About Love: Reinventing Romance for our Times

by Robert C. Solomon

Overview

This book offers insightful observations from a broad range of sources--literary, historical, and personal--to explore the volatile blend of passion, expectation, and confusion that characterizes this most exhilarating and excruciating of human passions--love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872208582
Publisher:	Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Publication date:	09/30/2006
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Robert C. Solomon, (1942-2007), was Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and Philosophy and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Table of Contents

	Preface to the Madison Books edition	11
	Introduction: Reinventing Love	13
	The Foggers and the Facilitators	20
	A Theory of Love	23
1.	The Elusive Emotion
	The Critical Question	31
	"I Love You"	35
	Love and Reciprocity	38
	Romantic Love	42
	Other Cultures	48
	The History of Love	54
	Love as Identity	62
	The Paradox of Love	64
2.	Getting Clear (About Love)
	Is Love a Feeling?	76
	Love and Relationships	82
	All or Nothing: The Idealization of Love	88
	Love Stories	97
	Beauty as the Basis of Love	103
	Beyond Romeo and Juliet: Love Among the Elderly	117
3.	"Falling in Love"
	Love and its Vicissitudes: "The Real Thing"	129
	The Joys of Sex	134
	Love at First Sight	140
	The Perils and Pleasures of Romantic Attraction: Why We Fall in Love	147
	Reasons for Love	153
	Love and Fantasy	160
	From Falling to Being in Love: The Coordination Problem	168
	Sleeping Together: Snugglers and Solipsists	174
	Loving and in Love	179
4.	The Self in Love
	The Identity Theory of Love	194
	The Indeterminacy of the Self	199
	The Romantic Creation of the Self	204
	Sex and the Shared Self	209
	The Importance of Privacy	217
	Romantic Roles	223
	The Dimensions of Identity ("Do Opposites Attract?")	231
	Private Virtues	238
	From Dialectic to Dynamics	249
5.	The Dynamics of Love: Making Love Last
	Caring and the Myth of Selfishness	255
	Love and Time	262
	Intimacy	272
	Equality and the Problem of Power	283
	Possession and Possessiveness	300
	The Importance of Fights in Love	310
	Friendship as the Foundation of Love	313
	The Meaning of Fidelity	323
	The Waning of Love, and Keeping Love Alive	329
	Reinventing Love	343

Editorial Reviews

The best book on this most written-on subject to come along in decades. --Los Angeles Daily News

In this wise, witty, adventurous essay, Solomon sheds light on love at first sight, whether opposites attract, counterfeit emotion, the euphemism (and act) of 'sleeping together,' possessiveness, the need of lovers for privacy and the importance of fights in a healthy relationship. --Publishers Weekly

For the generation of lovers that asks, 'How are we to make love last?' --The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher

Romantic love may begin with sexual passion, but it is guided and nurtured by ideas the lovers have about their selves and the world, according to this University of Texas philosophy professor. Solomon defines romantic love as an emotional process that is reciprocal and appropriate only between equals. A lover may complement what is best in us, embody values we share or encourage ideals we strive after. In any event, love endures only when it forges a conceptual bond, each person viewing the other's existence as necessary to complete one's self. In this wise, witty, adventurous essay, Solomon sheds light on love at first sight, whether opposites attract, counterfeit emotion, the euphemism (and act) of ``sleeping together,'' possessiveness, the need of lovers for privacy and the importance of fights in a healthy relationship. His re-visioning of love favors Plato's concept of the merger of two souls over Freud's view of love as sublimated erotic feeling. Literary Guild alternate. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly