Book picks similar to
The Polyamory Breakup Book: Causes, Prevention, and Survival by Kathy Labriola
polyamory
nonfiction
relationships
non-fiction
No Happy Endings
Nora McInerny Purmort - 2019
We lose love, lose jobs, lose our sense of self. For Nora McInerny, it was losing her husband, her father, and her unborn second child in one catastrophic year.But in the wake of loss, we get to assemble something new from whatever is left behind. Some circles call finding happiness after loss “Chapter 2”—the continuation of something else. Today, Nora is remarried and mothers four children aged 16 months to 16 years. While her new circumstances bring her extraordinary joy, they are also tinged with sadness over the loved ones she’s lost.Life has made Nora a reluctant expert in hard conversations. On her wildly popular podcast, she talks about painful experiences we inevitably face, and exposes the absurdity of the question “how are you?” that people often ask when we’re coping with the aftermath of emotional catastrophe. She knows intimately that when your life falls apart, there’s a mad rush to be okay—to find a silver lining, to get to the happy ending. In this, her second memoir, Nora offers a tragicomic exploration of the tension between finding happiness and holding space for the unhappy experiences that have shaped us.No Happy Endings is a book for people living life after life has fallen apart. It’s a book for people who know that they’re moving forward, not moving on. It’s a book for people who know life isn’t always happy, but it isn’t the end: there will be unimaginable joy and incomprehensible tragedy. As Nora reminds us, there will be no happy endings—but there will be new beginnings.
Against Love: A Polemic
Laura Kipnis - 2003
Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions.But is there something a bit worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible? Consider that the most powerful organized religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love.Hence the necessity for a polemic against it. A polemic is designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger. It won't injure you (well not severely); it's just supposed to shake things up and rattle a few convictions.
White Houses
Amy Bloom - 2018
Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick," as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor. But then, as her connection with the future first lady deepens into intimacy, what begins as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that Hick never expected to have.She moves into the White House, where her status as "first friend" is an open secret, as are FDR's own lovers. After she takes a job in the Roosevelt administration, promoting and protecting both Roosevelts, she comes to know Franklin not only as a great president but as a complicated rival and an irresistible friend, capable of changing lives even after his death. Through it all, even as Hick's bond with Eleanor is tested by forces both extraordinary and common, and as she grows as a woman and a writer, she never loses sight of the love of her life.From Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, from a little white house on Long Island to an apartment on Manhattan's Washington Square, Amy Bloom's new novel moves elegantly through fascinating places and times, written in compelling prose and with emotional depth, wit, and acuity.
Exhibitionism for the Shy
Carol Queen - 1995
Founder and Publisher Emerita Joani Blank, then working as a sex educator and counselor, started writing her own books about sexuality at her clients' and other therapists' behest.The press currently has a list of eighteen sexual self-awareness titles, including innovative and practical non-fiction with non-judgmental techniques for strengthening sexual communication. Down There Press also publishes lively literary and photographic erotica.
If the Buddha Dated: A Handbook for Finding Love on a Spiritual Path
Charlotte Kasl - 1999
Kasl brings a compassionate understanding to the anxiety and uneasiness of new love, and helps readers discover their potential for vibrant human connection based on awareness, kindness, and honesty. She approaches the dating process as a means for awakening, reminding us that when we live by spiritual rules, we bring curiosity and a light heart to the romantic journey. Filled with quotations from Zen, Sufi, and other wisdom traditions, and informed by the experiences of people from all walks of life, here is a relationship book that will appeal to readers looking for more than a Venus-meets-Mars solution to the complex affairs of the heart.
Naked at Our Age: Talking Out Loud About Senior Sex
Joan Price - 2011
. . the best is yet to come" (Dr. Dean Edell)Joan Price is talking out loud about a subject that is often ignored or ridiculed in our society: later-life sexuality.In Naked at Our Age, she offers a candid, straight-talking exploration of senior sexuality -- the challenges, the disappointments, and the surprises, as well as the delights of love and passion. She shares the stories of women and men -- coupled and single, straight and gay -- demonstrating how their sex lives and relationships have changed with age, and how their sex lives influence their lives and self-esteem. Along the way, she offers wise advice from sex therapists, health professionals, counselors, sex educators, and other knowledgeable experts, helping seniors to embrace intimacy in all its forms.Entertaining and indispensable, Naked at Our Age is a complete guide to enjoying senior sex, love, passion, and couplehood.
Depression Fallout: The Impact of Depression on Couples and What You Can Do to Preserve the Bond
Anne Sheffield - 2003
They draw the people they love – spouses, parents, children, lovers, friends – into their illness. In her first book, How You Can Survive When They're Depressed, Anne Sheffield coined the phrase 'depression fallout' to describe the emotional toll on the depressive's family and close friends who are unaware of their own stressful reactions and needs. She outlined the five stages of depression fallout (confusion, self–doubt, demoralisation, anger, and the need to escape) and explained that these reactions are a natural result of living with a depressed person.
