Love

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love. The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire. This book does to love what Marx did to it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.

In Creating Love, John  Bradsgaw provides a new way to understand our most  crucial with parents and children, with  friends and co-workers, with ourselves, and with  God.He shows us how we have been  literally "entranced" by past  experiences of counterfeit love, how we can break these  destructive patterns, and how we can open ourselves to  the soul-building work of real  love.John Bradshaw has touched and changed millions of  lives through his nationally televised PBS series  and his best-selling books. His previous book,  Homecoming, introduced the concept  of the inner child to a vast new audience. Now he  defines the "next great stage of  growth"--how we can work to create healthy, loving  relationships in every part of our  lives.Written for everyone who has struggled with  painful relationships and is seeking hope and a new  direction, Creating Love is a  life-changing book.