Provocative and eye-opening, Why We Need Love is one of three slim selections of philosophical texts and excerpts—along with Why We Fight and Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter—introduced and contextualized by acclaimed author Simon Van Booy (Love Begins in Winter, The Secret Lives of People in Love).

An inspirational self-help guide to break free from your dependence on guilt and blame and harness the power of love and empathy to secure your needs and improve your relationships. Jeroen Lichtenauer's zeitgeist-defying take on love and human psychology offers a surprisingly down to Earth answer to some of the most pressing questions of our time.

This book defines the centrality of love and loss in human life and in human meaning. Bowlby's Attachment theory forms the basis for understanding our selves and our relationships. The author proposes that love is the subjective experience of attachment and that dyadic relationships are the source of ultimate meaning. He supports his theses with a tour de force integration of ideas from attachment theory, psychoanalysis, neuroscience and existential philosophy. He argues that the quality of attachment between mother and infant lays the foundation for the formation of individual identity and ultimately shapes our capacity to engage in relationships with others. The author describes loss as the reciprocal of attachment and considers the enormous influence of loss on our moods, sense of identity, and our desire to live or die. The final segments of the book describe the implications of this analysis and links it to the meaning and purpose of human life. All of us seek to understand the meaning of life, and especially the meaning of our own lives.

Marriage, for Equals: The Successful Joint (Ad)Ventures of Well-Educated Couples pulls back the curtain on a number of dangerously misleading messages promoted in the media and popular press that encourage us to commit to ticking-time-bomb relationships. In addition to revealing the telltale signs of doomed relationships, this book also describes a form of marriage that is highly successful and deeply rewarding to many of the smartest women in this generation. To profile these relationships, Marriage for Equals draws from a poll of more than 1200 women, mostly Harvard graduates and their equally capable friends, who are working to create truly equal partnerships. The end result is a guidebook to a marriage of equals that offers a blunt, bold, and refreshingly truthful approach about what it takes to create and sustain an exceptional partnership. "With a combination of research, clinical insight, and plain good sense, author Shauna Springer sorts out the state of romantic love today, bursting more than a few myths in the process. For anyone confused about intimate relationships, this book offers a clear, highly readable, and entertaining road map." -- Dr. Benjamin Karney, Professor of Psychology, UCLA "A fresh look at love and marriage, stripping away the fantasies and revealing the realities, this book should be read by every person who is (or hopes to be) in love and/or married. While grounded in research, the concepts are presented in common sense terms and are presented in a way that is both entertaining and enlightening. I wholeheartedly recommend it." -- Peggy Vaughan, Author and Host of DearPeggy.com "The best predictor of well-being is a healthy and happy relationship. By drawing on clinical experience and solid research, this wonderful book can help you realize your potential for well-being--and love." --Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, Author of Being Happy Shauna Springer, Ph.D., earned her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Harvard University and her doctoral degree in Counseling Psychology from the University of Florida. She has particular expertise in marital counseling, stressor effects on marriage, trauma recovery, and women's issues.

Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life is a book about learning to improve your love life. After 30 years of clinical research and treatment of patients with unhealthy love lives, I now recognize that most people are not in control of their love lives. Why? Because most people don't know what they've learned about and from the love relationships in the course of their lives. Love relationships that started in their families of origin the moment they were born. If you don't know what you've learned about love relationships, then what you've learned is in control of your love life, healthy or unhealthy. If what you've learned was healthy, no problem. Chances are you'll simply replicate what you've learned about love relationships. If what you've learned was unhealthy, you could be unwittingly making the same love life mistakes over and over again because of what you've learned. Learn to Love will show you how to identify what you've learned about love relationships, how to unlearn what is unhealthy, and practice something new, healthy, and the opposite of what you've learned, now as a corrective in your adult love life. This simple learning formulate has helped many of my patients begin taking control of their own love lives, as well as helping me improve my own love life. Learn to Love will help you learn how to take control of your love life. Dr. Thomas Jordan

Full of practical tips and how-tos, this book will help you make your relationships better, deepen your intimacy with people you care for, and cultivate more love, understanding, and respect between you and others. Successful people confront well. They know that setting healthy boundaries improves relationships and can solve important problems. They have discovered that uncomfortable situations can be avoided or resolved through direct conversation. But most of us don't know how to have difficult conversations, and we see confrontation as scary or adversarial. Authors Henry Cloud and John Townsend take the principles from their award-winning and bestselling book, Boundaries, and apply them to a variety of the most common difficult situations and relationships in order to: Show how healthy confrontation can improve relationships Present the essentials of a good boundary-setting conversation Provide tips on preparing for the conversation Show how to tell people what you want, stop bad behavior, and deal with counterattack Give actual examples of conversations to have with your spouse, your date, your kids, your coworker, your parents, and more! This book is a practical handbook on positive confrontation that will help you finally have that difficult conversation you've been avoiding. Includes a discussion guide.

“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).