Love, relationships and sex are factors that we can all relate to. They are a central part of our lives, whatever form they take, and can make us feel happy, elated, uncertain or even heartbroken. Regardless as to what’s happening in your life (single, long-term relationship, just started dating again or aimlessly swiping on dating apps), it’s time to rethink what you think you know about love, relationships and sex. These books that I have suggested below are (I think) some of the best to help you rethink what you know. Every now and then it’s good to change up how you think about things, especially when it’s to do with our relationships, since it can offer new, helpful perspectives, letting you achieve clarity and certainty in a time when you may feel uncertain. Below are six suggestions that will help you do just that – happy reading!
Angelica Malin’s Unattached: Empowering Essays on Singlehood
This book contains 30 essays on what being a single woman means in this daunting, modern age. Edited by Angelica Malin, this work investigates single life through personal essays and contemplates the unique challenges that single people experience.
Sareeta Domingo’s Who’s Loving You: Love in Full Colour
This book celebrates love in all its different forms and written by women of colour, featuring ten short stories from new voices, showcasing how romance and love can begin in the most unexpected places in the most unexpected way. These stories celebrate and entertain romance, love, passion and relationships, exploring this in all forms of intensity which continues to burn even after the last page is turned.
Dolly Alderton’s Everything I know About Love
Dolly Alderton, an award-winning journalist, gives an account of bad dates, flat-shares, heartbreaks, and embarrassments. But most importantly, this book details the importance of female friendships that helped Alderton through all the tough times and the struggles. Written with humour and love, this book is a must read for anyone that has found themselves in their twenties, trying to survive.
Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller’s Attached
Attached is based on attachment theory – a theory that suggests each person has a unique attachment style that influences how we behave in our relationships, these types of attachment include anxious attachment, avoidant attachment and secure attachment. This book helps you to find out what your attachment style. This can help you to change your perspective on relationships since it can help to determine where your relationships always seem to struggle and gives advice on how to live and deal with your attachment style.
Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour
Babalola writes about some of the greatest love stories from both history and mythology, rewriting them with the idea of celebrating love and relationships, with great spirit. This book focuses on folk tales of West Africa, Greek myths, legends from the Middle East and from countries that no longer exist.
Bell Hook’s All About Love
Hook writes that “The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun…yet we would all love better if we used it as a verb”. Hooks argues in this work that society essentially fails to give us a framework that shows us how to learn to love. Arguing against society’s enforcement of romantic and sexual love, Hooks instead argues that readers should embrace love as a caring and compassionate force.