A deeply personal investigation into the meaning of love, from the author of the popular New York Times essay ‘To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This’

Why does love last? Does love ever work the way it does in films, books and social media? Or does our obsessing over love stories harm real relationships? These were questions Mandy Len Catron set out to answer when her parents’ 28-year marriage and her own 10-year relationship finished almost concurrently.

In a series of candid, charming and wise essays, she explores what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world. She deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories, going back to when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town, and also her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the psychology, biology, history and literature of love.

She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment – where the objective was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions – and ended up having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.