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On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion
Romantic love presents some of life's most challenging questions. Can we choose who to love? Is romantic love rational? Can we love more than one person at a time? And can we make ourselves fall out of love? Berit Brogaard here attempts to get to the bottom of love's many contradictions. This short book, informed by both historical and cutting edge philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, combines a new theory of romantic love with entertaining anecdotes from real life and accessible explanations of the neuroscience underlying our wildest passions. Against the grain, Brogaard argues that love is an emotion; that it can be, at turns, both rational and irrational; and that it can be manifested in degrees. We can love one person more than another and we can love a person a little or a lot or not at all. And love isn't even always something we consciously feel. However, love -- like other emotions, both conscious and not -- is subject to rational control, and falling in or out of
it can be a deliberate choice. This engaging and innovative look at a universal topic, featuring original line drawings by illustrator Gareth Southwell, illuminates the processes behind heartbreak, obsession, jealousy, attachment, and more.
it can be a deliberate choice. This engaging and innovative look at a universal topic, featuring original line drawings by illustrator Gareth Southwell, illuminates the processes behind heartbreak, obsession, jealousy, attachment, and more.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published November 23, 2014
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344 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
May 1, 2015
The trouble with discussing the emotion of love is this: "What people single out as perfect instances of being in love and true love do not reflect the love that exists in real love relationships." In other words, we're generally deluded. This makes the topic a danger zone for cocktail and dinner parties. So instead feast alone on this interesting book—a sort of interdisciplinary primer on the current state of the love research conducted by social and behavioral scientists.
The title, by referencing romantic love, is a bit of a misnomer because Brogaard actually discusses many varieties of love. She helpfully applies a taxonomy (along the lines of kingdom-phylum-class) to categorize these varieties, making you realize that our English language is terribly inefficient and imprecise when it comes to love. There are so many species of it, yet we're stuck with just the one word. But if they can forgive the title, readers are better off for the book’s breadth because the topic is just so darn fascinating.
That said, prepare to be challenged, even brutally so. Believing strongly in our power to make choices in the present, I was conflicted by her discussion of “enslavement by our past.” Regarding so-called familiar love, she cheerfully explains that “our reptilian brain can’t handle things that are different from what it already knows.” Supposedly this leads to a “pathetic search for partners with the personalities of our parents.” Terribly depressing—like learning that you have a crippling deficiency.
In contrast to the foregoing, it's refreshing to see Brogaard (or anyone) tear through so many precious and conventional beliefs. For example, “even when talking about a particular kind of love, we rarely love just one person.” Take that, Disney. Also, according to her reporting of the research, most married U.S. couples are in fact not monogamous: 60% of married individuals cheat at some point, while others (“refusing to embrace the mendacity of a bourgeois lifestyle”) simply drop the standard of monogamy altogether. (Her categories of non-monogamous love—more taxonomy—are particularly interesting.)
Similarly, although I think by now it is generally the prevailing view outside of religious circles, it's nevertheless still refreshing to read that most moral thinkers are neutral towards recreational sex: “There is nothing inherently bad about casual flings, loveless hookups, and friends-with-benefits arrangements. Whether or not love or attachment is involved does not matter.” We’ve come a long way since high school sex ed.
There’s also humor here, if you’re open to it. You know the conventional wisdom that the bliss of a relationship lasts for seven years? It’s more like three, she reports. (Lol.) And passionate love (which under her taxonomy includes romantic love) “is physiologically akin to obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and stressful body states such as hunger.” I dunno, I just find that funny.
