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A Book About Love
“Jonah Lehrer has a lot to offer the world….The book is interesting on nearly every page….Good writers make writing look easy, but what people like Lehrer do is not easy at all.” —David Brooks, The New York Times Book Review
Science writer Jonah Lehrer explores the mysterious subject of love.
Weaving together scientific studies from clinical psychologists, longitudinal studies of health and happiness, historical accounts and literary depictions, child-rearing manuals, and the language of online dating sites, Jonah Lehrer’s A Book About Love plumbs the most mysterious, most formative, most important impulse governing our lives.
Love confuses and compels us—and it can destroy and define us. It has inspired our greatest poetry, defined our societies and our beliefs, and governs our biology. From the way infants attach to their parents, to the way we fall in love with another person, to the way some find a love for God or their pets, to the way we remember and mourn love after it ends, this book focuses on research that attempts, even in glancing ways, to deal with the long-term and the everyday. The most dangerous myth of love is that it’s easy, that we fall into the feeling and then the feeling takes care of itself. While we can easily measure the dopamine that causes the initial feelings of “falling” in love, the partnerships and devotions that last decades or longer remain a mystery. This book is about that mystery. Love, Lehrer argues, is not built solely on overwhelming passion, but, fascinatingly, on a set of skills to be cultivated over a lifetime.
Science writer Jonah Lehrer explores the mysterious subject of love.
Weaving together scientific studies from clinical psychologists, longitudinal studies of health and happiness, historical accounts and literary depictions, child-rearing manuals, and the language of online dating sites, Jonah Lehrer’s A Book About Love plumbs the most mysterious, most formative, most important impulse governing our lives.
Love confuses and compels us—and it can destroy and define us. It has inspired our greatest poetry, defined our societies and our beliefs, and governs our biology. From the way infants attach to their parents, to the way we fall in love with another person, to the way some find a love for God or their pets, to the way we remember and mourn love after it ends, this book focuses on research that attempts, even in glancing ways, to deal with the long-term and the everyday. The most dangerous myth of love is that it’s easy, that we fall into the feeling and then the feeling takes care of itself. While we can easily measure the dopamine that causes the initial feelings of “falling” in love, the partnerships and devotions that last decades or longer remain a mystery. This book is about that mystery. Love, Lehrer argues, is not built solely on overwhelming passion, but, fascinatingly, on a set of skills to be cultivated over a lifetime.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2016
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November 28, 2016
I’ve missed Lehrer during his exile for the plagiarism in his last book. I’m glad he’s back. His strategy for dealing with the fallout of this scandal is to be up front but not to dwell on it. He opened this book by apologizing and assuring readers that this new book had been fact checked independently. Although there are some allusions to staying at home more and having a long break, it is not the focus. I think this is the exact right note to hit. For me as a reader, it’s not much of an issue. I still enjoyed his books. I even recently snapped up the offending book Imagine when I saw it at the used book store. I’d avidly read any article he cares to write on going through such a public fall from grace-both because the subject is interesting to me and I’d be curious as to how he would describe it. In short, life goes on. People make errors in judgement and hopefully, he’s learned his lesson.
This new book has all the attributes that made his former books so popular: His writing is erudite and his examples are apt and show a depth of understanding in a wide range of fields. His foundation has always been in the sciences: chemistry, anthropology, neurobiology, but he adds a little place of respect for a spiritual component or a sublimity in matters that makes his work feel less arrogant and several degrees warmer than many other science-heavy writers. I’m not naturally a science person, so to have the blend of science content couched oftentimes in the language of the humanities makes the content very palatable to me.
What Lehrer offers his readers is an extremely idiosyncratic look at common topics. He reminds me a great deal of Sarah Vowell in the freshness of his research. As an example, when discussing the view of paradise after the American Civil War, he tells the story of a wildly popular book that I have never heard of: The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. In terms of how we modern people remember the historical world and what anecdotes we naturally reach for at any time, they become less and less nuanced as you become more well-read and as time moves on. The book to talk about in regards to the American Civil War is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin, specifically about Abraham Lincoln remarking about the “little woman who wrote the book which started this great war.” Lehrer, time and again, goes to more interesting and obscure places to make his points. After reading his books, I find that I have several more entries in my book list of topics that I want to read about. Honestly, Lehrer’s books tell exciting and interesting stories that I’ve never heard elsewhere in such a way that I’m impatient to read more about them. That’s a singular talent. I appreciate the time and effort he takes to bypass the obvious references and to present the new.
This book is about love, which is a topic that is very much on my mind lately. Being on Goodreads, I have noticed a definite trend with readers to prefer self-actualization to romance, even to put those two states as incompatible with each other. (This is part of a larger trend in society in which readers are simply reflecting the zeitgeist. That’s a little sad for me to admit, because I would like to think that under the influence of the timelessness and depth of books, we readers would not be so tempted to blindly follow the trends and fads of modernity.) It has even gone so far as to take some of the major works of romance, such as Romeo and Juliet and try to re-work it into a different genre. The one candidate I’ve heard of the most is that the play is about family feuding, even though the play features not one speech about families or feuding, nor does it show any of the major players of the feud. Yet there are loads of people on here that will repeat this opinion straight-faced: Romeo and Juliet is not about love. There is no romance. It was simply teenaged hormones run amok that should be used as a lesson to all teenagers. William Shakespeare apparently gifted us an ancient example of an Afterschool Special. There are other threads that tend to hold up this cynicism about love. A thread about 1984 asks why would Julia be in love with Winston? What’s so special about him? (As if the only people who are ever loved are not average, weak, middle-aged men with varicose veins.) Another poster doesn’t understand why so many men seem to be in love with Sarah from The End of the Affair. She’s nothing special. Love is often downgraded to obsession and a moment of selfishness or weakness is proof enough that you were never in love in the first place. So I find that the concept of love in contemporary society to be out of vogue, although some readers do buck the trend.
The cultural history of love would have been a welcome addition to this book, especially since an honest look of it would be much different from the one that is currently told , but I was not surprised when it was not there. Lehrer will take anecdotes from history, but he is not a historian or a cultural anthropologist. He will discuss scientific trends which have affected child-rearing and other instances, but he will not go into cultural trends. If I were writing the book, it would be a completely different story. I would have focused more on literature. (I was a bit disappointed in the section on books. I do not know how anyone can call the marriage plot outmoded. Do women and men not choose partners/spouses anymore? I believe this is as much a concern as it has ever been.) But my own views are rather cantankerous and contrarian, so perhaps it is better that we all have our own private gardens to tend.
Lehrer is a great writer. He is able to expound on a subject with a great deal of insight. Here he discusses his experiences with fatherhood and the burgeoning attachment process that took place with his daughter:
After I lost my job, when I was home with nothing to do, I was forced to confront the consequences of my own absence. The sad truth is that I did not know how to be alone with my daughter, and she did not want to be alone with me. One night when my wife had to work late, I had to put my child to bed by myself. I said it wouldn’t be a problem. I knew what to do. Although I carefully repeated her bedtime ritual- Sesame Street and a glass of milk, followed by a long procession of books in bed-nothing worked. I begged and pleaded; I tried to explain the situation, how her mom would soon be home. But she wasn’t listening. Why would she? Then, when I felt the anger welling up inside of me, I exiled myself to the hallway. I sat down outside her door and listened to my daughter cry herself to sleep. She was crying because she wasn’t attached to me. Because I provided no comfort at all. That’s when I started crying, too.
These are the moments that test us, the conditions that force us to admit the difficulty of unconditional love. I wanted to be a good father. I wanted to be a good father right away. Instead, I was confronted by a stubborn gap between the attachment with my daughter that I had hoped for and the one we had.
