How to fall in love with anyone: a memoir in essays

Description

In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal 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. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she'd read about--where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions--and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. 2017.;Introduction -- The exploded star: the myth of the right person -- The football coach and the cheerleader: what makes a good love story? -- Coal miner's daughter: love in context -- Girl meets boy: following love's script -- The problem of deservingness: our American obsession with Cinderella -- I'm willing to lie about how we met: the tyranny of meeting cute -- The black box: thoughts on the stories we don't tell -- Okay, honey: bad advice from good people -- If you can fall in love with anyone, how do you choose? -- The pleasures of ordinary devotion -- To fall in love with anyone, do this -- Arthur Aron's 36 questions. Introduction -- The exploded star: the myth of the right person -- The football coach and the cheerleader: what makes a good love story? -- Coal miner's daughter: love in context -- Girl meets boy: following love's script -- The problem of deservingness: our American obsession with Cinderella -- I'm willing to lie about how we met: the tyranny of meeting cute -- The black box: thoughts on the stories we don't tell -- Okay, honey: bad advice from good people -- If you can fall in love with anyone, how do you choose? -- The pleasures of ordinary devotion -- To fall in love with anyone, do this -- Arthur Aron's 36 questions.