How to Fall in Love with Anyone

Essays

By: Mandy Len Catron

Narrated by: Mandy Len Catron

Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

An insightful, charming, and absolutely fascinating memoir from the author of the popular New York Times essay "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This" (one of the top five most popular New York Times pieces of 2015) explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy.

What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a 28-year marriage and her own 10-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer.

In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone and be loved and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists' research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she'd read about - where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of 36 questions - and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.

In How to Fall in Love with Anyone, Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal and universal investigation.

©2017 Mandy Len Catron. All rights reserved (P)2017 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Wow, it seems more possible.

After age 60, a divorce, building a life of my own, learning to love myself, and spending more of my life as a single.....it seems possible to love another and be true to your self. And remain kind to all. Thank you for writing about falling in love with hopes of it lasting if not forever then as long as possible.

Great Book!!

Love the true stories & the real life story is the author. She really gets you thinking about life & love.

Use professional VO actors

Please, please , please use professional voice over actors to read. They are trained and put in hours upon hours of work on their craft.
It was painfully, awkwardly obvious that the reader of this book, also the author, had very little voice over training. It distracted immensely from the book listening experience. I understand loving your work, especially when it’s an intimate look at your own life, but please,please, please, hire a professional.

For the most part, frustrating and exhausting

To fall in love with anyone...Don't read this. Author's narrating didn't help. Struggled to finish.

Thoughtful, entertaining love story reflections

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

This book is an interesting take on love stories: how pervasive they are, why they're beautiful and why they're problematic. It is not a book on how to fall in love with anyone (i.e. it's not a self help or self development book). It is also a lovely family biography.

Fast forward to the last 10 minutes

If you fast forward the the actual method it’s a good book. The rest is a story about this chicks life.
Can’t fault her for telling her story, plus she’s a great writer, but if you want the cliff notes go to the end and do that part.
After that it’ll be you and bunch of people tripping over themselves to have at you.

prolly just read the NYT article 🤷

Kind of felt like a Ted Talk or blog post going on several hours too long for me. But I do appreciate the vulnerability and honesty with which Mandy Len Catron presents her life and how she's parsing her experiences moving through it- there just wasn't anything particularly revelatory about any of it for me and I didn't realize I was getting into a sort of memoir of the author when I picked this up.

Maybe my blasé about this book is in part because I, also, am someone who lives much of my life flitting about in my head, struggling to be present, am also someone who is privileged with a middle-class life, is overstimulated and bored by it at the same time, and carry a sense of guilt about that...

Catron and I both spend a lot of time analyzing, researching, trying to arrive at a "take" on things that will deliver us or make things less chaotic- doing so hasn't been the healthiest for me in the past, so wasn't my cup of tea to stew in that *mode* for an 8 hour audiobook. 😬

YMMV, do wish her the best in life and love. ✌️

just the story of the author without any interest.

nothing on it. not what we expected choosing a book with this title. I listen it until the end hoping but nothing...

Pretty much Pointless

The book had nothing to do with the title at all - I should've checked reviews before purchasing. The point the first 10 chapters make is that people over embellish their lives stories to the point where it's basically just lies. Not news to me. The other point is that love can look like anything, and that rather than love happening to people, people happen to love. That's it, that's all there is to it. Read for entertainment purposes only. She also talks about her ex a ton more than her current husband and also mentions having an open relationship. I can't help but wonder that maybe her problem before was her situation and not the relationship. Anyway, none of my business really.