Change happens slowly. As a parent, I desperately needed practice. But the challenge of child care is that the practice is also the performance; every one of my mistakes was noticed and felt. It didn’t help that two-year-olds tell the truth: my daughter wasn’t afraid to point out my errors. My stories were boring and I’d take forever to install the car seat. I’d leave the snacks at home and forget the one stuffed animal that she wanted on the swing. When she cried because I was doing it wrong-because I let the sunblock get in her eye or left the crusts on her sandwich- I would lose patience. I would raise my voice. She probably thought that I was mad at her. I wasn’t. I was furious at myself.
But children are forgiving. They are the most forgiving people in the world. I first noticed the change in our relationship in little ways. When we’d go to the local park, she started keeping track of where I was. When she encountered something unsettling, she’d look back at me, checking to make sure I was paying attention. (To borrow the language of attachment theory, I was finally becoming a “secure base.”) We gradually found new books to read; my voices were usually acceptable. We bonded over her favorite television shows; when the shows were over, she listened attentively as I spun out sequels to Elmo skits and My Little Pony. I learned how to make her laugh without tickling her; how she squirmed when she had to pee; the most efficient way to ease her out of a tantrum. It sounds so silly when you write it down, but this intimate knowledge is what makes parenting possible. You either know it or you don’t, and I was beginning to know.” (pg 63-65)
The one reservation I have with Lehrer’s writing is a stylistic concern, and this is an entirely subjective matter. As I get deeper into middle age, I realize the limitations to categorizing everything, so I try to avoid that as much as possible. But there is a natural division within literature and in art in general. This is best expressed by the comparisons that naturally appear between contemporary masters. For instance, there is Mozart vs. Beethoven and Tolstoy Nikolavich Lev vs. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Mozart and Tolstoy are very adept and skilled at what they do, but their creations are consistently better than reality. They are more harmonious and clever and seamless. There are no rough edges, no dissonant chords. It is as close to the Platonic ideal as it is humanly possible to get, and this achievement is the pinnacle of creation. The most apt metaphor that I can come up with is likening the result to banana flavored pudding. Banana flavored pudding tastes nothing like the fruit; it is brighter and creamier. The texture is smooth. It is not a rendering of the fruit at all but an improvement on it or a reimagining of it. Beethoven and Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, totally eschew this model of perfection for a depth of emotion. No one has described ecstasy or sorrow like they have. The appeal of them is their ability to get the pitch of emotion exactly right-not the ideal but the actual. The first group concerns itself with how things should be. The second on the accurate recounting how things are and how they feel. Which is better? That’s for every person to decide for themselves, and perhaps it’s better to leave it largely unanswered. I can genuinely say that I love works of both persuasions. If it runs on a spectrum, I will be on the side of Beethoven/Dostoyevsky, but I think the happiest people must be those who respond to both camps. Maybe the impulse to embroider was caused by Lehrer’s search for perfection or harmony or succinctness in the Mozart/Tolstoy model. Being of the other persuasion, I would just prefer more emotional authenticity than stylizations, and there is something in Lehrer’s writing (and also in Gene Weingarten’s writing) that feels a bit forced and mechanical, even as competent and talented as they both are. There’s some remove there that reads as artificial-even though it might be that artificiality is an inherent and unavoidable component and to excise it would be a detriment to the writing. I’m not knocking Lehrer (or Mozart or Weingarten or Tolstoy). It’s simply a personal preference.
Lehrer has (again!) shown enormous talent in exploring a topic using various disciplines. I look forward to seeing what other projects he will choose, and I’m glad that he has decided to continue writing books in this vein.
This new book has all the attributes that made his former books so popular: His writing is erudite and his examples are apt and show a depth of understanding in a wide range of fields. His foundation has always been in the sciences: chemistry, anthropology, neurobiology, but he adds a little place of respect for a spiritual component or a sublimity in matters that makes his work feel less arrogant and several degrees warmer than many other science-heavy writers. I’m not naturally a science person, so to have the blend of science content couched oftentimes in the language of the humanities makes the content very palatable to me.
What Lehrer offers his readers is an extremely idiosyncratic look at common topics. He reminds me a great deal of Sarah Vowell in the freshness of his research. As an example, when discussing the view of paradise after the American Civil War, he tells the story of a wildly popular book that I have never heard of: The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. In terms of how we modern people remember the historical world and what anecdotes we naturally reach for at any time, they become less and less nuanced as you become more well-read and as time moves on. The book to talk about in regards to the American Civil War is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin, specifically about Abraham Lincoln remarking about the “little woman who wrote the book which started this great war.” Lehrer, time and again, goes to more interesting and obscure places to make his points. After reading his books, I find that I have several more entries in my book list of topics that I want to read about. Honestly, Lehrer’s books tell exciting and interesting stories that I’ve never heard elsewhere in such a way that I’m impatient to read more about them. That’s a singular talent. I appreciate the time and effort he takes to bypass the obvious references and to present the new.
This book is about love, which is a topic that is very much on my mind lately. Being on Goodreads, I have noticed a definite trend with readers to prefer self-actualization to romance, even to put those two states as incompatible with each other. (This is part of a larger trend in society in which readers are simply reflecting the zeitgeist. That’s a little sad for me to admit, because I would like to think that under the influence of the timelessness and depth of books, we readers would not be so tempted to blindly follow the trends and fads of modernity.) It has even gone so far as to take some of the major works of romance, such as Romeo and Juliet and try to re-work it into a different genre. The one candidate I’ve heard of the most is that the play is about family feuding, even though the play features not one speech about families or feuding, nor does it show any of the major players of the feud. Yet there are loads of people on here that will repeat this opinion straight-faced: Romeo and Juliet is not about love. There is no romance. It was simply teenaged hormones run amok that should be used as a lesson to all teenagers. William Shakespeare apparently gifted us an ancient example of an Afterschool Special. There are other threads that tend to hold up this cynicism about love. A thread about 1984 asks why would Julia be in love with Winston? What’s so special about him? (As if the only people who are ever loved are not average, weak, middle-aged men with varicose veins.) Another poster doesn’t understand why so many men seem to be in love with Sarah from The End of the Affair. She’s nothing special. Love is often downgraded to obsession and a moment of selfishness or weakness is proof enough that you were never in love in the first place. So I find that the concept of love in contemporary society to be out of vogue, although some readers do buck the trend.
The cultural history of love would have been a welcome addition to this book, especially since an honest look of it would be much different from the one that is currently told , but I was not surprised when it was not there. Lehrer will take anecdotes from history, but he is not a historian or a cultural anthropologist. He will discuss scientific trends which have affected child-rearing and other instances, but he will not go into cultural trends. If I were writing the book, it would be a completely different story. I would have focused more on literature. (I was a bit disappointed in the section on books. I do not know how anyone can call the marriage plot outmoded. Do women and men not choose partners/spouses anymore? I believe this is as much a concern as it has ever been.) But my own views are rather cantankerous and contrarian, so perhaps it is better that we all have our own private gardens to tend.
Lehrer is a great writer. He is able to expound on a subject with a great deal of insight. Here he discusses his experiences with fatherhood and the burgeoning attachment process that took place with his daughter:
After I lost my job, when I was home with nothing to do, I was forced to confront the consequences of my own absence. The sad truth is that I did not know how to be alone with my daughter, and she did not want to be alone with me. One night when my wife had to work late, I had to put my child to bed by myself. I said it wouldn’t be a problem. I knew what to do. Although I carefully repeated her bedtime ritual- Sesame Street and a glass of milk, followed by a long procession of books in bed-nothing worked. I begged and pleaded; I tried to explain the situation, how her mom would soon be home. But she wasn’t listening. Why would she? Then, when I felt the anger welling up inside of me, I exiled myself to the hallway. I sat down outside her door and listened to my daughter cry herself to sleep. She was crying because she wasn’t attached to me. Because I provided no comfort at all. That’s when I started crying, too.
These are the moments that test us, the conditions that force us to admit the difficulty of unconditional love. I wanted to be a good father. I wanted to be a good father right away. Instead, I was confronted by a stubborn gap between the attachment with my daughter that I had hoped for and the one we had.
