Love Cycles

In the movies, romantic couples manage to stay crazy-in-love for the entire length of their relationship, despite substantial trials and tribulations. Rarely do these stories describe the true, shape-shifting nature of intimate relationships and the inevitable mutation of rapture into reality as we encounter the ordinary disappointments and transgressions of shared daily life. But there’s redemption here. For a genuine relationship can only begin after the love potion dissolves and we plunge into the messy business of loving an imperfect person—and of being hugely imperfect lovers ourselves. Love Cycles is the first book to squarely face this reality and to celebrate it as a singular opportunity. The book demonstrates that our own inner development is both the prerequisite and the hidden reward of intimate relationship. Despite its reputation as a two-person connection, a love partnership is essentially an inside job. In Love Cycles, seasoned couple’s therapist Linda Carroll offers a new model for enduring love—five essential cycles that each couple must enter and courageously move through in order to arrive at genuine intimacy. Serving as a kind of “North Star” for couple relationships, the book helps us navigate our way toward rewarding and sustainable connection. Using examples from the author’s thirty years of couple’s therapy experience, Carroll offers fresh insights on love’s five journeys interwoven with stories of numerous people who are on this path, including one appealing but stumble-prone couple, Megan and Charlie, whom we follow through each of the cycles. Love Cycles also shows us that the goal of our lives is not to find someone to complete us—simply because that never works. Completion of ourselves is the path to the good life. As it drives home this message, the book challenges a primary tenet of many current relationship books, which is the notion that only partners that end in happy coupleship are successful. Regardless of the outcome of a relationship, we can all win the prize of deeper self-connection. Carroll also shows that over the course of a long relationship, a couple may enter and re-enter various of the five stages. Love Cycles emphasizes the necessary task of grappling with our own frailties as they emerge in relationship and to learn to accept and sometimes change those not-so-stellar sides of ourselves, which then—and only then—will free us to truly love our partner. Carroll drives home the message that we can’t change another person and it’s not our job to do so. The book pulls no punches: some hard work lies ahead. Courage is a prerequisite here, and so is a healthy dose of humility. But the rewards are enormous: the chance to develop a stronger, more resilient self and a truly joyful and authentic intimate relationship. Publisher: NEW WORLD LIBRARY Paperback ISBN: 9781608683000 Dimensions: 21.00 and 14.00 cm Publish Date: 10/1/2014 Page Count: 256