In this playful and informative exploration of the science behind how to choose a great mate, acclaimed relationship psychologist Dr. Ty Tashiro explores how to find enduring love. Dr. Tashiro translates reams of scientific studies and research data into the first book to revolutionize the way we search for love. His research pinpoints why our decision-making abilities seem to fail when it comes to choosing mates and how we can make smarter choices. Dr. Tashiro has discovered that if you want a lifetime of happiness--not just togetherness--it all comes down to how you choose a partner in the first place. With wit and insight, he explains the science behind finding a soul mate and distills his research into actionable tips, including: Why you get only three wishes when choosing your ideal partner. Why most people squander their wishes and end up in unfulfilling relationships. How wishing for the three traits that really matter can help you find enduring love. Illustrated using entertaining stories based on real-life situations and backed by scientific findings from fields such as demography, sociology, medical science and psychology, Dr. Tashiro provides an accessible framework to help singles find their happily-ever-afters.
In the vein of Quiet and The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth comes this illuminating look at what it means to be awkward—and how the same traits that make us socially anxious and cause embarrassing faux pas also provide the seeds for extraordinary success. As humans, we all need to belong. While modern social life can make even the best of us feel gawky, for roughly one in five of us, navigating its challenges is consistently overwhelming—an ongoing maze without an exit. Often unable to grasp social cues or master the skills and grace necessary for smooth interaction, we feel out of sync with those around us. Though individuals may recognize their awkward disposition, they rarely understand why they are like this—which makes it hard for them to know how to adjust their behavior. Psychologist and interpersonal relationship expert Ty Tashiro knows what it’s like to be awkward. Growing up, he could do math in his head and memorize the earned run averages of every National League starting pitcher. But he couldn’t pour liquids without spilling and habitually forgot to bring his glove to Little League games. In Awkward, he unpacks decades of research into human intelligence, neuroscience, personality, and sociology to help us better understand this widely shared trait. He explores its nature vs. nurture origins, considers how the awkward view the world, and delivers a welcome counterintuitive message: the same characteristics that make people socially clumsy can be harnessed to produce remarkable achievements. Interweaving the latest research with personal tales and real world examples, Awkward offers reassurance and provides valuable insights into how we can embrace our personal quirks and unique talents to harness our awesome potential—and more comfortably navigate our complex world.
Be ambitious; find everlasting love; look after your health ... There are countless stories about how we ought to live our lives. These narratives can make our lives easier, and they might sometimes make us happier too. But they can also trap us and those around us. In Happy Ever After, bestselling happiness expert Professor Paul Dolan draws on a wealth of evidence to bust the common myths about our sources of happiness and shows that there can be many unexpected paths to lasting happiness. Some of these might involve not going into higher education, choosing not to marry, rewarding acts rooted in self-interest and caring a little less about living forever. By freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, we might each find a life worth living.
What do you do when your marriage is so unhappy that you begin to fantasize about your husband's funeral? That's how bad it got for Alisa Bowman. . . So she launched a last-ditch effort to save her marriage. Project: Happily Ever After is her fearlessly honest and humorous account of how she went from being a "divorce daydreamer" to renewing her wedding vows -- and all of the steps in between. From bikini waxes to erotica, romance instruction manuals to second honeymoons, the silent treatment to power struggles, she goes where many marriage-improvement gurus have feared to tread. Equal parts funny, poignant, and most importantly, useful, Bowman's story will give other miserably-married folks courage and hope. And in addition to telling her own story, she packs straightforward prescriptive guidance, including a "10-Step Marital Improvement Guide." Readers will laugh. They'll cry. And they can start on the road toward their own happy ending!
“Stephanie Perkins’ characters fall in love the way we all want to, in real time and for good.”—Rainbow Rowell “This adorable YA romance is half New York love story, half Parisian romance, and fully prepared to make your heart melt quicker than a gelato dropped on a sidewalk.”—MTV.com From the glittering streets of Manhattan to the moonlit rooftops of Paris, falling in love is easy for hopeless dreamer Isla and introspective artist Josh. But as they begin their senior year in France, Isla and Josh are quickly forced to confront the heartbreaking reality that happily-ever-afters aren't always forever. Their romantic journey is skillfully intertwined with those of beloved couples Anna and Étienne and Lola and Cricket, whose paths are destined to collide in a sweeping finale certain to please fans old and new.
