If you’ve picked up this book, it’s probably because you’re frustrated with your love life. You may already have a partner, but you suspect he or she’s not the one. Yet you don’t quite have the nerve to break it off. What if it’s simply the best you can do?
Or you may be single, divorced, or widowed and longing for love, trying everything possible to find a partner, turning over every digital stone—Tinder, Happn, Hinge, and Bumble—to uncover matches. You may have spent several hours filling out a thoughtful profile on eHarmony or a snappy one on Match.com. Or asked all your friends to set you up on blind dates. You have pored over the Facebook profiles of all the people you had crushes on in your past—and have even instant messaged a few.
But still you keep striking out.
You may find yourself in a protracted cycle of excitement and disappointment—meeting someone, going home with him or her, and then waking up with dater’s remorse and wondering what on earth you’re doing there anyway as he nudges you to say he’s sorry but he needs you to kinda leave now because he has an early start. Or you may be feverishly fast-forwarding, imagining the destination wedding by the end of your first drink and the names of your children by the second. And then you never hear from him again. No text. Not even a three-second Snap. Total ghost.
Meanwhile, life for everyone else seems to flow merrily by, as your friends get engaged, get married, have babies—not always in that order, of course, but who cares. They have something going on. And you feel left behind.
Or you may have once been that person you now so envy—the one with the long-term boyfriend. But you broke up with him after college to play the field, and now, at twenty-nine, you’re wondering if you made a mistake. He’s engaged; you’re still single, and no one has come close to treating you as well as he did. Or perhaps you were that comfortably married one who paired off early, but it didn’t work out. And now here you are again, whether age thirty-two or fifty-two, having to get back out there. This was never part of your plan. Even more unimaginable, you didn’t realize that when you eventually posted your online-dating profile and leaned in to see the matches, you would find a Niagara Falls of dick pics, or even worse, their video versions. Online dating is not for the faint of heart.
The landscape has changed so radically in such a short period of time. Not just how we meet potential partners, but how honest women are finally being about how harrowing that can also be. Leaders, icons, and figures we once trusted—across all walks of life—have been brought down with startling velocity by sexual harassment charges, and women, who for years felt crushed by an impossible silence, have found their voices to tell sometimes terrible stories of bullying, harassment, and humiliation. This is another reason I wanted to write this book—to help women navigate what can feel like very tricky, even dangerous, terrain.
We all know that finding love is possible: the story you heard about the friend of a friend who married the Nobel Prize winner she met on JDate . . . It can and does work out, right?
Hang in there, whoever you are.
This book is for you.
This is a diet book for love.
Food and love have so much in common. We have huge appetites for both. We can’t live without them. But not all food is created equal, and neither is all love.
Just as there is junk food, there is junk love. And like junk food, junk love is fast, convenient, often attractively packaged, widely available, and superficially tasty. But the calories are largely devoid of real nutrients and leave you hungering for more, even as you smart with a lingering sense of shame after a binge. And yet, both junk food and junk love require enormous amounts of willpower to resist.
Amid the clamor of conflicting dietary advice, one book stands out to me for its clarity. Michael Pollan’s Food Rules is a straightforward and gimmick-free guide to eating well.
In Love Rules, I hope to do for relationships what Pollan did for food. To help women navigate their love lives in this very modern, fast-paced, and—what can feel to many—incredibly lonely digital age. In this case, social media and online-dating sites are equivalent to the Walmart and Costco of our relationship lives: You have to wade through rows of Little Debbie snack cakes and family-pack bags of Cheetos in order to find the aisle of fresh produce. The organic apples and almonds are there—you just have to know why they are important and then where and how to find them.
Substitute apples for a real-life healthy relationship, one grounded in intimacy and trust—with someone who makes you feel good about yourself. Someone who will stand beside you for the long haul.
To that end, I’ve created a series of guidelines. These are rules informed by my many years working at women’s magazines, including Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. They have been shaped by extensive consultation with psychologists, social scientists, anthropologists, doctors, college professors, therapists, and religious leaders, as well as by conversations with the many young women I have worked with in the media world. And, of course, those I have met over the last decade as a result of my work. The thousands of smart, independent, successful women who had so much going right—work, bank, friends, wardrobe, 401(k)s—but otherwise felt unhappy or unlucky in love. They have created enviable lives for themselves, yet they are missing someone to share that life with and maybe have a child or several with. That is the one thing that eludes them. Or, they may have two kids and a failed marriage, and are wracked with worry that they may never meet anyone to share their life with again.
The rules that emerged from these conversations are essentially love hacks.
This book will enable you to identify what you want in a relationship and when you want it. In order to do that, you have to turn inward. This book is truly about finding yourself and cultivating your self-worth in order to find the right person to share yourself with. And to do that well, you have to apply to your love life the same often fanatical focus that you devote to losing weight, getting fit, or changing your job.
I have used mainly he/she and his/her throughout this book, but however you identify and whatever your sexual orientation, Love Rules applies to everyone. So please, wherever relevant, just substitute your own preferred pronoun.
And on a somewhat related note: you will see that some names have been changed in the case studies that follow. As an editor, I don’t generally like using pseudonyms—it has always made me feel that people could exaggerate whatever they were saying—but the very personal nature of some of the stories and case studies in this book meant a pseudonym was necessary to protect privacy. We fact-checked each story but agreed to give certain people the right to change their names.
IT’S TIME TO GET REAL
Approach this as you would begin a diet. That means counting every calorie both in and out. A calorie is a unit of energy—so how many times do you check your Tinder account? Or how many hours have you spent on Facebook bingeing on ex-partners’ posts? These are emotional calories, and they use up your positive emotional energy that would be better expended elsewhere.
You need to take an emotional calorie count.
How many times have you struck up a conversation with the good-looking guy at your local coffee shop? When was the last time you had great sex that left you feeling satisfied and connected? Or a relationship with someone who made you feel truly good about yourself? These are the calories that will sustain you.
You need to take an emotional calorie count.
And then what about the calories you don’t even realize you are consuming? The equivalent of those french fries snuck off someone else’s plate at dinner. You didn’t order the fries yourself, but you ate them just the same. These are the incidental calories that satisfy in the moment but can do longer-term damage that’s surprisingly hard to shake off. The random hookups that may seem fun or daring at the time but leave you feeling annoyed with yourself. The online sinkholes we all have fallen down—in sweats on a Saturday night, hearting the Instagram shots of friends out partying and clearly having more fun than you, or comparing your sad inner life with the obvs perfect external one that your colleague at work curates on Facebook. These binges may feel beyond your control in the moment, but they likely are not leading you to find love.
Psychologists look for pattern recognition as the key to understanding and changing behavior. With the help of Love Rules, you can discover your intolerances and allergies and be your own relationship nutritionist.
In the same way that so many of us are used to keeping food journals, recording every morsel we consume in order to understand our food habits, it’s time to keep a love journal. A consistent log of your own behavior can highlight your repeated patterns that lead nowhere—and help you identify the triggers that cause them.
We all know that there is almost nothing more draining than a bad relationship. And there is nothing more life enhancing than a good one. It makes everything else look, feel, and taste better.