Are you longing for love? Perhaps the following reading tips can help you. We recommend three books that are worth reading.
“First love yourself before you are willing to love others.” Many long-term singles know this sentence. And yes, maybe there is a grain of truth in it too. But if no relationship develops despite self-love, frustration sets in – and we begin to doubt ourselves again. Is there perhaps another reason why things are more bad than good with love?
What is love?
Perhaps one of the biggest problems is that we never learned what love means. Love is a strong word. Poorly defined, it is an emotional state of affection. But isn’t there much more to it than that? It is not without reason that famous philosophers, including Plato, Augustine, Kant, Rousseau, Luhmann and Foucalt, have dealt with this topic for years. And even today, many authors devote themselves to the subject of love. In “All About Love – New Perspectives” bell hooks tries to come up with a definition. And bestselling author Dolly Alderton’s novel “Everything I know about love” is an attempt to understand what is probably the most complicated feeling in the world. But can you ever understand it? And doesn’t love already evaporate as soon as it gets complicated? No, on the contrary.
love changes
In his book “The Course of Love”, the Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton describes how love changes over the course of a relationship. There are also biological reasons for this. The happiness hormone dopamine, which is released when you are in love, causes euphoria. However, when true love develops from this initial infatuation, the body gets used to this state and the euphoria decreases. The dopamine rush is replaced by the hormone oxytocin. This binds us to each other, but also allows us to recognize the supposed rough edges of the other. Above all, true love is one thing: work. Romantic feelings and mutual affection can only be maintained if we are willing to invest in them.
Three books about love
Do you want to learn more about love, give it more space in your life or just read stories about it? Then here are three books worth reading:
Natasha Lunn is a journalist who has interviewed a number of celebrities about love for her Conversations on Love newsletter. She has finally dedicated a book to the whole thing, from which we can learn a lot about the most beautiful and at the same time most painful feeling. In “Conversations about Love” she examines the questions in three parts: How do we find love? How do we preserve them? And how can we cope with the loss of love?
Favorite Quote: “Love is a quest, a promise, a home. It is the strength we muster to reach out to one another, with a cup of tea and tenderness, with humor and apologies. It is the world we share created with another human being, a truth that exists in the here and now.”
The fact that love stories rarely correspond to the image we know from classic RomComs is shown by the numerous short stories in “Love’s Happiness: True Stories of Great Love”. The journalist Kathrin Werner traveled to various countries for this work. In the book, she wrote a total of 20 true love stories that couldn’t be more different. They move and give hope. Hope that love exists.
Favorite Quote: “Actually, she had made up her mind not to have anything to do with love anymore. ‘You have a state of mind, but when you meet someone, things can change,’ says Lindsay.”
In his novels, Benedict Wells deals primarily with one topic: loneliness. Then what is the novel “Hard Land” doing here? Well, it’s a coming-of-age story. It’s about falling in love for the first time, loss and that one summer that turns your entire life upside down. Above all, it is one thing: A homage to friendship, which is sometimes not sufficiently appreciated in the midst of all the madness of love.
Favorite Quote: “She could be so much like me, and she was the opposite of me, and if my vibe was an empty factory floor, then she was a bunch of candles.”
Note: This article first appeared on brigitte.de
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