Then there’s her discussion of insecure attachment styles. We have the anxious attachment style (co-dependancy), marked by jealousy (“seems to be considerably worse in people who suffer from an anxious attachment style”), control (they “feel so closely connected to their partners that they are more likely to think they own them”), and ideals (“they tend to idealize others and idealize relationships and friendships”). Then we have the avoidant attachment style, marked by distance (they “tend to shun close romantic relationships and intimate friendships”), recreational sex (they “are more likely to engage in casual sex than to have sex in a monogamous relationship”), and a lack of mindfulness (they may not be “as aware of their emotions as others”). It reminded me of the chapter in my psych 101 textbook regarding disorders: we students couldn’t help but see the disorders in ourselves and everyone else. Everybody seemed sick.
There’s so much more. Is love a bodily sensation? Can animals love? Can attachment styles change? Is love unconditional? Is love a disposition? Why does fiction move us when we know it’s fictive? Any one of these is a fun thinking exercisie, and Brogaard is an excellent and thoughtful guide to current research.
Now for the two strikes that take this book from five stars to three: first, you have to slog through a lot of biology, basic science, and dense emotion theory in the opening chapters to get to the good stuff. It felt like reading a long series of academic article abstracts. I imagine that a lot of readers must drop out early, despite the good offerings of later chapters.
Second, Brogaard (an academic) keeps the complexity at a fairly high level in those introductory chapters. You can place any non-fiction book on an accessibility scale that ranges from a lively and popular writing style (think David McCullough’s biographies) to a gratuitously impenetrable one (think Michel Foucault). Thankfully she's no Foucault, but still I wished she wrote a little closer to the McCullough end of the spectrum.
The title, by referencing romantic love, is a bit of a misnomer because Brogaard actually discusses many varieties of love. She helpfully applies a taxonomy (along the lines of kingdom-phylum-class) to categorize these varieties, making you realize that our English language is terribly inefficient and imprecise when it comes to love. There are so many species of it, yet we're stuck with just the one word. But if they can forgive the title, readers are better off for the book’s breadth because the topic is just so darn fascinating.
That said, prepare to be challenged, even brutally so. Believing strongly in our power to make choices in the present, I was conflicted by her discussion of “enslavement by our past.” Regarding so-called familiar love, she cheerfully explains that “our reptilian brain can’t handle things that are different from what it already knows.” Supposedly this leads to a “pathetic search for partners with the personalities of our parents.” Terribly depressing—like learning that you have a crippling deficiency.
In contrast to the foregoing, it's refreshing to see Brogaard (or anyone) tear through so many precious and conventional beliefs. For example, “even when talking about a particular kind of love, we rarely love just one person.” Take that, Disney. Also, according to her reporting of the research, most married U.S. couples are in fact not monogamous: 60% of married individuals cheat at some point, while others (“refusing to embrace the mendacity of a bourgeois lifestyle”) simply drop the standard of monogamy altogether. (Her categories of non-monogamous love—more taxonomy—are particularly interesting.)
Similarly, although I think by now it is generally the prevailing view outside of religious circles, it's nevertheless still refreshing to read that most moral thinkers are neutral towards recreational sex: “There is nothing inherently bad about casual flings, loveless hookups, and friends-with-benefits arrangements. Whether or not love or attachment is involved does not matter.” We’ve come a long way since high school sex ed.
There’s also humor here, if you’re open to it. You know the conventional wisdom that the bliss of a relationship lasts for seven years? It’s more like three, she reports. (Lol.) And passionate love (which under her taxonomy includes romantic love) “is physiologically akin to obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and stressful body states such as hunger.” I dunno, I just find that funny.
Then there’s her discussion of insecure attachment styles. We have the anxious attachment style (co-dependancy), marked by jealousy (“seems to be considerably worse in people who suffer from an anxious attachment style”), control (they “feel so closely connected to their partners that they are more likely to think they own them”), and ideals (“they tend to idealize others and idealize relationships and friendships”). Then we have the avoidant attachment style, marked by distance (they “tend to shun close romantic relationships and intimate friendships”), recreational sex (they “are more likely to engage in casual sex than to have sex in a monogamous relationship”), and a lack of mindfulness (they may not be “as aware of their emotions as others”). It reminded me of the chapter in my psych 101 textbook regarding disorders: we students couldn’t help but see the disorders in ourselves and everyone else. Everybody seemed sick.
