The title of this book is a bit misleading and no doubt was chosen to get browsers’ attention. The book is not an anti-romantic rant. It doesn’t try to denigrate love or deny its power and beauty. Even if you’re an incurable, dyed-in-the-wool romantic, you can still read this book without finding it offensive. Well, maybe you will feel furious on occasions, as the book attempts to prick your romantic balloon, especially with its heavy use of evolutionary psychology. (Sorry, but love really is ju...

You are locked in my heart, the little key is lost, and now you must stay there for ever. —Princess Alix of Hesse to her FiancéThe words ‘I love you’ contain an implicit demand. They are incomplete without the answer, ‘I love you too.’__________People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open. —Philip Roth, The Dying Animal_...

This book was loaned to me by a friend. I told her that most people mistake sensationalism for genuine affection. Thus started a debate in which I was (jokingly) accused of being severe. (Me? Ha- rumph!) I claimed that losing your head to reason; being selfish in your pursuit of pleasure; engaging in high-risk behavior; and alienating everyone with goopy melodrama does not make a person a romantic; it makes them troubled. IMHO, such behaviors are self-indulgent and damaging. Yet our culture cons...

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Love can be painful and can go wrong. Incurable Romantic consists of a number of case studies where the sexual and romantic areas of life have soured or gone wrong in some way; there is demonic possession, relentless obsession and the odd case of depression.Mixed in with the case studies are personal anecdotes and general explorations into different areas of psychoanalytical history - even some areas that are a little dodgy like Wilhelm Reich and his orgone accumulators. The book says is contain...

Dr. Frank Tallis help us make some sense of this crazy thing called love from an evolutionary and scientific point of view. The symptoms a person displays when in love, he argues, are remarkably similar to being mentally ill. Melancholy, sleeplessness, preoccupation with the beloved, daydreaming, obsession, jealousy, seeing the other person as perfect are some of the characteristics we all have experienced at some point in our lives. This necessary madness, however, is the one thing that ensures...

An interesting book that views love as an emotional endeavour that at times has the lover act irrationally. The book focuses on romantic love which most modern books on love do suggesting love is different for romantic lovers than for other lovers. This is mostly down to the fact that falling in love is considered a part of love rather than being or staying in love by Tallis.

A solid take on considering love through a prism of psychological disturbances (obsessions, delusions, anxieties, addictions, etc), drawing heavily on literature, mostly English (Burton, Byron, Darwin, Hume, Mann, Shakespeare, etc) and romantics (Stendhal, Goethe), but ventures into Tolstoy or Dostoyevski, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), covers Plato, Hippocrates, Lara Croft and even Dalai Lama views on love. As for a work of 2004 it's strangely based on pre-2000 research and (I assume) therapeutical pract...

A fascinating, accessible and entertaining guide to 'love', looking at its evolutionary roots, history and purpose. Tallis had a very engaging writing style, and the book is packed with engaging insights and fun facts. I didn't quite buy into the central premise of the book, namely that love may be a mental illness, but this was a fantastic read nonetheless.

I recommend to anyone dating.

Brilliant analysis! Insightful, wise and compassionate.Worth reading many times over.

I don't agree with everything Tallis says but he challenged my thought processes!

Informative popular psychology book trying to identify what love is, how it has emerged and the role it plays in the evolution of the human species. Turns out that love is a chemical construct that arose out of evolutionary necessity (the need to establish a strong bond between the mother and the father in order to allow the human child to survive infancy - for a finite amount of time), developed as a chemical bond between mother and infant allowing for the propagation of the species. Love is al...

To the best of my knowledge, Tallis was the first to show detailed relationships between the criteria we use to diagnose mental illness and the symptoms of those who are "love sick." It's not a particularly well-written book, but it's fun to consider the overlap between conditions we consider normal, but extreme (e.g., love sickness), and those we think of as psychopathology.

Life changingly good

Insightful but I wish there was a bit more on how to love "sanely". One to own I think and revisit over the years.

kheili jalebe!

I don't view love as a mental illness, though it's sometimes seemed that way to me because I'm so emotional, but there is a lot of interesting analysis in this book.

An entertaining read! :) love it.

This book slyly talks about the merits of madness in a way that is quite hard to argue with. I really enjoyed reading about the various aspects of love and madness that are addressed.