Change happens slowly. As a parent, I desperately needed practice. But the challenge of child care is that the practice is also the performance; every one of my mistakes was noticed and felt. It didn’t help that two-year-olds tell the truth: my daughter wasn’t afraid to point out my errors. My stories were boring and I’d take forever to install the car seat. I’d leave the snacks at home and forget the one stuffed animal that she wanted on the swing. When she cried because I was doing it wrong-because I let the sunblock get in her eye or left the crusts on her sandwich- I would lose patience. I would raise my voice. She probably thought that I was mad at her. I wasn’t. I was furious at myself.
But children are forgiving. They are the most forgiving people in the world. I first noticed the change in our relationship in little ways. When we’d go to the local park, she started keeping track of where I was. When she encountered something unsettling, she’d look back at me, checking to make sure I was paying attention. (To borrow the language of attachment theory, I was finally becoming a “secure base.”) We gradually found new books to read; my voices were usually acceptable. We bonded over her favorite television shows; when the shows were over, she listened attentively as I spun out sequels to Elmo skits and My Little Pony. I learned how to make her laugh without tickling her; how she squirmed when she had to pee; the most efficient way to ease her out of a tantrum. It sounds so silly when you write it down, but this intimate knowledge is what makes parenting possible. You either know it or you don’t, and I was beginning to know.” (pg 63-65)
The one reservation I have with Lehrer’s writing is a stylistic concern, and this is an entirely subjective matter. As I get deeper into middle age, I realize the limitations to categorizing everything, so I try to avoid that as much as possible. But there is a natural division within literature and in art in general. This is best expressed by the comparisons that naturally appear between contemporary masters. For instance, there is Mozart vs. Beethoven and Tolstoy Nikolavich Lev vs. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Mozart and Tolstoy are very adept and skilled at what they do, but their creations are consistently better than reality. They are more harmonious and clever and seamless. There are no rough edges, no dissonant chords. It is as close to the Platonic ideal as it is humanly possible to get, and this achievement is the pinnacle of creation. The most apt metaphor that I can come up with is likening the result to banana flavored pudding. Banana flavored pudding tastes nothing like the fruit; it is brighter and creamier. The texture is smooth. It is not a rendering of the fruit at all but an improvement on it or a reimagining of it. Beethoven and Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, totally eschew this model of perfection for a depth of emotion. No one has described ecstasy or sorrow like they have. The appeal of them is their ability to get the pitch of emotion exactly right-not the ideal but the actual. The first group concerns itself with how things should be. The second on the accurate recounting how things are and how they feel. Which is better? That’s for every person to decide for themselves, and perhaps it’s better to leave it largely unanswered. I can genuinely say that I love works of both persuasions. If it runs on a spectrum, I will be on the side of Beethoven/Dostoyevsky, but I think the happiest people must be those who respond to both camps. Maybe the impulse to embroider was caused by Lehrer’s search for perfection or harmony or succinctness in the Mozart/Tolstoy model. Being of the other persuasion, I would just prefer more emotional authenticity than stylizations, and there is something in Lehrer’s writing (and also in Gene Weingarten’s writing) that feels a bit forced and mechanical, even as competent and talented as they both are. There’s some remove there that reads as artificial-even though it might be that artificiality is an inherent and unavoidable component and to excise it would be a detriment to the writing. I’m not knocking Lehrer (or Mozart or Weingarten or Tolstoy). It’s simply a personal preference.
Lehrer has (again!) shown enormous talent in exploring a topic using various disciplines. I look forward to seeing what other projects he will choose, and I’m glad that he has decided to continue writing books in this vein.
September 25, 2017
This book about the psychology of love is fascinating and this will be a book I re-read over the years. I particularly was fond of his analyzation of Jane Austen's books and her life & the Civil War and how it effected the people who lost so many family members. Highly recommended!
unfinished
February 13, 2017(DNF @ 31%) Although I can see why he starts where he does, Lehrer’s early focus on attachment and attunement – two psychological theories of how babies learn to relate affectionately to others – means the book gets bogged down in studies performed on mice and/or children and feels more like a parenting book than anything else. (If that’s what you’re after, read All Joy and No Fun.) A glance at the table of contents suggests the rest of the book will go into marriage, divorce and how love changes over time, but I couldn’t be bothered to stick around. That said, Lehrer’s popular science writing is clear and engaging, and with the heartfelt mea culpa at the start of this book I couldn’t hold a grudge about his earlier plagiarism scandal.
Reviewed with five other “love” titles for a Valentine’s-themed post on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Reviewed with five other “love” titles for a Valentine’s-themed post on my blog, Bookish Beck.
July 19, 2016
Thanks to Goodreads for a copy of this book.
First of all, I thought it was good that Lehrer acknowledged all of the plagiarism from his previous works and took ownership of the fall-out surrounding that right from the very first page. That being said, I felt like this book was a really great compilation of LOADS of research (which was meticulously footnoted and cited, as it should have been) but very little by way of original thought.
If you are looking for a book that gathers research over the topic of different kinds of love (between adults, within marriage, towards kids, even regarding religion) then this is your book. I had to force myself through it though because it was DRY. Also having an educational background in psychology means that I've heard of probably half of these studies already so it was not anything new. Even the parts that were just Lehrer talking, seemed...well....trite? I got the feeling this book was his attempt to honor his wife for sticking with him and to prove that he could write without ripping people off. In the end, I appreciated the effort more than the final product.
First of all, I thought it was good that Lehrer acknowledged all of the plagiarism from his previous works and took ownership of the fall-out surrounding that right from the very first page. That being said, I felt like this book was a really great compilation of LOADS of research (which was meticulously footnoted and cited, as it should have been) but very little by way of original thought.
If you are looking for a book that gathers research over the topic of different kinds of love (between adults, within marriage, towards kids, even regarding religion) then this is your book. I had to force myself through it though because it was DRY. Also having an educational background in psychology means that I've heard of probably half of these studies already so it was not anything new. Even the parts that were just Lehrer talking, seemed...well....trite? I got the feeling this book was his attempt to honor his wife for sticking with him and to prove that he could write without ripping people off. In the end, I appreciated the effort more than the final product.
August 31, 2016
A scientific look at love. Some interesting insights and ideas. The best part of the book for me was when he talked about Viktor Frankl and how critical it is to have meaning in your life and to help others.
March 25, 2022
A Book about Love is written by a broken man, humiliated and scorned by his former circle of friends and fans. Like many, I had not actually heard about Lehrer or his small but popular body of work until I read Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed. That book devotes a chapter to Lehrer and his plagiarism (of himself and other writers) and his use of made up quotes from the legendary likes of Bob Dylan. His fall from grace was painful and devastating to his own life, and the poor guy seems to not have bounced back. It only happened in 2013. This book is his first since then, published three years after his disgrace. It apparently made nothing more than a ripple of impression, then sunk down into a murky depth of sneering rejection.
I felt sorry for Lehrer, but also interested in checking out his post-exile book, not really knowing anything about it other than what the rather obvious title suggests.
I don't know if it's because I always feel more partial towards underdogs, or to anyone despised, but I found myself really, really enjoying this book. It's basically a scientific defence of love and human emotion, in opposition to the existential idea we are all just wired to like or dislike certain things based on past experiences, that we are just complex slabs of skin, bones, blood and organs, without any spiritual dimension, without anything but this very life to live for. Hell, even if he wasn't already shunned by the scientific community, an idealistic book like this was never going to gain much respect. But as a Christian, and as someone who now happily married, recently made a father, much of what Lehrer says - on his own thoughts, or on other writers - totally resonated with me. And I also found it surprising: I did not expect there to be a whole chapter on the love of God, with stories (anecdotal or otherwise) about miraculous visions and life-changing events that led people closer to God, and through Him closer to themselves.