There’s so much more. Is love a bodily sensation? Can animals love? Can attachment styles change? Is love unconditional? Is love a disposition? Why does fiction move us when we know it’s fictive? Any one of these is a fun thinking exercisie, and Brogaard is an excellent and thoughtful guide to current research.
Now for the two strikes that take this book from five stars to three: first, you have to slog through a lot of biology, basic science, and dense emotion theory in the opening chapters to get to the good stuff. It felt like reading a long series of academic article abstracts. I imagine that a lot of readers must drop out early, despite the good offerings of later chapters.
Second, Brogaard (an academic) keeps the complexity at a fairly high level in those introductory chapters. You can place any non-fiction book on an accessibility scale that ranges from a lively and popular writing style (think David McCullough’s biographies) to a gratuitously impenetrable one (think Michel Foucault). Thankfully she's no Foucault, but still I wished she wrote a little closer to the McCullough end of the spectrum.
June 28, 2018
The problem with "romantic love" which aligns with any other form of attachment to another person is that the definition is slippery--even when dealing with the philosophy of romantic love, by which we mean erotic love, we have to divide between the dopamine attachment of love and the oxytocin levels. Brogaard clearly is mainly concerned with the dopamine-inspired variety and defending it as "real" love, but ultimately all these terms become too fraught for there to be anything like a consistent philosophy of romantic love and the linked complexities.
Brogaard is excellent at interdisciplinary studies and behavioral psychology being webbed into these definitional challenges, but the psychological research spans decades and often is contradictory, but Brogaard uses this to cut through conceptions about ourselves, our notions of familiarity, and the physiology of attachments. For those with conventional romantic views, I am sure this is illuminatingly anti-romantic and at points somewhat devastating, but for those who keep somewhat abreast of developmental neurology, very little of this is surprising.
Many of the philosophical defenses and developments are under-explored though, and this is why this otherwise very readable and easy to understand book loses a star. There were many times where I wished Brogaard would slow down, not just jump to the anecdote or study, and linger with the actual philosophical implication more deeply.
Brogaard is excellent at interdisciplinary studies and behavioral psychology being webbed into these definitional challenges, but the psychological research spans decades and often is contradictory, but Brogaard uses this to cut through conceptions about ourselves, our notions of familiarity, and the physiology of attachments. For those with conventional romantic views, I am sure this is illuminatingly anti-romantic and at points somewhat devastating, but for those who keep somewhat abreast of developmental neurology, very little of this is surprising.
Many of the philosophical defenses and developments are under-explored though, and this is why this otherwise very readable and easy to understand book loses a star. There were many times where I wished Brogaard would slow down, not just jump to the anecdote or study, and linger with the actual philosophical implication more deeply.
January 30, 2019
This is a little book packed with wisdom more than I can understand. When it comes to things on the emotional and anything of the heart, I handle it all very carelessly, very haphazardly. I don't believe in emotions and don't know how to handle them as a normal person does. This book has showed me why people behave the way they do while in love, makes them feel love, and also how to fall out of love. While it does provide science-based evidence of various phenomena, Brogaard was also able to bring all of the science into human context and it didn't feel very foreign or difficult to understand. I did enjoy learning just that little bit more on the human psyche.
April 2, 2018
http://openbooksociety.com/article/on...