Bad Boyfriends: Using Attachment Theory to Avoid Mr. (or Ms.) Wrong and Make You a Better Partner
Jeb Kinnison - 2014
If you were brought up in the Western world, you’ve been trained on fairy tales of love and relationships that are misleading at best, and at worst have you making mistake after mistake in starting relationships with the wrong kinds of people who will waste your time and keep you from finding a loyal partner. Science has the answer! Or at least a guide to save you the time and effort of discovering for yourself how many wrong types of romantic partners there are. Reading this book will help you recognize the signs of some of the syndromes that prevent people from being good partners. We’ll go through those syndromes and point out some of the signs. Those little red flags you sometimes notice when you are getting to know someone? Often they speak loud and clear once you understand the types, and you can decide immediately to run away or approach with caution those who show them. If you’re young and just starting to look for a partner, good news—the world is swarming with well-adjusted, charming matches for you, if you know how to recognize them. The bad news: you are inexperienced and you may not recognize the right type of person when you date them. Many people expect to experience an immediate sense of excitement, an overwhelming rush of attraction, and to fall in love rapidly and equally with someone who feels the same. This rarely happens, and when it does it usually ends badly! And expecting it will cause you to let go of people who are steady, loving, and attentive, if you had given them a chance. So once you’ve identified someone who makes you laugh, answers your messages, and is there for you when you want them, don’t make the mistake of tossing them aside for the merely good-looking, sexy, or intriguing stranger. If you’re older, bad news: while you were spending time and effort on relationships you were hoping would turn out better, or even happily nestled in a good relationship or two, most of the secure, reliable, sane people in your age group got paired off. They’re married or happily enfamilied, and most of the people your age in the dating pool are tragically unable to form a good long-term relationship. You should always ask yourself, “why is this one still available?”—there may be a good answer (recently widowed or left a long-term relationship), or it may be that this person has just been extraordinarily unlucky in having over twenty short relationships in twenty years (to cite one case!) But it’s far more likely you have met someone with a problematic attachment style. As you age past 40, the percentage of the dating pool that is able to form a secure, stable relationship drops to less than 30%[1]; and since it can take months of dating to understand why Mr. or Ms. SeemsNice is really the future ex-partner from Hell, being able to recognize the difficult types will help you recognize them faster and move on to the next. This book outlines the basics (which might be all you need), and points you toward more resources if you want to understand more about your problem partner. If you're wondering if the guy or girl you've been hanging out with might not be quite right, this is the place to match those little red flags you've noticed with known bad types. And by getting out fast, you can avoid emotional damage and wasted time, and get going on finding someone who's really right for you. Study all of the bad types and you'll detect them before even getting involved. Or you could be one of the few people who recognizes their own problems in one of these types. There are study materials and plans of action for you, too.
Get the Guy: How to Find, Attract, and Keep Your Ideal Mate
Matthew Hussey - 2013
Here's a book dedicated to telling you what you can do. In his book, Get the Guy, Matthew Hussey - relationship expert, matchmaker, and star of the reality show Ready for Love - reveals the secrets of the male mind and the fundamentals of dating and mating for a proven, revolutionary approach to help women to find lasting love. Matthew Hussey has coached thousands of high-powered CEOs, showing them how to develop confidence and build relationships that translate into professional success. Many of Matthew's male clients pressed him for advice on how to apply his winning strategies not to just get the job, but how to get the girl. As his reputation grew, Hussey was approached by more and more women, eager to hear what he had learned about the male perspective on love and romance. From landing a first date to establishing emotional intimacy, playful flirtation to red-hot bedroom tips, Matthew's insightfulness, irreverence, and warmth makes Get the Guy: Learn Secrets of the Male Mind to Find the Man You Want and the Love You Deserve a one-of-a-kind relationship guide and the handbook for every woman who wants to get the guy she's been waiting for.
Three Women
Lisa Taddeo - 2019
Starved for affection, Lina battles daily panic attacks and, after reconnecting with an old flame through social media, embarks on an affair that quickly becomes all-consuming. In North Dakota we meet Maggie, a seventeen-year-old high school student who allegedly has a clandestine physical relationship with her handsome, married English teacher; the ensuing criminal trial will turn their quiet community upside down. Finally, in an exclusive enclave of the Northeast, we meet Sloane—a gorgeous, successful, and refined restaurant owner—who is happily married to a man who likes to watch her have sex with other men and women.Based on years of immersive reporting and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy, Three Women is both a feat of journalism and a triumph of storytelling, brimming with nuance and empathy. “A work of deep observation, long conversations, and a kind of journalistic alchemy” (Kate Tuttle, NPR), Three Women introduces us to three unforgettable women—and one remarkable writer—whose experiences remind us that we are not alone.