Clearly this isn't for everyone, and it's obviously a cool thing to hate among unforgiving narcissists who apparently never made a mistake in their lives, but I loved this - so much so that it came close to getting a full five stars.
I felt sorry for Lehrer, but also interested in checking out his post-exile book, not really knowing anything about it other than what the rather obvious title suggests.
I don't know if it's because I always feel more partial towards underdogs, or to anyone despised, but I found myself really, really enjoying this book. It's basically a scientific defence of love and human emotion, in opposition to the existential idea we are all just wired to like or dislike certain things based on past experiences, that we are just complex slabs of skin, bones, blood and organs, without any spiritual dimension, without anything but this very life to live for. Hell, even if he wasn't already shunned by the scientific community, an idealistic book like this was never going to gain much respect. But as a Christian, and as someone who now happily married, recently made a father, much of what Lehrer says - on his own thoughts, or on other writers - totally resonated with me. And I also found it surprising: I did not expect there to be a whole chapter on the love of God, with stories (anecdotal or otherwise) about miraculous visions and life-changing events that led people closer to God, and through Him closer to themselves.
Clearly this isn't for everyone, and it's obviously a cool thing to hate among unforgiving narcissists who apparently never made a mistake in their lives, but I loved this - so much so that it came close to getting a full five stars.
December 31, 2016
I love that Jonah Lehrer came back to talk about love, after 4 years of exile due to plagiarism. He starts the book by apologizing for his mistakes and reassures his audience that the book has undergone some serious fact-checking. I can just give him 17 stars for not letting his mistakes define him, for having the courage to rise from the bottom, for not giving up on his love of writing after he was outed because of his writing, 17 stars for just keep showing up.
The book is an enjoyable read, starting from the attachment and love that babies need, to talking about marriage and religious form of love. My most favorite part was the chapter on memory, and how the act of recalling them rewrites them.
The book is an enjoyable read, starting from the attachment and love that babies need, to talking about marriage and religious form of love. My most favorite part was the chapter on memory, and how the act of recalling them rewrites them.
October 18, 2016
I read Jonah Lehrer’s book titled “Imagine” in 2012 and loved it. I and everybody in the world soon came to know that Jonah had made some serious mistakes in this book. A journalist from Brooklyn figured out that Jonah had made up some quotes from Bob Dylan and within a matter of days, he was publicly shamed by all of his peers. His book, Imagine, was pulled from all bookstores. I had read the book from the library, and desperately wanted to get my own copy, as I still liked the book. Thankfully, it was not hard to find one on eBay and I quickly ordered it for myself.
I didn’t realize how badly Jonah was doing until I read “So you’ve been shamed” by Jon Ronson. Through this book, I also learned that Jonah was writing another book and I was eager to get my hands on it. I checked out the reviews, and was pained to see that the New York Time, Guardian, etc. all had panned the new book. Nevertheless, I wanted to see what it was like for myself and checked out a copy from my local library.
Jonah opens with a note on how he has taken every precaution possible to make sure that he has the right quotes this time. And there are numerous memorable quotes in the book like the one from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — “Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek!”,
The book is filled with plenty of anecdotes on different aspects of love and attachment. Jonah rolls through many experiments that seek to understand the parent-child attachment. He concludes the obvious, that there is no substitute for spending quality time with your kids. You can’t write them letters or have long conversations with them, so the only thing that works is playing with them, touching them, singing to them, etc.
Moving on to adulthood, he tackles marriage by recalling Darwin’s own admission that marriage would curtail his freedom and ability to travel the world and make important discoveries. Despite all of this warning, Darwin got married to Emma Wedgwood and she ended up helping him by reading his drafts and providing valuable feedback. They read books to each other and watched earthworms play in the dirt!
Jonah briefly takes on religion and our “love” for God. He doesn’t go into any depth here, nor does he offer up his own opinion and we are left with “you either know Him or you don’t”. One place where Jonah spends a good deal of time on is the Grant Study that conducted a bunch of medical and psychiatric tests on 268 Harvard students from the class of 1939 and followed them for the rest of their life. These were some of the most privileged and fortunate men, and the striking thing was that they didn’t end up with the “happily ever after” ending that you would expect. George Vaillant spent a good chunk of his life studying these individuals and he wrote that even the ones who ended up wealthy, had their “full share of difficulty and private despair.” He concluded that “Happiness equals love. Full stop”.
I felt that Jonah saved the best for last, with the story about Frankl, the psychiatrist in Vienna who survives the horrors at Auschwitz and writes about it later. I loved the quote from Frankl, saying that "life can be pulled by goals as sure as it can be pushed by drives.” It is quite impressive to read how Frankl found purpose all through his life. The love for his wife Tilly, helped him survive the horrors he experienced in the concentration camp and after he got out, his purpose was to write the book that was stolen from him. If there is one strong conclusion that will remain with me, it is immortalized in this quote from Nietzsche: "He who has the why to live can bear with almost any how".
I didn’t realize how badly Jonah was doing until I read “So you’ve been shamed” by Jon Ronson. Through this book, I also learned that Jonah was writing another book and I was eager to get my hands on it. I checked out the reviews, and was pained to see that the New York Time, Guardian, etc. all had panned the new book. Nevertheless, I wanted to see what it was like for myself and checked out a copy from my local library.
Jonah opens with a note on how he has taken every precaution possible to make sure that he has the right quotes this time. And there are numerous memorable quotes in the book like the one from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet — “Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek!”,
The book is filled with plenty of anecdotes on different aspects of love and attachment. Jonah rolls through many experiments that seek to understand the parent-child attachment. He concludes the obvious, that there is no substitute for spending quality time with your kids. You can’t write them letters or have long conversations with them, so the only thing that works is playing with them, touching them, singing to them, etc.
Moving on to adulthood, he tackles marriage by recalling Darwin’s own admission that marriage would curtail his freedom and ability to travel the world and make important discoveries. Despite all of this warning, Darwin got married to Emma Wedgwood and she ended up helping him by reading his drafts and providing valuable feedback. They read books to each other and watched earthworms play in the dirt!
Jonah briefly takes on religion and our “love” for God. He doesn’t go into any depth here, nor does he offer up his own opinion and we are left with “you either know Him or you don’t”. One place where Jonah spends a good deal of time on is the Grant Study that conducted a bunch of medical and psychiatric tests on 268 Harvard students from the class of 1939 and followed them for the rest of their life. These were some of the most privileged and fortunate men, and the striking thing was that they didn’t end up with the “happily ever after” ending that you would expect. George Vaillant spent a good chunk of his life studying these individuals and he wrote that even the ones who ended up wealthy, had their “full share of difficulty and private despair.” He concluded that “Happiness equals love. Full stop”.
I felt that Jonah saved the best for last, with the story about Frankl, the psychiatrist in Vienna who survives the horrors at Auschwitz and writes about it later. I loved the quote from Frankl, saying that "life can be pulled by goals as sure as it can be pushed by drives.” It is quite impressive to read how Frankl found purpose all through his life. The love for his wife Tilly, helped him survive the horrors he experienced in the concentration camp and after he got out, his purpose was to write the book that was stolen from him. If there is one strong conclusion that will remain with me, it is immortalized in this quote from Nietzsche: "He who has the why to live can bear with almost any how".
August 25, 2016
This is a fascinating examination of the role of attachment in our lives, from the earliest days of childhood through the longest of marriages. Lehrer continually finds different ways to tell us that love is not what we think it is and is better than we think it is. Coming close to our 40th anniversary, I appreciated his explorations of the power of long relationships. I also particularly enjoyed the chapter on grace and the experience of God's love (whether there is a God or not; I vote "Yes".)
June 8, 2016
Thank you Simon & Schuster, Jonah Lehrer, and Edelweiss for the advanced digital copy of this book. A truly scientific look at love, bonding, attraction, and the chemistry that helps create, shape, mold the way we feel about the ones we love. An insightful look into why we love who we love.