On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion
By Berit Brogaard
ISBN: 9780199370740
Author’s website: sites.google.com/site/brogaardb/
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Summary
Romantic love presents some of life’s most challenging questions. Can we choose who to love? Is romantic love rational? Can we love more than one person at a time? And can we make ourselves fall out of love? In On Romantic Love, Berit Brogaard attempts to get to the bottom of love’s many contradictions. This short book, informed by both historical and cutting-edge philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, combines a new theory of romantic love with entertaining anecdotes from real life and accessible explanations of the neuroscience underlying our wildest passions. Against the grain, Brogaard argues that love is an emotion; that it can be, at turns, both rational and irrational; and that it can be manifested in degrees. We can love one person more than another and we can love a person a little or a lot or not at all. And love isn’t even always something we consciously feel. However, love — like other emotions, both conscious and not — is subject to rational control, and falling in or out of it can be a deliberate choice. This engaging and innovative look at a universal topic, featuring original line drawings by illustrator Gareth Southwell, illuminates the processes behind heartbreak, obsession, jealousy, attachment, and more.
Review
“I used to have real, physical pain in my chest when I didn’t hear from him, and hearing from him or knowing I’d see him made me feel so infinitely good, like I was on ecstasy. Now I turn to ice inside when I think of him. I won’t make any last ditch efforts to turn things around. There is nothing left. I have miraculously recovered from an impossible romance.”
On Romantic Love is a book written by philosopher scholar Berit Brogaard. In this work, Brogaard looks at “love” through the many lenses of human experience, and how we all interact and handle it. Love is this thing, emotion, feeling, state that we have all experience through our lives and might not always know how to handle it, but still, it can be the most wonderful or painful thing that we have ever felt. Brogaard through the use of examples from letters and stories she explains different theories about what love is and how it affects us. We also look at what Love does us physically, at how we fall in Love, and at how we fall out of Love.
I normally review fiction and types of fantasy books, but from time to time I like to read scientific or psychologic articles, to learn more about what the current ideas or knowledge have come out lately. Given that I have recently read a lot of romance genre books, I thought it will be a good idea to look into what “love” is and learn more about it for future readings. At the same time, love is one of the most mysteries and exciting emotions that humans feel, it was fun and interest to read the different theories.
There are many theories and ideas in this book, but the one that I liked the most was what falling love does chemically to our brain. The idea that fresh love, just as once start to fall for somebody is like a new intake of chemicals to our system, like taking drugs. On Romantic Love, it describes the state of being in love like consuming cocaine:
“Cocaine is a serotonin/norepinephrine/dopamine reuptake inhibitor, like the most frequently prescribed antidepressants… When you fall in love with someone, norepinephrine fills you with raucous energy, serotonin boosts your self-confidence, and dopamine generates a feeling of pleasure.”
The book also mentions that there are sometimes when emotions such as Love can be an emotion that occurs unconsciously, and until it gets to a specific point the person becomes aware of it. It mentions that it doesn’t have to be only Love, but when you are in love and in a bad relationship, the resentment and anger starts to grow unconsciously in the back of your mind and can come out at any moment.
On Romantic Love has a lot more interest ideas and theories about Love and how we experiment with it in our daily lives. The book is a great read for readers who, like me, enjoy psychological articles with interest topics that can be related to other books we read.
If you like Love or you are interested in the notion of learning about how falling in love affects us, then I recommend you On Romantic Love by Berit Brogaard. After reading the book, your notion of love will change.
*OBS would like to thank the publisher for supplying a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review*
On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion
By Berit Brogaard
ISBN: 9780199370740
Author’s website: sites.google.com/site/brogaardb/
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Summary
Romantic love presents some of life’s most challenging questions. Can we choose who to love? Is romantic love rational? Can we love more than one person at a time? And can we make ourselves fall out of love? In On Romantic Love, Berit Brogaard attempts to get to the bottom of love’s many contradictions. This short book, informed by both historical and cutting-edge philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, combines a new theory of romantic love with entertaining anecdotes from real life and accessible explanations of the neuroscience underlying our wildest passions. Against the grain, Brogaard argues that love is an emotion; that it can be, at turns, both rational and irrational; and that it can be manifested in degrees. We can love one person more than another and we can love a person a little or a lot or not at all. And love isn’t even always something we consciously feel. However, love — like other emotions, both conscious and not — is subject to rational control, and falling in or out of it can be a deliberate choice. This engaging and innovative look at a universal topic, featuring original line drawings by illustrator Gareth Southwell, illuminates the processes behind heartbreak, obsession, jealousy, attachment, and more.
