Review: The Case for Falling in Love by Mari Ruti, PhD

The Case for Falling in Love

Mari Ruti, PhD
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Publication Date: February 1, 2011
Trade Paperback {p.270}
Source: Publisher
Genre: Nonfiction, Self-Help
Characters:
Challenge: 100+

"Why play 'hard to get' when you can just get what you want? Mari Ruti's lively research, from Plato to Freud to Gossip Girl to her own bedroom, finally puts an end to playing games, and provides a resource for lovers and the love-scorned alike. A must-read for anyone who has ever fallen in love, wants to, or wants to know what went wrong."
-Arianne Cohen, creator of TheSexDiariesProject.com

"At last, a relationship advice book that will actually work. If you're intelligent, interested in love, and like a book you can't put down, this is it. John Gray, move over. The brilliant Mari Ruti has arrived."
-Juliet Schor, professor of sociology, Boston College, and author of Born to Buy and Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth

"Groundbreaking...Ruti opens the eyes of her readers so that they can love better...A must-read."
-Nancy Redd, New York Times bestselling author of Body Drama

"Finally, a book that takes love seriously. Written with passion and verve...I wish I had read this book years ago!"
-Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time

Are you tired of reading book after book and playing game after game, trying to avoid heartbreak? It seems impossible, and maybe that's because you can't lock up your heart like that-not if you want the real thing. And maybe that's one of the best things about love.

We've been thinking about it all wrong. Our culture's insistence that women need to learn how to catch and keep a man is actually doing much more harm than good. The more we try to manipulate our relationships, the less we are truly able to experience love's benefits and wonders.

Love is a slippery, unruly thing, and trying to control and manage it robs us of its delicious unpredictability.

Sure, letting go of the reins a bit might mean a broken heart, but heartbreak, in fact, offers a wealth of possibilities-creativity, wisdom, and growth-that we need in order to make the most of our lives.

Liberating for women who are frustrated by the idea that they just need to learn the right "formula," The Case for Falling in Love shows that there isn't a method to mastering the madness of love. But that might be exactly what's so wonderful about it.

The Case for Falling in Love is what I would describe as being a guide to help you undo all the previous BS you’ve been programmed to believe about dating. It offers a new, fresh way of seeing the true dynamics among the sexes. It doesn’t offer that Mars/Venus excuse for every little thing that goes wrong in our relationships.

The book itself is broken down into two parts: Changing How We Think About Men and Women and Changing How We Think About Love and Romance.

One of the major things this book deals with is trying to break down a lot of gender stereotypes that have been drilled into us from the womb. Mari does a great job of doing this by providing the reader with examples that are relate to today’s pop culture. She uses pop culture everyone should recognize even if it’s just in passing, such as, Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, Glee, The O.C., and Smallville, just to name a few. I myself am one of those girls who are a sucker for the Seth Cohen appeal.

I enjoyed how Mari incorporates the letters from her male friends and counterparts, to provide a real-life take from the male prospective. One of my favorites was from Sean about his black belt wife.

To hear from men that they are not intimated or turned off by strong, successful women after constantly hearing just the opposite, is quite refreshing.

We also learn to eliminate all the game playing. Neither gender truly enjoys it. So we have to dispense of the notion that you have to play hard to get (not meaning throw yourself at him) or the “rules” you must follow to keep him. You just have to be yourself, because after awhile trying to keep up this façade becomes a job in and of itself. Plus it’s not the true you that the person is “in love” with, but the person you led them to believe you were.

Another of the major things Mari deals with is how we are projecting our ideal of our mate onto them, but not actually seeing them. We are constantly in search of that illusive “Thing” in our mate that will complete us. One of the chapters is titled rightly so in Seeing the Extraordinary Within the Ordinary.

We do tend to measure our partner or potential love match against external criteria as Mari suggests. I myself am guilty of this. I can recall recently sharing with a friend that my “ideal” man would have the external packaging of David Beckham and the sense of humor and family togetherness of Will Smith.

Overall this is an eye-opening book that everyone can benefit from. Not just the single girl, but anyway dating in the 21st century. This will definitely help to bring some of those on the dating scene kicking and screaming into this century. Mari offers a no holds barred look at not only the dating scene but at ourselves.