August 30, 2016
Pretty good. Better than average, but not something I would ever read again or even recommend to most people. Lots of theories/ideas I don't necessarily agree with. There was a quote from Jefferson (Thomas)that wasn't attributed to him, but whatever. The love of God chapter made me pukey.
July 10, 2016
Unoriginality lingers, deception doesn't.
January 18, 2023
Wonderful book about an emotion, state, source of life we all care so much about yet not necessarily read a lot about.
The book opens with a honest description of the scandal of his previous books. That is also likely why the notes throughout the book are very detailed. And why there are quite some references to a challenging personal situation throughout the book. Given the topic of this book these personal reflections worked well, so despite my initial apprehension after reading the disclaimer in the front that was ok.
I really like all study and literature references. Being a Jane Austen fan I have to admit being partial to his analysis of temperance in this book. It would have been nice to see that combined with the part on grit later on, since I do see some links there that have not been completely unpicked. Also Carol Dweck her Growth Mindset might feature in a next edition.
The book is very well written, Lehrer knows how to write and unpick challenging concepts in easy to read and engaging language.
In general a book worth reading and despite the disclaimer, I might just read some of his earlier work as well. It is always super nice to decipher science and some emotion through a well written book.
The book opens with a honest description of the scandal of his previous books. That is also likely why the notes throughout the book are very detailed. And why there are quite some references to a challenging personal situation throughout the book. Given the topic of this book these personal reflections worked well, so despite my initial apprehension after reading the disclaimer in the front that was ok.
I really like all study and literature references. Being a Jane Austen fan I have to admit being partial to his analysis of temperance in this book. It would have been nice to see that combined with the part on grit later on, since I do see some links there that have not been completely unpicked. Also Carol Dweck her Growth Mindset might feature in a next edition.
The book is very well written, Lehrer knows how to write and unpick challenging concepts in easy to read and engaging language.
In general a book worth reading and despite the disclaimer, I might just read some of his earlier work as well. It is always super nice to decipher science and some emotion through a well written book.
i-gave-up
November 27, 2018Reading the mea culpa at the beginning of the book I realized I hadn’t done the math re Lehrer as the author. Tried to start reading but: we only have time to read so many books in a lifetime & I kept thinking: I could be giving this brainspace to some other new writer or woman or scientist. Plus: the description of the book as framed by his personal reflections didn’t much appeal. So: onward.
January 22, 2018
Not a bad read, the most intriguing information was in the second half of the book.
September 2, 2016
A very satisfying and insightful look into the science into how attachment and affection shape people's lives. I appreciated that this was grounded so much in research. It taught me a lot of important things, and reminded me of just as many. It had another layer of meaning which was the authors search for love in his own life. While subtle enough to not detract from the book, it was also charming to see so much of his personality through that.
August 9, 2016
I always rated his writing and was devastated with his demise at the New Yorker. Hopefully he has been penitent enough now and can get back to doing what he does best. I enjoyed reading this and found much of the research insightful and important. Particularly liked the bit about "grit" and the work done in that area.
February 4, 2022
"Love is just another name for what never gets old". The beauty and magic of love is not in the fleeting feelings of heavy passion, but in deep bonds, attachment and commitment that is formed and grown over time.
This book talks about love in so many different ways: scientific, physical, psychological, even religious. There are theories on how humans developed this characteristic of deep, lasting attachment to others and how it is "a source of meaning in a meaningless world". And how if we go without it, we quite literally die. How attachments in our early childhood affect our behaviors and resiliency as adults, "how true independence requires that we become dependent on someone else," love is a source of pleasure as well as a kind of protection, the necessity of trust and vulnerability and how love is really at the center of all that we do and all that we are.
-Mental health is defined by how we cope.
-The essence of love is realizing someone matters more than you
-Happiness equals love full stop
-The loveless were 3 times more likely to have been diagnosed with mental illness, five times more likely to be unusually anxious and for times less likely to rely on mature adaptations when dealing with adversity. subjects from loving homes earned 50% more money over their careers
-loneliness kills
-Success means nothing if it's not shared
- life satisfaction = the capacity for loving relationships
- love never loses the capacity to transform what it touches
- the capacity for love turns out to be a great predictor of mortality
- limerence - the all consuming infatuation for another person usually after a brief meeting, is almost always an illusion
- Theory on why we have the most durable emotional attachment ever created is because humans have shorter gestation periods which requires longer care outside of the womb and taking care of children is arduous and ranked very unpleasant at times so we must have instincts to keep us tied to our children
- the importance of a present father was discussed and the huge benefits it has on the child's early intellectual development
- "Present" parenting is necessary to form a "secure base"
- attunement (when our bodies mirror another's with heartbeat, breathing rate, and blood chemistry etc...) happens automatically. Scenes of attunement are a brief vacation from the stresses of adulthood, a chance to lose ourselves in the most visceral delights of life, we are finally present in the moment (quality of time with your kids matters more than quantity)
- women with insecure avoidant attachments were much more likely to suppress their fears and not share information with their partner. the more anxious they were, the less they sought support
- "all of us from the cradle to the grave are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures
- we want to fall in love and keep falling but passion always fades. THE KEY is to keep relighting the candle "love isn't a feeling, it's a practice"
- healthy attachment leads to healthy sex, and trying things with someone you trust
- the best sex is about getting as close as we can, in th emost literal and emotional sense, to another human being
- the reality of love is that the perfect lover doesn't exist
- suggested that it matters more about similar tempers being together and less about similar people. this quality allows affection to grow over time (meta-emotional compatibility)
- problems should be solved before they fester. find a way to cope with differences
- empathy is an absolute necessity in every lasting relationship even when it feels like a sacrifice
- married people are statistically healthier and happier and higher resilience
- "partner responsiveness" is very important - the extent to which people believe their partners understand, validate and care for them
- like every other love, the love with God can change lives
- believing in Him means we are never alone, gives our lives structure. proved to lower stress, loneliness, depression
- God matters because he changes lives, not just scientifically for the health menefits
- "no matter how wrong things seem to be, they are all right"
- salvation is only the start of the never ending fight
- sharing his weakness was his last source of strength (on AA trying to replace a chemical dependence with a human one)
- "every separation is a link" (on us and God)
- joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality
- the love demanded to be something else, it demanded to be expressed beyond the expression of the participants. That excess energy, i think, is God, and I think it's God in us trying to return to its source. Excess energy
- "To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything" !!!!!!!
- faith, like love, is ultimately a private expereince, knowable from the inside only... you either know Him or you don't but you can't reason your way across the chasm of faith
- whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them
- love dies or else lovers die
- although love is the cuase of our purest joys, its inevitable loss is also responsible for our most intense suffering
- post traumatic growth "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger". Suffering can interrupt the busyness of our lives and make us ask what kind of life we were living and who do we want to be?
- hardship leads to something better when it's used as an opportunity for self-assessment
- pain becomes an engine of menaing
- the rupture of attachment makes us more determined than ever to attach ourselves to others
- "but we don't want to be safe. When it comes to love, we are reckless creatures. The tragedy is plain as day - everyone we love will die, unless we die first - but we live in denial of this truth, for that is the only way to feel alive. Thank God we never learn"
- memory sustains love. Intimacy is made possible by history, for the feeling of love is as much a memory as it is an experience
- the act of remembering changes the memory itself. becuase they're always changing, we can change them for the better (build something out of the ruins)
- people could not choose what to forget they ahd to find ways to live with what they remembered (nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it)
- "coherence" of memories is most important. How we recall it all together, the meaning we take from it, this is what we have the power to change!!!!!! "earned-secure". if you have an unstable childhood but make the most of it with how you remember it, the menaing you take from it, the stories you tell yourself about it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- how you describe the past of a relationship predicts the future. A couple's ability to cope with unexpected turns is key. talk in "we's" and how the hardships make us better.