Review
“I used to have real, physical pain in my chest when I didn’t hear from him, and hearing from him or knowing I’d see him made me feel so infinitely good, like I was on ecstasy. Now I turn to ice inside when I think of him. I won’t make any last ditch efforts to turn things around. There is nothing left. I have miraculously recovered from an impossible romance.”
On Romantic Love is a book written by philosopher scholar Berit Brogaard. In this work, Brogaard looks at “love” through the many lenses of human experience, and how we all interact and handle it. Love is this thing, emotion, feeling, state that we have all experience through our lives and might not always know how to handle it, but still, it can be the most wonderful or painful thing that we have ever felt. Brogaard through the use of examples from letters and stories she explains different theories about what love is and how it affects us. We also look at what Love does us physically, at how we fall in Love, and at how we fall out of Love.
I normally review fiction and types of fantasy books, but from time to time I like to read scientific or psychologic articles, to learn more about what the current ideas or knowledge have come out lately. Given that I have recently read a lot of romance genre books, I thought it will be a good idea to look into what “love” is and learn more about it for future readings. At the same time, love is one of the most mysteries and exciting emotions that humans feel, it was fun and interest to read the different theories.
There are many theories and ideas in this book, but the one that I liked the most was what falling love does chemically to our brain. The idea that fresh love, just as once start to fall for somebody is like a new intake of chemicals to our system, like taking drugs. On Romantic Love, it describes the state of being in love like consuming cocaine:
“Cocaine is a serotonin/norepinephrine/dopamine reuptake inhibitor, like the most frequently prescribed antidepressants… When you fall in love with someone, norepinephrine fills you with raucous energy, serotonin boosts your self-confidence, and dopamine generates a feeling of pleasure.”
The book also mentions that there are sometimes when emotions such as Love can be an emotion that occurs unconsciously, and until it gets to a specific point the person becomes aware of it. It mentions that it doesn’t have to be only Love, but when you are in love and in a bad relationship, the resentment and anger starts to grow unconsciously in the back of your mind and can come out at any moment.
On Romantic Love has a lot more interest ideas and theories about Love and how we experiment with it in our daily lives. The book is a great read for readers who, like me, enjoy psychological articles with interest topics that can be related to other books we read.
If you like Love or you are interested in the notion of learning about how falling in love affects us, then I recommend you On Romantic Love by Berit Brogaard. After reading the book, your notion of love will change.
*OBS would like to thank the publisher for supplying a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review*
January 13, 2020
Mixed in with the philosophical discussion is a lot of psychological results, case studies of individuals experiencing irrational love, descriptions from fiction and media, and description of personal experiences, so it can be a little overwhelming to make sense of the topic. It seems funny that someone hasn't written something like this earlier, to my knowledge. The chapters are organized by theme drawing from all these disparate sources to draw some kind of conclusion, though not all of them end up with an airtight answer for the reader. Also I thought at first there was a distinction being drawn between a "feeling" and an "emotion," with one of them more fleeting than the other one, but I'm thinking that I might have gotten that wrong. It seems clear that the act of falling in love can happen very quickly for no clear reason, leaving the rest of the personality with the problem of what to do with this strong drive when it threatens the stability of other aspects of life. In the next to last chapter, the author sets forward some practical strategies for reducing or eliminating a love that has proven to be troublesome either because the other person is gone, destructive, imaginary, or simply uninterested, but it stops short of coming off like an advice book by not advocating one surefire strategy (beyond the passage of sufficient time). Given the amount of ink which has been spilled all through history about the trials of romantic love, I'm a little uncertain whether this book, short as it is, has been a fair treatment of every worthwhile suggestion without obviously neglecting some important thinking about the matter. I did enjoy reading it and would be interested in taking a look at her other works of nonfiction.
