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.

Guest Post: Mari Ruti, PhD, author of The Case for Falling in Love

Please join me in welcoming Mari Ruti, PhD, author of The Case for Falling in Love, as she provides us with a guest post today.

She will be discussing with her readers why it is she dislikes gender stereotypes.

“Why I Dislike Gender Stereotypes,” by Mari Ruti, author of The Case for Falling in Love

I dislike gender stereotypes because they blind us to what is most interesting, most alive, about other people. Take the Mars/Venus mentality that permeates our romantic culture. This mentality is meant to bridge the differences between men and women by helping us decipher “the male psyche,” so that we, for instance, understand why men “need their caves.” But what it actually does is to cause us to focus on the most superficial aspects of love (what men are “supposed” to be like, what women are “supposed” to do) so that we no longer see our partner for who he actually is: we fail to respect what is distinctive about him, and instead reduce him to a “category” (the male psyche, the male ego, etc.) that has been handed to us by our culture. He may need his cave. But he may not. If you assume the former, you might miss the latter. And who’s to say that you don’t need a cave from time to time? I sure do.

I am speaking to women in particular because we have been conditioned to think that to make romance work, we need to make a superhuman effort: learn to read the male psyche, figure out a game plan, play hard to get, show just the right amount of vulnerability, etc. And we tend to believe that when things don’t work out, it’s our fault – that somehow we destroyed our relationship by taking the wrong step somewhere along the line. Did we come on too strong? Did we reveal too much of ourselves? Did we seem too desperate? Did we step on the fragile male ego? Did we return his call too quickly? Should we have let him drive around aimlessly rather than insist on asking for directions?

I wrote The Case for Falling in Love because I want us to stop torturing ourselves with these kinds of questions. When love doesn’t thrive, it’s not because we did something wrong. It’s definitely not because we left our toothbrush in his bathroom. Love is inherently fickle and volatile. A lot of times it’s not meant to last. We are used to thinking that its job is to make us happy, and often it can; it can make us happier than pretty much anything else. But this is not its only mission: it may be trying to teach us a lesson that we can only learn through its failure.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t aim to have fulfilling relationships. It’s just that there is no clear correlation between effort and happiness, and that the more we try to control and manipulate love, the more we stifle what is most magical about it. Authentic love couldn’t care less about our gendered games. And it doesn’t have much patience with our poker-face. It aims at the very core of our being – at the spirit that makes each of us a unique and irreplaceable creature. What’s so sad is that the more we let gender stereotypes rule our romantic behavior, the less likely we are to release this spirit. And why, for heaven’s sake, would any woman want to date a guy who falls into the stereotype – who thinks that women are “prey” to be conquered, or who claims that it’s in men’s “nature” to stray, fear commitment, forget your birthday, or fail to understand emotions. Why are so many self-help gurus trying to sell us a guy like this? My advice would be to run in the other direction.

I think that most quality men – that is, men worth dating in the first place – share a lot of the same romantic confusions and insecurities as women do. And a lot of them are looking for a strong woman with whom to build an emotionally complex relationship. When we replace the deep mysteries of love by stale gender formulas, we can’t recognize this. And we give men a convenient excuse to treat us badly. So let’s toss those self-help guides in the recycling bin and focus instead on savoring what is most surprising, least predictable, about love. And let’s have faith that a guy who genuinely likes us is not going to walk away just because we know how to parallel park, change a light bulb, or read a map. A guy worth our attention would never be that dumb!

Book Beginnings & Friday 56: The Case for Falling in Love

The Friday 56 is a weekly meme hosted by Freda's Voice. Check out the rules and join in the fun.

Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
Turn to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post that sentence (plus one or two others if you like) along with these instructions on your blog or (if you do not have your own blog) in the comments section of this blog. Post a link along with your post back to this blog.

Book Beginnings on Friday is a meme hosted by A Few More Pages. Anyone can participate; just share the opening sentence, or two, of your current read, making sure that you include the title and author so others know what you're reading.

Book Beginnings:

Let's imagine you've managed to catch a guy through a meticulous application of the rules of dating you've gleaned from the self-help guides hidden in your closet.

Friday 56:

I'm not the only one who can't find twenty sex mates every time I step into a subway car.