Linda Carroll - Love Cycles: The Five Essential Stages of Lasting Love

Praise for Love Cycles

Thank you, Linda Carroll, for this clear and heartening map of the predictable, and challenging, stages of love. Its so good to be reminded that these hinges of change are also pivots of growth, and above all that we can not only get through them but become even more deeply connected in the process.

Daphne Rose Kingma, author of Coming Apart and The Ten Things to Do When Your Life Falls Apart

Linda Carroll has achieved it a truly commonsense manual on growing relationships while growing ourselves. Love Cycles is a must-read for all, no matter where you are in your cycle of loving. Kudos to Carroll for a valuable contribution to a discipline long in need of a real model.

Marilyn Mason, author of Facing Shame: Families in Recovery

If you want a road map to love, if you want to love more deeply, if you desire a way out of pain this book can serve as a kind companion.

Pat Love, EdD, author of Hot Monogamy and How to Improve Your Marriage without Talking about It

Linda Carroll is a seasoned couples therapist who has written a very engaging book that urges individuals and couples to understand and adopt her approach to genuine intimacy. Her chapters on Wholehearted Loving are worth the price of the whole book.

Barry McCarthy, PhD, author of Rekindling Desire and Sexual Awareness

This beautifully written book is replete with valuable information about the cycles of love. The author has enlivened the narrative with concrete examples of couples in each stage and empowered couples on the journey from the romantic tingle to wholehearted love with effective, time-tested exercises to build the skills to get there. We recommend it to all couples.

Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, authors of Making Marriage Simple

Wise and immediately helpful, Love Cycles speaks to every couple brand-new partners in the throes of infatuation, seasoned couples struggling with doubt and discontent, those who have been shattered by an affair or other betrayal, and those who confront the crossroads of intimate partnership: Do we split, or do we recommit? Linda Carroll deeply understands the challenges and potential of each stage and will help you normalize, survive, and master this journey.

Janis Abrahms Spring, PhD, author of After the Affair: Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful and How Can I Forgive You?

Love Cycles is an incredible book that reveals and provides a powerful program for growing a deep, rich, and enduring love with your partner. It should be required reading for everyone who plans to fall in love and wants to stay in love!

Arielle Ford, author of The Soulmate Secret

Linda Carrolls book is impossible to read without seeing yourself in its pages. How can she be speaking directly to me and yet she is? Everyone will feel that way. Thats because this extremely talented therapist knows what makes us tick and can point out the inevitable stages of love that we need to navigate and master. You cannot help but be awed at the clarity and power of her observations on beginning, maintaining, and repairing profound relationships. We all need this book, to read once for perspective and then to keep reading for guidance. This is a real contribution: accessible and meaningful from start to finish.

Pepper Schwartz, PhD, University of Washington sociologist and author of Prime: Adventures and Advice on Sex, Love,and the Sensual Years

Love Cycles is filled with useful nuggets of practical wisdom that are sure to inspire and enlighten anyone who seeks to enhance the quality of their relationships. It is abundant with great guidelines geared to the challenge of creating enduring love.

Linda Bloom, coauthor of 101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married and Secrets of Great Marriages

This wonderful book I will keep close for a long time to come. Linda Carrolls wisdom is so direct and radiant, it has inspired me to tend my relationship in a deeper, more mature way.

Jennifer Louden, author of The Womans Comfort Book and The Life Organizer

Love Cycles will serve as a helpful and wise guide for people who want to make their love last. The author understands the stages as well as the pitfalls of love, honoring the former and explaining how to navigate the latter. A really useful guide.

Frederic Luskin, PhD, author of Forgive for Good

LOVE
CYCLES

New World Library 14 Pamaron Way Novato, California 94949

Copyright 2014 by Linda Carroll

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for education. It is not meant to take the place of diagnosis and treatment by a qualified medical practitioner or therapist. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given or liability taken.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carroll, Linda.

Love cycles : The five essential stages of lasting love / Linda Carroll ; foreword by Sam Keen.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60868-300-0 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-60868-301-7 (ebook)

1. Love. 2. Intimacy (Psychology) 3. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Title.

BF575.L8.C24437 2014

First printing, September 2014

ISBN 978-1-60868-300-0

Printed in the USA on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Tim

As a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart.

SAPPHO, as translated by Mary Barnard

I am so grateful to you, my many clients and students who for the past thirty-five years have shown up for therapy and the Love Cycles program with openhearted trust and bravery. To protect client confidentiality, all details and identifying information in cases and anecdotes have been changed, mixed, and in some cases reinvented.

Love is a many-splendored thing : The essence of God. That old black magic.

Intimate warfare. The end of hostility. A game of hide-and-seek. Chemistry (caution: sometimes what you thought was H2O turns out to be H2SO4). The answer. Please repeat the question! Sweet madness. The only sanity. The cure for loneliness. The lan vital that binds all things together.

It is appetite, fancy, favor, liking, craving, yearning, enthusiasm, esteem, appreciation, distress, disappointment, anger, respect, adoration, fidelity, ardor, caring, lusting, worshiping, cherishing. And much more.