April 20, 2023
Here's the thing. I expected something different from this book, namely something more of the philosophical bent. I didn't want to read about neuropsychology, to be honest, because I think love is something beyond than a series of inputs and reactions. And sure, the book doesn't flat out state that this is its case, but the book is disorganized, and often just state cases for the sake of mentioning a news article, a study, or an event.
Plus, there was this blatantly wrong statement: "It is said that belief is sensitive to evidence, whereas love is not." That... doesn't make sense. If anything, love is so much like belief in the sense that in most cases, it is easy to love or believe something with the flimsiest of evidence if it confirms something about ourselves. Or so I think.
So yeah, to be fair, I largely skimmed this text. But skimmed it enough that I read the phrase "stinking tootsies" and I knew I had to fucking end it.
Which is too bad. I wanted this book for my Love collection, but at this rate, it just infuriated me.
Plus, there was this blatantly wrong statement: "It is said that belief is sensitive to evidence, whereas love is not." That... doesn't make sense. If anything, love is so much like belief in the sense that in most cases, it is easy to love or believe something with the flimsiest of evidence if it confirms something about ourselves. Or so I think.
So yeah, to be fair, I largely skimmed this text. But skimmed it enough that I read the phrase "stinking tootsies" and I knew I had to fucking end it.
Which is too bad. I wanted this book for my Love collection, but at this rate, it just infuriated me.
April 21, 2020
agak berat bahasanya karena emang dari hasil penelitian, filsafat, dan psikologi yak. But, overall it's interesting!
August 31, 2018
This book goes beyond describing mere romantic love, to discussing where feelings come from. The author describes the neuropsychological basis of feelings. It fits well with the REBT approach of Albert Ellis, as described on The Secret of Overcoming Verbal Abuse, which I read immediately after. Berit Brogaard is an entertaining writer. The book contains numerous eclectic references that are both informative, and stimulate further thought and exploration.
March 7, 2017
Fairly disorganized. Many arguments are unclear or insufficient to defend her point. Reads more like she's trying to get over her past experiences by writing a blog using a hodgepodge of random scientific facts than like she's trying to put forward a philosophical treatise on the nature of love. The argument that "love is an emotion" is fairly weak and based on mostly scientific meanderings and lacks strong conceptual analysis with a careful refutation or even consideration of alternative perspectives. For example, no mention of the contrary idea that "love is a practice" was provided, regardless of the notion's long history that goes as far back as the Kama Sutras and as recently as Kierkegaard and Erich Fromm. This suggests to me that she hadn't spent an adequate amount of time actually doing background research in the *phiosophy* of love and instead (I write this to exaggerate) browsed through google scholar and internet articles while using this book as a semi-confessional therapeutical device to slowly work through all the residual affection for her ex which she consistently calls irrational.
October 25, 2015
Brogaard has successfully managed to put me off romantic love! In my opinion the stress our body (and brain) goes through when in love is not worth it. I could LITERALLY die of a broken heart. Other people might infer a different lesson altogether - or so I hope. Towards the end, a whole chapter is dedicated to falling 'out of love'. I skipped psychotherapy and skimmed through the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) treatment since there was nothing new there. The problem with recommending such treatments in just one chapter is that no one really knows what they are supposed to be doing. Plus, most people won't go and read further. So really unhelpful.
One other thing: from the beginning, gender roles sneak into the author’s writing. In other words, the author reinforces the idea that women get more jealous and emotional when loving their partner, whereas men are mostly indifferent.
I enjoyed the part where the author says history plays an important role in how you perceive your future relationships. Yes! However, my mind switched off when attachment styles are introduced. I can envision many people nodding their heads enthusiastically when reading this section. It is easier to label people and put them into boxes. It makes it easier to understand what one’s ‘problem’ is. However, this makes it more difficult to change that pattern of behaving when that label becomes the excuse.
