Romantic love presents some of life's most challenging questions. Can we choose who to love? Is romantic love rational? Can we love more than one person at a time? And can we make ourselves fall out of love? Berit Brogaard here attempts to get to the bottom of love's many contradictions. This short book, informed by both historical and cutting edge philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, combines a new theory of romantic love with entertaining anecdotes from real life and accessible explanations of the neuroscience underlying our wildest passions. Against the grain, Brogaard argues that love is an emotion; that it can be, at turns, both rational and irrational; and that it can be manifested in degrees. We can love one person more than another and we can love a person a little or a lot or not at all. And love isn't even always something we consciously feel. However, love -- like other emotions, both conscious and not -- is subject to rational control, and falling in or out of it can be a deliberate choice. This engaging and innovative look at a universal topic, featuring original line drawings by illustrator Gareth Southwell, illuminates the processes behind heartbreak, obsession, jealousy, attachment, and more.

Berit Brogaard is Professor of Philosophy, University of Miami. Her book Transient Truths was published by Oxford University Press in 2012. In her academic research she specializes in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and the cognitive sciences.

• Preface


• Chapter 1: Letter from a Friend


• Chapter 2: The Chemistry of Love


• Your Brain on Crack


• Beliefs and Brain Chemistry


• Taking the Drug Away


• Addicted to Grief


• Emotional Pain


• Stress, Pimples and Gray Hair


• Love and Hate


• Chapter 3: The Philosophy of Love


• Love as an Emotion


• Basic and Complex Emotions


• The James-Lange Theory


• The Conjunctive Theory of Emotions


• The Connection Problem


• The Problem of Emotional Responses to Fiction


• The Perceived-Response Theory


• Chapter 4: Irrational Love


• Does the Idea of Irrational Love Make Sense?


• You Call It Madness, I Call It Love


• Irrational Compassionate Love


• Love as a Moral Emotion


• Love as a History


• Love and Personal Identity


• Is Love Unconditional?


• Love and Personal Identity


• Love and Sex


• Chapter 5: Relationships and Insecure Attachment


• Avoidant Attachment Style


• Secure Versus Insecure Attachment


• Avoidant Attachment


• Anxious Attachment


• Childish Relationships


• Jealousy and Anxious Attachment


• Attachment and the Relationship Theory


• Can Attachment Styles Change?


• Familiar Love


• Attachment Love


• Can Animals Love?


• The Other Dimension of Sex


• Chapter 6: Our Unconscious Affections


• Opponents of Unconscious Affection


• Unconscious Affect


• Unconscious Love


• In Your Dreams


• Is Love a Disposition


• Chapter 7: He Is Just Not That into You


• (And Other In-Between Cases)


• Prototype Theory


• Non-Monogamous Love as In-Between Cases


• "Love" is a Gradable Verb


• He's Just Not That Into You


• Ambivalence


• Chapter 8: How To Fall Out of Love


• Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche


• Psychoanalysis and Talk Therapy


• Emotional Regulation and Avoidance Behavior


• The Repetition Technique


• Prolonged Exposure Therapy


• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing


• Deep Relaxation and Meditation


• Heartbreak and Placement Conditioning


• The Sinclair Method


• Out, Damned Spot: Using Soap to Wash Away Your Negative Feelings


• Emotional Regulation as a Route to Happiness


• The End: The Heart Wants What It Wants


• References