Hello, MF . This is a review of "The Secrets Nobody Tells You About Love" by invitation from "WdC SuperPower Reviewers Group" ! I have the following comments to offer.
Reader Experience
A self-help guide to loving. The focus seems to be on a romantic relationship rather than the other forms of love. The account speaks of ways in which love relationships can be improved by authentic communication, owning mistakes, respecting differences, balancing other commitments, compliments, and understanding the beloved - their needs and wants.
Various things can undermine our capacity for loving including stress and anxiety. The author speaks of the phases of love - the movement from full sensual addiction, to a time when the feelings are less passionate.
We are vulnerable to the one we love- they can make or break us, but the feeling of love is a shared struggle and we can work through heartbreaks and arguments. But even if love fails then it lets go only because that is what the other person needs. If you tried your best to love against the odds then there is no shame in letting go when you have to. But it should not sabotage the possibility of future connection and make us avoidant of loving.
We need to be honest with the problems our partners provoke in us. It is often a matter of commitment and energy to overcome these issues. A person who loves someone else knows when to back off a little. There is an element of teaching by example in loving. Sometimes people never learn to love properly but can learn this in a committed relationship. Love is not just a feeling. We need to continually the reasons we love, study the details of each other's lives, spend quality time together, and balance intimacy and attraction, silliness and seriousness.
We need to be honest with ourselves also. Are we scared of being alone? Are we forcing love on another person? What kinds of disappointment do we have in ourselves?
Can we love our partner at their worst and still feel comfortable with them?
Commentary
Hi Matthias, thanks for asking me to review these reflections on love. You focused on romantic love rather than familiar or religious forms of love. It might have been good to distinguish your account of love from these alternatives at the start.
I found your structure a little chaotic. For example, love can be an overwhelming sensual and erotic addiction as you described or a decision to honor a promise and to devote oneself to loving the other. It can also be a way of thinking that we subscribe to wholeheartedly and continually refresh with new reflections on its meaning. A husband loves his wife with his body and his actions, with his thoughts and his words, and with the decisions he continually makes to be faithful to his promises. These different focuses on feelings, thoughts and will are not together purely selfish or selfless but feelings can be erotically selfish or giving, thoughts are either true or false, relevant or irrelevant, helpful or unhelpful and acts of will require the selfless ability to sacrifice oneself for a partner for the sake of that loving commitment. These are really different modes of loving which complement each other in a relationship, but which I felt were blurred together in your account.
In some ways, this read a little like a list and obviously, some items in the list contradict the others because love is complicated like that. So you talked about being committed and walking away as if they were both about love for example. Maybe you were talking about longer-term relationships rather than marriage here, I was never into the serial monogamy culture and my wife is genuinely the only true love of my life who united my body, mind, and will into a committed relationship to her.
Maybe the reason for this acceptance of failure is that this account of love misses a religious context or framework. You speak as if marriage were only a commitment of one person to another. I made my vows in a church and it is to God that I account for how I treat my wife. I do not have the option of walking away except in the circumstance of adultery without repentance. Since the commitment is inviolable my wife and I have to work out our issues. The element of will is required in a committed relationship if promises are to be honored until death us do part.
With that said about the inviolability of the commitment, I found a lot of your comments helpful and every relationship is always a work in progress, mine is no different in that respect. You might benefit from reading the "five love languages" and the biblical account of marriage from the New Testament in Ephesians 5 for example. Your own account was colored by your own unspoken experiences rather than an appeal to authorities whether religious, scientific, or psychological.
Thanks for asking me to read this.
Mechanical issues
- }}Matthias Fiore in the first line and the last. You bookmark an account of love with your own name and curly brackets appear throughout the text.
On occasions, this felt a little like English was not your first language, then at other times you sounded like a native. Some sentences did not really make sense or included strange word choices.
e.g.
There are many ways you can love someone and not get confused with certain terms. - There are many ways you can love someone without getting confused by certain terms.
Do not just give up on your partner when it's been the start, give them time and patience, alongside effort
Try running a grammar checker like quillbot.com over the text in American or British English to see what I mean.
Thanks for sharing.
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