- before we make sense of the past, we need to revisit it, following the mind into all sorts of sentimental corners and nostalgic cul-de-sacs : both with talk and writing therapy
- revision = revealing
- confronting trauma = assimilating the event. put feeling into words. Touch those deepest emotions and thoughts you have, shape a new narrative
- our recollections could always be rewritten so do so until we find a version that gives us peace and solace
- telling stories over dinner helps children develop their ability to form coherent recollections = higher levels of emotional well-being and personal identity
- nothing lasts forever and the sooner we accept that the sooner we get to living
- stories of redemption are a higher indicator of happiness than just happy lives
- life is a complex mix of failures and success and it's good to rememebr that
- indifference is opposite of love, not hate. Hate and lvoe both persist. this is why you still remember your exs, you still stalk occaisonally or see the min your dreams
This book talks about love in so many different ways: scientific, physical, psychological, even religious. There are theories on how humans developed this characteristic of deep, lasting attachment to others and how it is "a source of meaning in a meaningless world". And how if we go without it, we quite literally die. How attachments in our early childhood affect our behaviors and resiliency as adults, "how true independence requires that we become dependent on someone else," love is a source of pleasure as well as a kind of protection, the necessity of trust and vulnerability and how love is really at the center of all that we do and all that we are.
-Mental health is defined by how we cope.
-The essence of love is realizing someone matters more than you
-Happiness equals love full stop
-The loveless were 3 times more likely to have been diagnosed with mental illness, five times more likely to be unusually anxious and for times less likely to rely on mature adaptations when dealing with adversity. subjects from loving homes earned 50% more money over their careers
-loneliness kills
-Success means nothing if it's not shared
- life satisfaction = the capacity for loving relationships
- love never loses the capacity to transform what it touches
- the capacity for love turns out to be a great predictor of mortality
- limerence - the all consuming infatuation for another person usually after a brief meeting, is almost always an illusion
- Theory on why we have the most durable emotional attachment ever created is because humans have shorter gestation periods which requires longer care outside of the womb and taking care of children is arduous and ranked very unpleasant at times so we must have instincts to keep us tied to our children
- the importance of a present father was discussed and the huge benefits it has on the child's early intellectual development
- "Present" parenting is necessary to form a "secure base"
- attunement (when our bodies mirror another's with heartbeat, breathing rate, and blood chemistry etc...) happens automatically. Scenes of attunement are a brief vacation from the stresses of adulthood, a chance to lose ourselves in the most visceral delights of life, we are finally present in the moment (quality of time with your kids matters more than quantity)
- women with insecure avoidant attachments were much more likely to suppress their fears and not share information with their partner. the more anxious they were, the less they sought support
- "all of us from the cradle to the grave are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figures
- we want to fall in love and keep falling but passion always fades. THE KEY is to keep relighting the candle "love isn't a feeling, it's a practice"
- healthy attachment leads to healthy sex, and trying things with someone you trust
- the best sex is about getting as close as we can, in th emost literal and emotional sense, to another human being
- the reality of love is that the perfect lover doesn't exist
- suggested that it matters more about similar tempers being together and less about similar people. this quality allows affection to grow over time (meta-emotional compatibility)
- problems should be solved before they fester. find a way to cope with differences
- empathy is an absolute necessity in every lasting relationship even when it feels like a sacrifice
- married people are statistically healthier and happier and higher resilience
- "partner responsiveness" is very important - the extent to which people believe their partners understand, validate and care for them
- like every other love, the love with God can change lives
- believing in Him means we are never alone, gives our lives structure. proved to lower stress, loneliness, depression
- God matters because he changes lives, not just scientifically for the health menefits
- "no matter how wrong things seem to be, they are all right"
- salvation is only the start of the never ending fight
- sharing his weakness was his last source of strength (on AA trying to replace a chemical dependence with a human one)
- "every separation is a link" (on us and God)
- joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality
- the love demanded to be something else, it demanded to be expressed beyond the expression of the participants. That excess energy, i think, is God, and I think it's God in us trying to return to its source. Excess energy
- "To turn from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything" !!!!!!!
- faith, like love, is ultimately a private expereince, knowable from the inside only... you either know Him or you don't but you can't reason your way across the chasm of faith
- whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them
- love dies or else lovers die
- although love is the cuase of our purest joys, its inevitable loss is also responsible for our most intense suffering
- post traumatic growth "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger". Suffering can interrupt the busyness of our lives and make us ask what kind of life we were living and who do we want to be?
- hardship leads to something better when it's used as an opportunity for self-assessment
- pain becomes an engine of menaing
- the rupture of attachment makes us more determined than ever to attach ourselves to others
- "but we don't want to be safe. When it comes to love, we are reckless creatures. The tragedy is plain as day - everyone we love will die, unless we die first - but we live in denial of this truth, for that is the only way to feel alive. Thank God we never learn"
- memory sustains love. Intimacy is made possible by history, for the feeling of love is as much a memory as it is an experience
- the act of remembering changes the memory itself. becuase they're always changing, we can change them for the better (build something out of the ruins)
- people could not choose what to forget they ahd to find ways to live with what they remembered (nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it)
- "coherence" of memories is most important. How we recall it all together, the meaning we take from it, this is what we have the power to change!!!!!! "earned-secure". if you have an unstable childhood but make the most of it with how you remember it, the menaing you take from it, the stories you tell yourself about it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- how you describe the past of a relationship predicts the future. A couple's ability to cope with unexpected turns is key. talk in "we's" and how the hardships make us better.
- before we make sense of the past, we need to revisit it, following the mind into all sorts of sentimental corners and nostalgic cul-de-sacs : both with talk and writing therapy
- revision = revealing
- confronting trauma = assimilating the event. put feeling into words. Touch those deepest emotions and thoughts you have, shape a new narrative
- our recollections could always be rewritten so do so until we find a version that gives us peace and solace
- telling stories over dinner helps children develop their ability to form coherent recollections = higher levels of emotional well-being and personal identity
- nothing lasts forever and the sooner we accept that the sooner we get to living
- stories of redemption are a higher indicator of happiness than just happy lives
- life is a complex mix of failures and success and it's good to rememebr that
- indifference is opposite of love, not hate. Hate and lvoe both persist. this is why you still remember your exs, you still stalk occaisonally or see the min your dreams
August 11, 2016
Good, fast read. Interesting way of looking at love and the various types of it. I especially liked the exploration of love as it relates to on-line dating sites, and was happy to hear that family dinner conversation really does make a difference!
September 21, 2016
It is telling that the only two books that he didn't plagiarise (that we know of) are boring and read like a list of encyclopedia entries with a touch of Malcolm Gladwell sprinkled on.
Such a missed opportunity to reflect on his life and failures.
Such a missed opportunity to reflect on his life and failures.
June 28, 2017
I enjoyed this book about love, beginning with attachment in infancy and developing through old age. The value of love and attachment was explored using scientific studies and a quality of a novel in tone.
June 21, 2016
Very informative in bringing different ideas on love, bonding, and memory into print. I received this book via the GoodReads First Reads program.
August 18, 2016
I very much enjoyed Jonah Lehrer's redemption. Beautifully woven research and personal narrative. More personal and intimate than his earlier works.
August 25, 2016
Scientific breakdown of that thing called LUV. Bottom line=We all need it.
December 31, 2020
О ЧЕМ КНИГА:
Сразу видно, что книгу написал журналист. Много интересных и захватывающих историй, объединенных одной темой. У автора нет уникальных мыслей, а он просто собрал большое количество исследований на тему любви и отношений. За время чтения я узнал множество новых теорий и подходов. Наконец то хорошо разобрался в «теории привязанности» Джона Боулби и знаменитом исследовании Синди Хазан и Филипп Шейвер о трех типах привязанности взрослых.
