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

What really makes like last? Does like ever work just how we say it can in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those like stories harm our real-life about how exactly to Fall deeply in love with Anyone: Essays relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight 12 months marriage and her own ten-year relationship finished, those had been the queries that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer.

In some candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be adored, and how we present our love to the world, “Catron melds science and emotion beautifully right into a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation” (Bookpage). She delves back to 1944, when her grandparents met within a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her personal dating life as a teacher in Vancouver. She uses biologists’ study into dopamine sets off to ask if the need to like can be an innate human get. She uses literary theory showing why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to query the unwritten scripts we follow in human relationships and looks into where those scripts come from. And she tells the story of how she decided to check an experiment that she’d read about-where the goal was to make intimacy between strangers using a set of thirty-six questions-and finished up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new romantic relationship.

“Perfect fodder for the romantic and the cynic in all of us” (Booklist), How to Fall in Love with Anyone flips the script in love. “Clear-eyed and full of heart, it really is obligatory reading for anybody coping with-or interested about-the problems of modern courtship” (The Toronto Superstar).