The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality
Julie Sondra Decker - 2014
They aren't sexually attracted to anyone, and they consider it a sexual orientation—like gay, straight, or bisexual.Asexuality is the invisible orientation. Most people believe that "everyone" wants sex, that "everyone" understands what it means to be attracted to other people, and that "everyone" wants to date and mate. But that's where asexual people are left out—they don't find other people sexually attractive, and if and when they say so, they are very rarely treated as though that's okay.When an asexual person comes out, alarming reactions regularly follow; loved ones fear that an asexual person is sick, or psychologically warped, or suffering from abuse. Critics confront asexual people with accusations of following a fad, hiding homosexuality, or making excuses for romantic failures. And all of this contributes to a discouraging master narrative: there is no such thing as "asexual." Being an asexual person is a lie or an illness, and it needs to be fixed.In The Invisible Orientation, Julie Sondra Decker outlines what asexuality is, counters misconceptions, provides resources, and puts asexual people's experiences in context as they move through a very sexualized world. It includes information for asexual people to help understand their orientation and what it means for their relationships, as well as tips and facts for those who want to understand their asexual friends and loved ones.
A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire
Ogi Ogas - 2011
For his groundbreaking sexual research, Alfred Kinsey and his team interviewed 18,000 people, relying on them to honestly report their most intimate experiences. Using the Internet, the neuroscientists Ogas and Gaddam quietly observed the raw sexual behaviors of half a billion people. By combining their observations with neuroscience and animal research, these two young neuroscientists finally answer the long-disputed question: what do people really like? Ogas and Gaddam's findings are transforming the way scientists and therapists think about sexual desire. In their startling book, Ogas and Gaddam analyze a "billion wicked thoughts" on the Internet: a billion Web searches, a million individual search histories, a million erotic stories, a half-million erotic videos, a million Web sites, millions of online personal ads, and many other enormous sources of sexual data in order to understand the true differences between male and female desires, including: ?Men and women have hardwired sexual cues analogous to our hardwired tastes-there are sexual versions of sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter. But men and women are wired with different sets of cues. ?The male sexual brain resembles a reckless hunter, while the female sexual brain resembles a cautious detective agency. ?Men form their sexual interests during adolescence and rarely change. Women's sexual interests are plastic and change frequently. ?The male sexual brain is an "or gate": A single stimulus can arouse it. The female sexual brain is an "and gate": It requires many simultaneous stimuli to arouse it. ?When it comes to sexual arousal, men prefer overweight women to underweight women, and a significant number of men seek out erotic images of women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. ?Women enjoy writing and sharing erotic stories with other women. The fastest growing genre of erotic stories for women are stories about two heterosexual men having sex. ?Though the male sexual brain is much more different from the female sexual brain than is commonly believed, the sexual brain of gay men is virtually identical to that of straight men. Featuring cutting-edge, jaw-dropping science, this wildly entertaining and controversial book helps readers understand their partner's sexual desires with a depth of knowledge unavailable from any other source. Its fascinating and occasionally disturbing findings will rock our modern understanding of sexuality, just as Kinsey's reports did sixty years ago.
Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms
Matthias Roberts - 2020
Whether we grew up in the repressive purity culture of American Evangelical Christianity or not, we've all been taught in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that sex (outside of very specific contexts) is immoral and taboo. Psychotherapist Matthias Roberts helps readers overcome their shame around sex by overcoming three unhealthy coping mechanisms we use to manage that shame. Beyond Shame encourages each of us to determine our own definition of healthy sex, while avoiding the ditches of boundaryless sex positivity on the one hand and strict moralistic boundaries on the other. Define your sexual values on your own terms, overcome your shame, and start having great, healthy sex.
Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee
Pamela Druckerman - 2007
It's an adulterous world out there. Russian husbands and wives don't believe that beach-resort flings violate their marital vows. Japanese businessmen, armed with the aphorism "If you pay, it's not cheating," flock to sex clubs where the extramarital services on offer include "getting oral sex without showering first." South Africans may be the masters of creative accounting: Pollsters there had to create separate categories for men who cheat, and men who only cheat while drunk. In America, however, there is never a free pass when it comes to infidelity. According to our national moral compass, cheating is abominable no matter what the circumstances. But do we actually behave differently than everyone else? Pamela Druckerman, a former foreign correspondent for "The Wall Street Journal," decided to delve into this incredibly taboo topic. She interviews people all over the world, from retirees in South Florida to Muslim polygamists in Indonesia; from Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn to the men who keep their mistresses in a "concubine village" outside Hong Kong. Druckerman talks to psychologists, sex researchers, marriage counselors, and most of all, cheaters and the people they've cheated on, and concludes that Americans are the least adept at having affairs, have the most trouble enjoying them, and suffer the most in their aftermath. "Lust in Translation" is a voyeuristic, statistics-packed, sometimes shocking, often hysterical, worldwide glimpse into the endlessly intriguing world of extramarital sex. It may be politically incorrect to say so, but who knew infidelity could be this fascinating?
A General Theory of Love
Thomas Lewis - 2000
Three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain.A General Theory of Love demonstrates that our nervous systems are not self-contained: from earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Explaining how relationships function, how parents shape their child’s developing self, how psychotherapy really works, and how our society dangerously flouts essential emotional laws, this is a work of rare passion and eloquence that will forever change the way you think about human intimacy.