Книга могла бы быть существенно короче, если бы не длинные истории жизни авторов психологических теорий, которые использует Лерер.
ГЛАВНАЯ МЫСЛЬ КНИГИ:
Любовь – дело непростое. То, что важнее всего в жизни, требует больше всего усилий.
ЗАЧЕМ ЧИТАТЬ ЭТУ КНИГУ?
Чтобы разобраться как изменения в социальной жизни за последние десятилетия влияют на качество отношений с близкими.
МЫСЛИ И ВЫВОДЫ ИЗ КНИГИ:
- Отношения с родителями - это база для ребенка при исследовании им мира взрослых.
- Ранние переживания с родителями в итоге образуют систему мыслей, убеждений и ожиданий по отношению к другим людям. Эта система продолжит развиваться и укрепляться с появлением новых отношений и во взрослом возрасте. Способ привязанности к родителям в детстве объясняет и психологию отношений в парах.
- В делах любви взрослые — те же младенцы, только выучившееся говорить и пользоваться кредитками.
- Такой близости, какая сегодня существует в семьях со стажем, не существовало за всю историю человечества.
- За два последних десятилетия мы всё меньше общаемся с друзьями и уже вдвое больше обсуждаем серьезные вопросы только со своим мужем или женой.
- В простых повседневных действиях и заключена самая суть зрелой привязанности. Это будничная работа, которую надо делать, если вы хотите сохранить любовь.
- Выбирая спутника жизни, мы выбираем пакет проблем.
- Готтман обнаружил, что метаэмоциональная совместимость, когда супруги обладают схожим темпераментом, – самый верный признак будущего семейного счастья, позволяющий “предсказать развод с точностью до 80 %".
- Супруги, метаэмоции которых сильно отличаются, испытывают трудности в общении друг с другом. Они не замечают уязвимого состояния своих партнеров в трудные минуты, их волнуют только различия: их раздражает в партнере все, что в нем не так, как в них самих.
- Брак – более значимый фактор счастья, чем работа, деньги или положение в обществе.
- Именно потому, что сейчас брак можно расторгнуть, когда угодно, решение сохранить его так драгоценно. Поэтому сегодня счастливая семья значит гораздо больше, чем когда-либо в истории человечества.
- Рассказывать детям за ужином истории семьи - хороший прием. Надо рассказывать друг другу истории взлетов и падений. Вспоминая, как переменчива бывает жизнь, мы невольно вспоминаем и то, что остается неизменным. Рассказывая о внезапных поворотах судьбы, мы понимаем, что в этой жизни по-настоящему ценно, что остается с нами в любых обстоятельствах.
- Настоящая любовь – штука вовсе не романтическая: любые близкие отношения – это проверка на выносливость и упорство, показатель того, насколько мы способны продолжать идти к цели, когда хочется все бросить и убежать.
- “Чтобы отношения стали по-настоящему крепкими, надо озвучить все разногласия. Иными словами, то, что кажется неприятным в браке – гнев и разочарование, – в долгосрочной перспективе может пойти ему на пользу. Яростные стычки, происходящие время от времени, не разрушают брак, а, напротив, со временем способствуют его укреплению”, т. е. если вы хотите сохранить отношения, следует смотреть в лицо горькой правде и говорить вслух о своих ошибках и сожалениях.
ЧТО Я БУДУ ПРИМЕНЯТЬ:
- Обращать внимание на свои поступки, понимая свой тип привязанности.
- Буду рассказывать больше семейных историй своей дочери.
ЕЩЕ НА ЭТУ ТЕМУ:
📗Ален де Ботов «Курс любви»
Сразу видно, что книгу написал журналист. Много интересных и захватывающих историй, объединенных одной темой. У автора нет уникальных мыслей, а он просто собрал большое количество исследований на тему любви и отношений. За время чтения я узнал множество новых теорий и подходов. Наконец то хорошо разобрался в «теории привязанности» Джона Боулби и знаменитом исследовании Синди Хазан и Филипп Шейвер о трех типах привязанности взрослых.
Книга могла бы быть существенно короче, если бы не длинные истории жизни авторов психологических теорий, которые использует Лерер.
ГЛАВНАЯ МЫСЛЬ КНИГИ:
Любовь – дело непростое. То, что важнее всего в жизни, требует больше всего усилий.
ЗАЧЕМ ЧИТАТЬ ЭТУ КНИГУ?
Чтобы разобраться как изменения в социальной жизни за последние десятилетия влияют на качество отношений с близкими.
МЫСЛИ И ВЫВОДЫ ИЗ КНИГИ:
- Отношения с родителями - это база для ребенка при исследовании им мира взрослых.
- Ранние переживания с родителями в итоге образуют систему мыслей, убеждений и ожиданий по отношению к другим людям. Эта система продолжит развиваться и укрепляться с появлением новых отношений и во взрослом возрасте. Способ привязанности к родителям в детстве объясняет и психологию отношений в парах.
- В делах любви взрослые — те же младенцы, только выучившееся говорить и пользоваться кредитками.
- Такой близости, какая сегодня существует в семьях со стажем, не существовало за всю историю человечества.
- За два последних десятилетия мы всё меньше общаемся с друзьями и уже вдвое больше обсуждаем серьезные вопросы только со своим мужем или женой.
- В простых повседневных действиях и заключена самая суть зрелой привязанности. Это будничная работа, которую надо делать, если вы хотите сохранить любовь.
- Выбирая спутника жизни, мы выбираем пакет проблем.
- Готтман обнаружил, что метаэмоциональная совместимость, когда супруги обладают схожим темпераментом, – самый верный признак будущего семейного счастья, позволяющий “предсказать развод с точностью до 80 %".
- Супруги, метаэмоции которых сильно отличаются, испытывают трудности в общении друг с другом. Они не замечают уязвимого состояния своих партнеров в трудные минуты, их волнуют только различия: их раздражает в партнере все, что в нем не так, как в них самих.
- Брак – более значимый фактор счастья, чем работа, деньги или положение в обществе.
- Именно потому, что сейчас брак можно расторгнуть, когда угодно, решение сохранить его так драгоценно. Поэтому сегодня счастливая семья значит гораздо больше, чем когда-либо в истории человечества.
- Рассказывать детям за ужином истории семьи - хороший прием. Надо рассказывать друг другу истории взлетов и падений. Вспоминая, как переменчива бывает жизнь, мы невольно вспоминаем и то, что остается неизменным. Рассказывая о внезапных поворотах судьбы, мы понимаем, что в этой жизни по-настоящему ценно, что остается с нами в любых обстоятельствах.
- Настоящая любовь – штука вовсе не романтическая: любые близкие отношения – это проверка на выносливость и упорство, показатель того, насколько мы способны продолжать идти к цели, когда хочется все бросить и убежать.
- “Чтобы отношения стали по-настоящему крепкими, надо озвучить все разногласия. Иными словами, то, что кажется неприятным в браке – гнев и разочарование, – в долгосрочной перспективе может пойти ему на пользу. Яростные стычки, происходящие время от времени, не разрушают брак, а, напротив, со временем способствуют его укреплению”, т. е. если вы хотите сохранить отношения, следует смотреть в лицо горькой правде и говорить вслух о своих ошибках и сожалениях.
ЧТО Я БУДУ ПРИМЕНЯТЬ:
- Обращать внимание на свои поступки, понимая свой тип привязанности.
- Буду рассказывать больше семейных историй своей дочери.
ЕЩЕ НА ЭТУ ТЕМУ:
📗Ален де Ботов «Курс любви»
March 24, 2020
The author intended to posit that love is what lasts and is not diminished with time or habituation. This could have been an interesting venue to explore, however I find that the author simply compiled a ton of data and the book felt like a reference book rather than an opinion book where the author could further explore and demonstrate his ideas. Whatever point he was trying to make was lost in the excessive citing and paraphrasing of the scientific studies he collected.
