Love Is A Story:  A New Theory Of Relationships, by Robert J. Sternberg

Is this really a new theory?  Let us be clear that this book is a compelling look at the narrative elements of relationships (including but not limited to dating and courtship) and includes a wide variety of different genres in which these love stories can be constructed, some of which I can personally relate to very strongly and others of which are quite horrifying.  I found much in here that related to other work on transactional analysis and what it is that people seek to gain out of relationships, but the fact that this book is not as new as the author appears to think does not make it by any means a bad book.  It is clearly aimed at a mass audience with at least some interest in psychology and its insights on the workings of the mind, and it does offer a great deal of understanding on the sort of stories we often find ourselves in unwittingly.  To be made aware of the genres that our lives follow does not necessarily lead to happiness–some of the genres offer little or no hope for happy endings–but it does at least lead to understanding what we are about, and that insight is worthwhile even when (especially when) it is somewhat gloomy.  For if we are discontented with the genres we find ourselves involved in, there is always the possibility that we may engage in difficult personal change, at least.  (And it should be noted that therapy and recovery is one of the genres of relationship story the author deals with.)

This book of a bit more than 200 pages (which I was able to read over the course of my lunch hour) is divided into three parts, of which the second is by far the longest.  The first part of the book introduces the stories we tell, the way that love is a story, the elements of stories, and where they come from and can go in our lives.  The second part of the book, which is more than 150 pages long, discusses and provides examples of a great many love stories, divided into five parts:  asymmetrical stories (teacher-student, sacrifice, government, police, pornography, horror), object stories where both the person (science-fiction, collection, art) and the relationship (house and home, recovery, religion, game) can be viewed as objects, coordination (travel, sewing and knitting, garden, business, addition), narrative (fantasy, history, science, cookbook), and genre (war, theater, humor, mystery).  These various genres are given examples, and I have included in italics those I find most appealing on a personal level.  The last part of the book discusses the implications of the theory and asks the famous question:  what is love?

The author’s insights about relationships clearly spring from a great deal of observation into the problems faced by others in their relationships.  Many of the relationship genres can either work out well or badly, while some appear to be only negative in nature.  It would appear that some genres may only last for so long, and that quite a bit of unhappiness in relationships springs from the way that one partner will want one thing from a relationship and the other partner may resent this.  In some relationship genres (war, police, pornography, horror, addiction) a great deal of violence and harm may come to one or both of the people in the relationship as a result of the dynamics of the relationship.  In reading this book I am personally convinced that it is important to note what it is that we are looking for from a particular story, because many narrative aspects of our relationships may be long-enduring, and if we are not content with a given genre that is of importance to a close friend or spouse, there is likely to be a great deal of trouble.