One time, on a long road trip with my brother through the middle-of-nowhere-California, we got to talking about some really deep stuff. I remember portions of that conversation vividly, because it was the first time I realized, or admitted, that I did not really know how to love. Not just someone. Anyone, really.

This has followed me around my whole life, so I suppose I was attracted to the title of this book, because someone was finally going to tell me how it worked.

Spoiler alert: it's not a guide. It's not a self-help book. But it's encouraging in the way you read any story where you see a version of yourself in the hero. We are very different people, with dissimilar personal histories, this author and I, but we share commonalies: a pragmatic, almost scientific take on the nature and the progression of love and a rejection of empty platitudes; a desire to understand how institutions around love formed for economic or political gain; a suspicion that the love stories we tell ourselves and to each other are convenient lies. If there's an audience for this book, it's because most of us need to be reminded there's no such thing as the one true path for falling in love, and whether you've dated a million people or zero, no one really knows what they're doing. We just like pretending that we do.