisexuality, and polyamory—with sensitivity and honesty.”
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Love Starts Here: Becoming Your Best Self to Find Your Best Match, by Avrum Nadigel & Aliza T. Israel
About the book: Are you ready for a relationship? How can you meet the right person? How do you know it’s right? Will this last?
Thanks to Internet dating and instant global communication, it’s become easier and easier to meet people. So why is it so hard to find the right person? So hard that you may have, almost, given up. Who needs a long-term committed relationship anyway?
The exercises in this workbook are designed to help you thrive in the relationships you have, or hope to find. Created by a married couple—a family-and-relationship therapist and a clinical psychiatris—this book will provide you with tools to navigate the highs and lows of emotionally-committed relationships. Whether you fear commitment, or find yourself blinded by your love of falling in love, this workbook will help you begin to make changes, to chart a path toward lasting, committed love.
Commitment is hard. But there is meaning in the struggle: You are capable of building a relationship that is far better than the ones you've seen.
Why we’re taking notice: Because Self-Counsel Press publishes great guides about every quandary and challenge life might throw at you.
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Thinking About Love: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, edited by Diane Enns & Antonio Calcagno
About the book: Does love command an ineffability that remains inaccessible to the philosopher?
Thinking About Love considers the nature and experience of love through the writing of well-known Continental philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Evolving forms of social organization, rapid developments in the field of psychology, and novel variations on relationships demand new approaches to and ways of talking about love. Rather than offering prescriptive claims, this volume explores how one might think about the concept philosophically, without attempting to resolve or alleviate its ambiguities, paradoxes, and limitations. The essays focus on the contradictions and limits of love, manifested in such phenomena as trust, abuse, grief, death, violence, politics, and desire.
Why we’re taking notice: If you're looking for something erudite this Valentines, a book to put the heavy in "hot and heavy," this title is the ticket!
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The Sacred Path of the Soulmate: Embracing True Romantic Love, by Gerald Sze
About the book: Discover the power of True Romantic Love to transform your relationships and guide your spiritual growth to higher consciousness.
At any moment, millions of women and men are seeking romantic relationships, while millions more are ending them. Why are we so fervently drawn to romantic relationships if it’s so hard to find lasting fulfillment in them? In The Sacred Path of the Soulmate, existential spiritual philosopher Gerald Sze helps us find this fulfillment by understanding the spiritual purpose of True Romantic Love. In this “why-to” book, readers will embark on a courageous journey of healing, growth and spiritual evolution that will teach them how to transform limited, conditional relationships into True Romantic Love.
Why we’re taking notice: We like the idea of a "why-to" book. True Romantic Love FTW.