How to Fall in Love with Anyone – Mandy Len Catron

Thoughts: I found this one in a little library in Waterloo a few summers ago, if I remember correctly. I read it partly out of curiosity and partly in an effort to broaden the scope of my reading. Other than the idea that love is not an ineffible thing beyond human control (an idea I’m not certain has served me well), I don’t recall taking much from it. It was an okay book.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Catron, Mandy Len. 2017. How to Fall in Love with Anyone. Simon & Schuster.

• 35: Jonathan Gottschall: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human
• 64: Eli Finkel: “over the past two centuries, our hopes for marriage have slowly ascended Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.”
• 72: 1996 study “The Self-Fulfilling Nature of Positive Illusions in Romantic Relationships”: newlyweds with idealized views of their partners experience less decline in marital satisfaction.
• 73: “Only in the face of death [i.e. limited time] does commitment [i.e. marriage etc.] really become meaningful.”
• 94: Folk tales - look up the Aarne-Thompson system for indexing folk tales, plus perhaps other systems
• 142: Where couples meet is correlated with their sense of support from family/friends. i.e. the story of meeting legitimizes a relationship
• 144: Moira Weigel’s book Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating
• 164: Psychologist Arie Kruglanski: our desire for “cognitive closure” - to seek explanations, simplify how the world works. High ambiguity -> strong impulse for explanation
• 168: Dinah Lenney’s essay, “Against Knowing”
• 180: “It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.”