Review: How to Fall in Love with Anyone

*I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.*

Title: How to Fall in Love with Anyone

Author: Mandy Len Catron

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Publication Date: July 2017

ISBN: 9781501137440

Synopsis from Goodreads:
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.

This book was incredibly engaging and fascinating. I love reading about love and relationships, and what other people think and experience. Catron discusses love through a series of her personal anecdotes and her reflection on the relationships of her parents and grandparents. Catron is witty and hilarious as she recounts various stories of her past, but she’s also insightful as she explores how people date and marry differently then the did even one or two generations ago. I couldn’t stop turning the pages, staying up well past an acceptable hour to sleep in order to finish reading.

Many of you might know Catron from her New York Times Article, “To Fall In Love With Anyone, Do This.” This book expands on the ideas that she presents in this article, applying them to the different stages of love in her life, through the ups and downs of different relationships. Not only does she explore her experiences with me, she discusses in depth her time alone when she learned invaluable lessons about herself. In this period of time she is able to ruminate on how her young and young adult dating life was driven not by her own confidence, but by her lack thereof and her feelings that as a woman she was defined in terms of how men appreciated her. In her time of being single, she gains the confidence to find out what it is she’s looking for love and to know that her self worth lies in being who she is and being true to herself.

I absolutely loved this book. It’s one that I’ll gladly keep in the permanent collection and read again, and recommend to other readers. If you enjoy learning about others and how we define love, this book will certainly appeal to you.