One other thing: from the beginning, gender roles sneak into the author’s writing. In other words, the author reinforces the idea that women get more jealous and emotional when loving their partner, whereas men are mostly indifferent.
I enjoyed the part where the author says history plays an important role in how you perceive your future relationships. Yes! However, my mind switched off when attachment styles are introduced. I can envision many people nodding their heads enthusiastically when reading this section. It is easier to label people and put them into boxes. It makes it easier to understand what one’s ‘problem’ is. However, this makes it more difficult to change that pattern of behaving when that label becomes the excuse.
February 8, 2017
I had mixed feelings about the book when I began reading it. However with time the book surprised me. It covers areas from philosophy, psychoanalysis and neuroscience in a very organic way. I really enjoyed how the different theories evolved and how the author left things open for the reader to think for him/herself. The style was very easy to follow. It almost felt like reading a blog.
I did not like the way that some of the case studies were shown. Some of them were too dramatic or were not clear to illustrate the idea of the section. I hoped to see more details and examples on the part of how to fall out of love. That chapter was the one that made me read the book. I felt a bit disappointed by how quick and superficial was that section compared to the others.
Overall it is an interesting book, easy to read, with lots of information from different fields.
I did not like the way that some of the case studies were shown. Some of them were too dramatic or were not clear to illustrate the idea of the section. I hoped to see more details and examples on the part of how to fall out of love. That chapter was the one that made me read the book. I felt a bit disappointed by how quick and superficial was that section compared to the others.
Overall it is an interesting book, easy to read, with lots of information from different fields.
July 31, 2016
I read this alongside The Future of the Mind to get a bit of armchair neuroscience, particularly how love affects the brain, as light research for some sci-fi writing I’m doing. A Salon article by the author cemented my decision this was worth looking into. First the good: there’s a lot of good information in here about the way the neurotransmitters cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine function, as well as the causes and effects of too much of them. The latter half of the book cites multiple fascinating studies, such as the ones on blind-sight and the exposure method. The bad: the writing style is crass. I’m sure the informal, almost gossipy style has its audience, but that audience is not me. Also, I fairly often had to re-read sentences because the flow was so bad, either because of comma misuse or bad sentence construction. Much of the book is steeped in psychology rather than neurology, and I was bored by the debate over whether love is an emotion or a mood, conscious or subconscious. The illustrations are literally caricatures. The first 50 or 60 pages contain some truly educational and interesting material, but the rest is either sensational cliché anecdotal tripe or a term-paper-style deconstruction of love.
June 13, 2016
A philosophical, psychological, scientifical look at the concept of "love". Plenty of digression into other areas, though it was necessary, as those topic brought up would later be applied in relation to the dicussion on "love". Found myself 'moved' and doing a lot of introspection when the comparison of 'explanation' versus 'justification' was used as a foil to 'irrational love' versus 'rational love'. However, I may have been more preoccupied with the explanation versus justification issue, with regards to other matters I am now facing in life. Great book though!
February 6, 2016
Everybody should be issued a copy of this book before they fall in love the first time. Or, better, before their first breakup. A brilliant reminder of what's really happening in our bodies, minds, and hearts. Brogaard dispels the old myths that get people into such tangles and wreak such misery...but she doesn't take the fun away. Her book's charming, funny and warm as well as penetratingly insightful and cleanly scientific.
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October 19, 2015128.46 B866 2015
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March 11, 2016Philosophical perspective on romantic love. The real-life crazy stories made it more meaningful. Also good perspective on what you can do about it.
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August 29, 2018super interesting and readable, although i disagreed w her characterisation of love (getting all my feeling out about that out in an essay) and at times it felt a bit reductionist/simplistic re human psychology and arguments. but the breadth of it is incredible, and i love how she tries her very best to help people get over their broken hearts. 3 > <3 :D
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews