Carrie Jenkins Knihy

A rising star in philosophy examines the cultural, social, and scientific interpretations of love to answer one of our most enduring questions What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations); we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently changed-to be more accepting of homosexual, interracial, and non-monogamous relationships-and how they will continue to evolve in the future. Full of anecdotal, cultural, and scientific reflections on love, What Love Is is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to say "I love you." Whether young or old, gay or straight, male or female, polyamorous or monogamous, this book will help each of us decide for ourselves how we choose to love.

As a woman with a husband and other partners, philosopher Carrie Jenkins knows that love is complicated. Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can badly let us down. And the ways we love are often quite different to the romantic ideals society foists upon us. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, would we be better off without it? No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of love, one that recognises that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. What Carrie calls “Sad Love” offers no bogus “happy ever afters”. Rather, it tries to find a way to properly integrate heartbreak and disappointment into the lived experience of love. It’s time we liberated love.