In the beginning, he relied heavily on the theory of attachment and elaborated on the scientific research behind the love of parent-child, then he used the theory of attachment to model the relationship between two partners which I found to be a somewhat weak and oversimplified approach. The rest of the book seemed to lose focus and to elaborate on tangents that vaguely tie in to the main point the author was attempting to make. In some cases, it would have served him better to begin his chapters with a clear topic sentence, rather an anecdote or a story that takes two to three pages.
Is my life richer for having read this book? No.
I feel that I didn't learn a whole lot, and was quickly losing interest as many of the ideas he mentioned I had already read about in much more focused books that addressed them in a deeper way.
There were the occasional insights here and there that I took notes of to explore more later, such as John Gottman's Meta-emotionality or Victor Frankl on Meaning and Purpose, but in many ways, I felt that this was the author's own attempt to grasp the topic of love and identify it in his own life, which came off quite subjective (despite the numerous studies cited) and personal.
Overall, the book lacked originality. It is however a good book to consult if you are looking for a briefly compiled overview of the prominent studies around the subject. On the positive side, I did feel that the author attempted to cover as many different angles as possible, however superficially in some instances. Also, the writing style is very easy to read and one can go through it fairly quickly.
In the beginning, he relied heavily on the theory of attachment and elaborated on the scientific research behind the love of parent-child, then he used the theory of attachment to model the relationship between two partners which I found to be a somewhat weak and oversimplified approach. The rest of the book seemed to lose focus and to elaborate on tangents that vaguely tie in to the main point the author was attempting to make. In some cases, it would have served him better to begin his chapters with a clear topic sentence, rather an anecdote or a story that takes two to three pages.
Is my life richer for having read this book? No.
I feel that I didn't learn a whole lot, and was quickly losing interest as many of the ideas he mentioned I had already read about in much more focused books that addressed them in a deeper way.
There were the occasional insights here and there that I took notes of to explore more later, such as John Gottman's Meta-emotionality or Victor Frankl on Meaning and Purpose, but in many ways, I felt that this was the author's own attempt to grasp the topic of love and identify it in his own life, which came off quite subjective (despite the numerous studies cited) and personal.
Overall, the book lacked originality. It is however a good book to consult if you are looking for a briefly compiled overview of the prominent studies around the subject. On the positive side, I did feel that the author attempted to cover as many different angles as possible, however superficially in some instances. Also, the writing style is very easy to read and one can go through it fairly quickly.
August 9, 2019
Disclaimer: I listened to this in audiobook format and I have a harder time retaining heard information than read information, so parts of the book are probably lost to my memory already even though I just finished listening to it.
This book covers a lot of topics and there's no way I could possibly argue with, approve of, or even just talk about all of them accurately in this small space.
The general premise of the book is challenging the notion of love in the form of the 'soul-mate' or quick attachment, and reframing the idea of love as a long-lasting effort that exists between two people.
All in all, it's pretty interesting, and probably a solid half of the text in the book is explaining and recounting psychology studies and stories of various psychologists and how they came to believe this or that. It's pretty interesting as a read, and at least according to the author, very heavily fact checked (he stresses this as apparently his last book had some false info in it somewhere and he felt guilty) which is good to know.
All in all it's an interesting read. It's given me something to talk about with several other people, and a some somewhat empirical backing to the way I look at and talk about the concept of love. For a long time I've felt like it's the long-term struggle that the book sets out to argue that it is, but not for the same reasons laid out in the book (maybe some of them). It's interesting to hear it argued by someone willing to do a little more research about it than me just deciding it was so based on my gut.
This book covers a lot of topics and there's no way I could possibly argue with, approve of, or even just talk about all of them accurately in this small space.
The general premise of the book is challenging the notion of love in the form of the 'soul-mate' or quick attachment, and reframing the idea of love as a long-lasting effort that exists between two people.
All in all, it's pretty interesting, and probably a solid half of the text in the book is explaining and recounting psychology studies and stories of various psychologists and how they came to believe this or that. It's pretty interesting as a read, and at least according to the author, very heavily fact checked (he stresses this as apparently his last book had some false info in it somewhere and he felt guilty) which is good to know.
All in all it's an interesting read. It's given me something to talk about with several other people, and a some somewhat empirical backing to the way I look at and talk about the concept of love. For a long time I've felt like it's the long-term struggle that the book sets out to argue that it is, but not for the same reasons laid out in the book (maybe some of them). It's interesting to hear it argued by someone willing to do a little more research about it than me just deciding it was so based on my gut.
September 16, 2024
There were a few parts that were moving -- I had no idea that Montaigne's essays were a way of continuing conversations he had started with deceased lover. I enjoyed the pro-attachment/humans need attachment/do best when life is lived as a series of excursions from an attachment figure viewpoint in a society that so often emphasizes "self care" and "self love." And the incorporation of the Harvard Study of Adult Development was interesting in that it showed that loving relationships were essentially the basis of well-being and physical health. It's also a less well-known, "in the water" study than many others.
I found many parts of the book frustrating though. It started off with a slew of Psych 101 cases such as the famous stranger experiment to test attachment styles. It became preachy toward the end when it talked about how "love requires work." And there was too much tossing around of findings from scientific studies, almost causing the book to take the form of a college psychology paper or literature review at points. I think focusing on people as illustrations of concepts (such as Montaigne) or doing a deep dive into a core few impactful studies (such as the Harvard study) would have made for a more compelling and original piece of work.
I found many parts of the book frustrating though. It started off with a slew of Psych 101 cases such as the famous stranger experiment to test attachment styles. It became preachy toward the end when it talked about how "love requires work." And there was too much tossing around of findings from scientific studies, almost causing the book to take the form of a college psychology paper or literature review at points. I think focusing on people as illustrations of concepts (such as Montaigne) or doing a deep dive into a core few impactful studies (such as the Harvard study) would have made for a more compelling and original piece of work.
March 16, 2019
The author does a great job describing the studies and delving into the lives of the people he writes about. I'd heard of some of the studies from a couple of psych classes I've taken, but others were new to me. I see that some reviewers have felt his tone was too dry, but I didn't personally think so. To me, this was a very warm, engaging look at the psychological impact love has on our lives. I also liked that he added a personal touch by describing some of his own experiences. The writing style was pleasant, thorough but not too technical, and made it a quick read.
This was a great book for my recent plane trip! I'd recommend to anyone with an interest in psychology, although enthusiasm about it isn't necessary to enjoy this book since the author does spend a good amount of time telling the life stories of the scientists and writers he's discussing. Lovely blend of research and narrative!
This was a great book for my recent plane trip! I'd recommend to anyone with an interest in psychology, although enthusiasm about it isn't necessary to enjoy this book since the author does spend a good amount of time telling the life stories of the scientists and writers he's discussing. Lovely blend of research and narrative!
February 27, 2023
For the most part, this isn’t about the falling in love type of love, but rather love that endures. A scientific look at the topic, it begins with measuring love/the effects thereof and their effect on attachment style. Several other topics are reviewed, including the decrease in time we spend with friends (as our friendships and other relationships diminish, our romantic relationship becomes more important); “compensatory attachment relationships” (faith in God); and how memory sustains love.
Some tidbits that struck me:
• Strong relationships are the best predicator for happiness
• Desire fades; attachment/companionship last.
• Maintain a close friendship with your partner
• Those with grit/perseverance are 17% more likely to stay married.
And finally, some hope: “We can still learn how to love, even if our childhood was marked by loss and insecurity.”
-Marjorie
Some tidbits that struck me:
• Strong relationships are the best predicator for happiness
• Desire fades; attachment/companionship last.
• Maintain a close friendship with your partner
• Those with grit/perseverance are 17% more likely to stay married.
And finally, some hope: “We can still learn how to love, even if our childhood was marked by loss and insecurity.”
-Marjorie
Displaying 1 - 30 of 87 reviews