Customer Reviews

Psychology of Romantic Love: What Love is, Why Love is Born, Why it Sometimes Grows, Why it Sometimes Dies

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great book about the nature of romantic love over the centuries. It puts the kind of love called romantic love into perspective with other kinds, and talks about what makes for a stable relationship. As a spouse of 27 years, I find it is very interesting to try to understand the nature of love and commitment. The fact that Branden is an authority on self-esteem also helps for this topic. I have read the book from the library, and now I am trying to find it to buy.

I like this book because it draws clear distinctions between unhealthy romantic love and mature romantic love. In our culture, there tends to be a strong focus on romance and often what is presented in books, songs and the media is unrealistic and unattainable. This book presents a vision of mature, erotic love that embraces everyday realities and the maturing of love over time.

The content in this book is not heavy and it is readable by anyone. There is a lot of good food for thought and Nathaniel Branden writes in a simple straightforward style. He is also a therapist and this book goes beyond the pop culture type books on this subject that often have very little real substance.

I have always wondered if I really even understood what real love is. This book explained it all to me. It's history, how my self-esteem effects it, why selfishness is a normal and valid part of love, what characteristics help love to succeed, and what missing links cause it to remain unfulfilling. I'm going to make my children read this before they get married. Everyone needs to know this stuff.

This little book gives a crisp, well integrated way at looking at relationships and why we need them. Branden's relating the idea of romantic love to historical context is very important, a topic I've seen no one else discuss

You must get through the initial, rather dry, historical information to truly understand and appreciate the balance of the book's content. It will open your eyes to many things about yourself and others.

It helps you understand why your previous relationships may have failed and what changes you need to apply to stop making the same relationship mistakes. It also helps you make better choices about who you can have a successful relationship with.

You will use this book over and over as a reference guide for yourself and you will use it try to educate the people you care about!

person? Really SEE who they are... regardless of you...

not what you need them to be for you ~

not for qualities you wish you had yourself ~

but do you SEE them?

it's where everything starts... and proceeds from there to grow, or to go away...

this book followed by Dreams Of Love and Fateful Encounters are all anyone ever needs to find out What Love Is...

hopefully, it'll be reprinted one of these days...

This was the first book of Nathaniel Branden's that I read. I have since read all of them (some even twice). This covers some important ground focusing on love relationships. I place other books of his more highly in terms of overall favorites and most powerfully life-changing (e.g. The Disowned Self and Taking Responsibility), but this rounds out his body of work well and I definitely do recommend it.

Nathaniel Branden always hits the nail on the head. I love Ayn Rand and as her male, contemporary, I must say that I can not get quite enough. I love Branden's traditional discussion around Self-Esteem, Responsiblity, and awareness of the self and for one's life but this masterpiece concerning intimacy, love and romantic relationships is what Ayn Rand forgot to say. If you love this title as much as I do then you have got to check out "What Love Asks of Us" also known in later editions as "The Romantic Love Questions&Answers" both by Nathaniel Branden, of course.

**Check out these Kindle books to get the party started today. Enjoy!

*Honoring the Self: The Pyschology of Confidence and Respect

*What Love Asks of Us

*The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

*My Years with Ayn Rand

*The Psychology of Self-Esteem

*A Woman's Self-Esteem: Struggles and Triumphs in the Search for Identity

Firmly grounded in Goethe, Schiller, Sullivan, Rand and Kohut in pretty much all of his work, Branden is what he is, an egoistic, idealistic, German ("heroic") Romanticist at heart. Which is a wonderful thing if one is from Beverly Hills and can afford to see the world - and act upon what they see - as people from Beverly Hills do. One would have to, to be able to go at life as Nathan would have had them in the 1970s. (He stood at the launch pad of the human potential movement, after all.)

But I'm not here to knock this guy, just to point out that his perspective may not suit the more mundane realities of the working class. Branden is eternally hopeful and appears to believe in unlimited possibilities. I'm an existentialist, however, so forgive me if I see a world of limits, in no small part based on financial and cultural realities.

That said, there's plenty here to chew on for people who've reached the awareness of their crappy cultural programming. How are we supposed to be able to love others if we've been programmed to believe life is about controlling the environment or being its victim? Agreeing with Rollo May, Martin Buber, Jules Henry, Ron Laing and other existentialist observers as I do, it's been easy for me to buy into Erich Fromm's, Anne Schaef's, and Pia Mellody's notions that, save for a very few of us, romantic love has been repackaged for profit and/or cultural "progress" since Noah's day.

Branden surely "gets" that (and a lot more), but his views of what it =can= be sometimes perplex me. Maybe it's his specific language. Compared to his wonderful =The Psychology of Self Esteem= and =The Disowned Self=, some of =TPORL= forces me into the sort of "mindful self-awareness of feelings" more recent authors like Seigel, Marra, Kabat-Zinn, Hayes (and Branden himself) describe. I found myself having to do that just to "be there" with some of the idealism he asserts, because it doesn't make rational or experiential sense to me.

Indeed, I feel like there's some sort of odd dis-connection between Branden's enthusiasm =here= and his well-informed, experience-based grasp of What Actually Happens there. The only thing I can hang it on is what he, himself, alludes to in =TPORL=: the recent death of a much-loved, but not always easy-to-live-with spouse and the immediate (or maybe even already evolved) fascination with an extremely potent and "formidable" new romance object who could hardly have been more different from Patrecia. (Well; you had to be there to see it.)

I was too dense and societally programmed myself to "get" Nathan during the period he wrote this book, but later schooling and experience - especially in the millennial era of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy - compelled me to have another look. For me, anyway, Branden is somewhat like Bradshaw: not an original thinker (well, okay; who is?) but one of the finest synthesists of his day, at least for the very intellectual / conceptual crowd that followed him about.

His understanding of the same sort of Eastern philosophical, humanist and Gestalt principles that ripped up the pavement of Freudian psychoanalysis and gave us "family systems" and second-wave cognitive behaviorism will come through to anyone schooled since the mid or late `80s. His essay on what one really has to do to make love work beginning on page 177 at "The Courage to Love" reads like the terrific New Harbinger stuff that's remodeling minds and brains in such a hurry these days.

I'm not sure I'd recommend =TPORL= to everyone, and I know I wouldn't lay it down in front of anyone "slow," "simple" or "working class," but as a sometimes clear (and sometimes not so clear) scope through which the human potential movement - and its effects upon those who were influenced by it - might be better understood, it's fine stuff.

This book made a deep impression on me and as a result I started a web site matchmaking forum based on Branden's concepts outlined in his wonderful book. The concepts are lucidly explained and derived from basic principles.