Joanna Coles - Love Rules: How to Find a Real Relationship in a Digital World

If youve picked up this book, its probably because youre frustrated with your love life. You may already have a partner, but you suspect he or shes not the one. Yet you dont quite have the nerve to break it off. What if its simply the best you can do?

Or you may be single, divorced, or widowed and longing for love, trying everything possible to find a partner, turning over every digital stoneTinder, Happn, Hinge, and Bumbleto uncover matches. You may have spent several hours filling out a thoughtful profile on eHarmony or a snappy one on Match.com. Or asked all your friends to set you up on blind dates. You have pored over the Facebook profiles of all the people you had crushes on in your pastand have even instant messaged a few.

But still you keep striking out.

You may find yourself in a protracted cycle of excitement and disappointmentmeeting someone, going home with him or her, and then waking up with daters remorse and wondering what on earth youre doing there anyway as he nudges you to say hes sorry but he needs you to kinda leave now because he has an early start. Or you may be feverishly fast-forwarding, imagining the destination wedding by the end of your first drink and the names of your children by the second. And then you never hear from him again. No text. Not even a three-second Snap. Total ghost.

Meanwhile, life for everyone else seems to flow merrily by, as your friends get engaged, get married, have babiesnot always in that order, of course, but who cares. They have something going on. And you feel left behind.

Or you may have once been that person you now so envythe one with the long-term boyfriend. But you broke up with him after college to play the field, and now, at twenty-nine, youre wondering if you made a mistake. Hes engaged; youre still single, and no one has come close to treating you as well as he did. Or perhaps you were that comfortably married one who paired off early, but it didnt work out. And now here you are again, whether age thirty-two or fifty-two, having to get back out there. This was never part of your plan. Even more unimaginable, you didnt realize that when you eventually posted your online-dating profile and leaned in to see the matches, you would find a Niagara Falls of dick pics, or even worse, their video versions. Online dating is not for the faint of heart.

The landscape has changed so radically in such a short period of time. Not just how we meet potential partners, but how honest women are finally being about how harrowing that can also be. Leaders, icons, and figures we once trustedacross all walks of lifehave been brought down with startling velocity by sexual harassment charges, and women, who for years felt crushed by an impossible silence, have found their voices to tell sometimes terrible stories of bullying, harassment, and humiliation. This is another reason I wanted to write this bookto help women navigate what can feel like very tricky, even dangerous, terrain.

We all know that finding love is possible: the story you heard about the friend of a friend who married the Nobel Prize winner she met on JDate... It can and does work out, right?

Hang in there, whoever you are.

This book is for you.

This is a diet book for love.

Food and love have so much in common. We have huge appetites for both. We cant live without them. But not all food is created equal, and neither is all love.

Just as there is junk food, there is junk love. And like junk food, junk love is fast, convenient, often attractively packaged, widely available, and superficially tasty. But the calories are largely devoid of real nutrients and leave you hungering for more, even as you smart with a lingering sense of shame after a binge. And yet, both junk food and junk love require enormous amounts of willpower to resist.

Amid the clamor of conflicting dietary advice, one book stands out to me for its clarity. Michael Pollans Food Rules is a straightforward and gimmick-free guide to eating well.

In Love Rules, I hope to do for relationships what Pollan did for food. To help women navigate their love lives in this very modern, fast-paced, andwhat can feel to manyincredibly lonely digital age. In this case, social media and online-dating sites are equivalent to the Walmart and Costco of our relationship lives: You have to wade through rows of Little Debbie snack cakes and family-pack bags of Cheetos in order to find the aisle of fresh produce. The organic apples and almonds are thereyou just have to know why they are important and then where and how to find them.

Substitute apples for a real-life healthy relationship, one grounded in intimacy and trustwith someone who makes you feel good about yourself. Someone who will stand beside you for the long haul.

To that end, Ive created a series of guidelines. These are rules informed by my many years working at womens magazines, including Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. They have been shaped by extensive consultation with psychologists, social scientists, anthropologists, doctors, college professors, therapists, and religious leaders, as well as by conversations with the many young women I have worked with in the media world. And, of course, those I have met over the last decade as a result of my work. The thousands of smart, independent, successful women who had so much going rightwork, bank, friends, wardrobe, 401(k)sbut otherwise felt unhappy or unlucky in love. They have created enviable lives for themselves, yet they are missing someone to share that life with and maybe have a child or several with. That is the one thing that eludes them. Or, they may have two kids and a failed marriage, and are wracked with worry that they may never meet anyone to share their life with again.

The rules that emerged from these conversations are essentially love hacks.

This book will enable you to identify what you want in a relationship and when you want it. In order to do that, you have to turn inward. This book is truly about finding yourself and cultivating your self-worth in order to find the right person to share yourself with. And to do that well, you have to apply to your love life the same often fanatical focus that you devote to losing weight, getting fit, or changing your job.

I have used mainly he/she and his/her throughout this book, but however you identify and whatever your sexual orientation, Love Rules applies to everyone. So please, wherever relevant, just substitute your own preferred pronoun.

And on a somewhat related note: you will see that some names have been changed in the case studies that follow. As an editor, I dont generally like using pseudonymsit has always made me feel that people could exaggerate whatever they were sayingbut the very personal nature of some of the stories and case studies in this book meant a pseudonym was necessary to protect privacy. We fact-checked each story but agreed to give certain people the right to change their names.

ITS TIME TO GET REAL

Approach this as you would begin a diet. That means counting every calorie both in and out. A calorie is a unit of energyso how many times do you check your Tinder account? Or how many hours have you spent on Facebook bingeing on ex-partners posts? These are emotional calories, and they use up your positive emotional energy that would be better expended elsewhere.

You need to take an emotional calorie count.

How many times have you struck up a conversation with the good-looking guy at your local coffee shop? When was the last time you had great sex that left you feeling satisfied and connected? Or a relationship with someone who made you feel truly good about yourself? These are the calories that will sustain you.

You need to take an emotional calorie count.

And then what about the calories you dont even realize you are consuming? The equivalent of those french fries snuck off someone elses plate at dinner. You didnt order the fries yourself, but you ate them just the same. These are the incidental calories that satisfy in the moment but can do longer-term damage thats surprisingly hard to shake off. The random hookups that may seem fun or daring at the time but leave you feeling annoyed with yourself. The online sinkholes we all have fallen downin sweats on a Saturday night, hearting the Instagram shots of friends out partying and clearly having more fun than you, or comparing your sad inner life with the obvs perfect external one that your colleague at work curates on Facebook. These binges may feel beyond your control in the moment, but they likely are not leading you to find love.