According to Dr. Maggie Maguire, happiness is serious science, as serious as Maggie takes herself. But science can't always account for life's anomalies--for instance, why her fiancé dumped her for a silk-scarf acrobat and how the breakup sent Maggie spiraling into an extended ice cream-fueled chick flick binge. Concerned that she might never pull herself out of this nosedive, Maggie's friends book her as a speaker on a "New Year, New You" cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. Maggie wonders if she's qualified to teach others about happiness when she can't muster up any for herself. But when a handsome stranger on board insists that smart women can't ever be happy, Maggie sets out to prove him wrong. Along the way she may discover that happiness has far less to do with the head than with the heart. Filled with memorable characters, snappy dialogue, and touching romance, Kristin Billerbeck's The Theory of Happily Ever After shows that the search for happiness may be futile--because sometimes happiness is already out there searching for you. "Billerbeck has the most delightful voice I've ever read. I adore her stories, and she returns with an enchanting new novel, The Theory of Happily Ever After. I laughed, cried, and rejoiced with her wonderful characters and was sad when the story ended. Highly recommended!"--Colleen Coble, USA Today bestselling author
A memoir about writing a novel about searching for love. Is romance dead? Is that why there are so many vampires in today's romance novels? When Avi Steinberg's love life took a grim turn, he did what he always does: He consulted his old books, the usual cast of Great (Very Serious, Usually Male) Authors. And he immediately realized that these books were part of the problem. Instead, he began to read romances, the books he--like so many of us--have been conditioned to dismiss as "trashy." What he discovered was a genre that was tremendously diverse and daring, along with a vast network of innovative writers who were keeping the novel as alive as ever. His own relationship problems, he realized, came down to a failure of his imagination. And so he set out on a quest to write and publish a romance novel and to find real-life love. A hybrid of memoir, travelogue, and critical essay, The Happily Ever After chronicles an adventure in a brave new world of literature. Steinberg offers a report from the trenches of romance, moving between major industry conferences and writing groups at the local bar as he works and reworks his romance novel idea. He reveals the inside scoop from a major romance publishing house, crisscrosses the country meeting mysterious ghostwriters and Fabio's great unsung rival, and offers a running take on the fascinating history of romance writing, the genre that invented, and continues to reinvent, the modern novel. Along the way he meets many readers, each of whom sheds light on why we are so fascinated by--and phobic of--romance fiction and what the vitality and fractiousness of our biggest genre says about us. With quirky wit and disarming honesty, Steinberg captures an often misunderstood literary culture and learns, from its devoted practitioners, how to take the Happily Ever After seriously in his own life.
Two years ago, I accidentally, yeah maybe on purpose, crossed that line with my best friend and it ruined everything. I haven't seen him much since. But now he’s standing at my door. Same lumberjack build. Same dark hair that begs my fingers to run through it. And then he gives me that half smile, and I know I’m about to agree to do something I’m going to regret. I’ve got to spend two months with him now... and that’s not the worst part. Each book in the British Bad Boys series is STANDALONE: * Cinderella and the Geek * Once Upon A Player * Not So Happily Ever After
Earlier in my post-divorce life, I thought marriage would never happen again for me. Having exited a painful one, I had no desire to enter another. Why would anyone want to repeat a difficult experience? . . . I felt that my heart would never be as trusting as it once was. I had lost my faith in marriage. I wasn’t sure it was the best custodian of love. And I still feared how the wife identity could sabotage me. I was content to sit to the side and let others have their turn at giving the institution a whirl. – from Happily Ever After Marriage: There’s Nothing Like Divorce to Clear the Mind by Sarah Hampson After eighteen years of marriage and three children, Sarah Hampson finds herself amongst the growing ranks of divorced MLWs (“Mid-Life Women”). “This is what happens when you are outside the marriage bubble,” she writes. Suddenly, you are in a parallel universe, across some mythic river in a place where you are the un-wife – and you and your un-husband are on the un-married side. And once there, as some kind of compensation for the hardship of the journey, you develop relationship X-ray vision. You know more than if you had never inhabited the bubble. Illusions (and delusions) drop away. Everything is clearer. (pp. xi – xii) Hampson uses this newfound vantage point outside the “marriage bubble” to bravely explore the institution of matrimony. She applies her famously warm, perceptive and frequently hilarious perspective, not only to her own marriage experience, but also to those of her family and friends, along with the myriad celebrities she has interviewed in more than a decade of journalism. Hampson asserts that the tradition of unveiling the bride after the vows have been made is all wrong. “A bride wears a veil after she becomes a wife,” she writes. “For many, it’s a question of denial, not just of what they want and their unhappiness but also of the characteristics in their mate” (p. 138). With the veil lifted from her eyes, Hampson scrutinizes the marriage assumptions she made as a child, better able to see the domestic compromises made by her mother and grandmother, as well as her own. As a young girl growing up in a comfortably privileged household, Hampson felt secure in her expectation that she would one day be taken care of by a husband. “The message in all quarters of our upbringing was that marriage was the life glue” (p. 30), she writes. Now an Un-Married, Hampson has no end of worries to keep her awake at night. Will her children be irreparably damaged by the divorce? Will her “Ghost Dad” ex stop disappointing them, and her? How will she manage financially? Will she find the serenity she craves? And yet, despite her worries, Hampson finds that as a mature and independent woman she has access to the sort of security and self-possession that she sorely lacked when married. She traces her divorce journey, from her hilarious “Un-marriage Ceremony” (selling her wedding ring to a junk gold broker), to a more fully realized state of being, in which life can be viewed as “a carnival of choices, good and bad, wise and regrettable, designed not to teach us pride in ourselves for engineering whatever successes we may have, but humility in acceptance of how it happened to unfold” (p. 280). Candid, humorous and full of fascinating stories, Happily Ever After Marriage is part modern guide, part passionate conversation with friends and part meditation on what can be seen as a new rite of passage to self-actualization in mid-life. By bravely examining her own life, Hampson brings clarity to the underlying cultural messages that inform the choices we make – and shows how embracing change at mid-life can open oneself to new possibilities of connectedness.
How do you get to “happily ever after”? In fairy tales, lasting love just happens. But in real life, healthy habits are what build happiness over the long haul. Happy Together, written by positive psychology experts and husband-and-wife team Suzann Pileggi Pawelski and James O. Pawelski, is the first book on using the principles of positive psychology to create thriving romantic relationships. Combining extensive scientific research and real-life examples, this book will help you find and feed the good in yourself and your partner. You will learn to develop key habits for building and sustaining long-term love by: • Promoting a healthy passion • Prioritizing positive emotions • Mindfully savoring experiences together • Seeking out strengths in each other Through easy-to-follow methods and fun exercises, you’ll learn to strengthen your partnership, whether you’re looking to start a relationship off on the right foot, weather difficult times, reignite passion, or transform a good marriage into a great one.
