👀 Your Summer Love Syllabus: What to Read About Relationships Right Now 📚

1. Love

   

bell hooks’ All About Love certainly belongs here in the general category of learning about love in a broader sense. I am actually re (listening) to this book right now as I pack and prepare for my two dear friends’ Indianapolis wedding this weekend! I am choosing a passage from the book to read at their ceremony, and with all the wisdom and inspiration, it is no easy task! 

Take away idea: “Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love—“care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”— in our everyday lives…” hooks speaks to romantic love certainly in this book, but also calls us to think about the love we create and share in our everyday lives and how that shapes the world we see and experience. 

2. Family 

Good Inside by Clinical Psychologist Becky Kennedy is one of my all time favorite parent reads, but I put it on the list, because I think the first few chapters are amazing for anyone to read. Much like Alexandra Solomon’s idea of a “love template” this introduces tools to help you understand how the way you were parented can still impact you into adulthood and how to identify the things you want to keep and the things you want to change. As someone who definitely grew up with “people pleaser” tendencies this book was really helpful in identifying how those behaviors were learned and rewarded in my life. It also helped me understand my husband in a new light, thinking about how we were parented in different ways. 

Take away idea: Understanding how you and others were parented can help you understand yourself and others in a new way, a way filled with a lot more compassion, grace, and intention. Down the road, it can also help you understand how you want to parent in  your own future family. 

3. Sex 

   

Taking Sexy Back by Alexandra Solomon looks at the self-awareness necessary for a fulfilling and meaningful sex life and gives readers a blend of research and reflection (similar to Loving Bravely) to help them figure themselves out and their ideal sex life. She explores sex beyond the way me might most simply understand it and looks at it as a way to “elevate, expand, and heal.” This books is written for women, but I honestly think is a good read for anyone who wants a relationship with women, to better understand the specific social and structural challenges faced by women owning and enjoying their sexuality.

Take away idea: Sex and your sex life is something that deserves intentionality. I know in class we explored the benefits of a healthy sex life from the individual, public health, and relational points of view, but this book helps you think through what that means for you. 

4. Money 

   

Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence is my recommendation for anyone who wants to more actively think about their financial future (and I think everyone should)! It has many similar ideas to Your Money Your Life, but has a lot more practical strategies to help you use money to build the life you want and ultimately buy your time back (so you are not working until you are 70, unless you want to).

Nat and I are on this path and while it is slow, it is also so freeing to know there will come a point where we can choose to work. This semester one of my students asked me what I would do if I didn’t teach at UF, and I answered with the things that make me happiest, “swimming in the sea, spending time with my family, growing a garden, and going out dancing” just having the time freedom to choose what to do each day. The truth is though, I think I would also always find a way to keep teaching about love. It is not what I started out to do in my graduate studies, but it has become the most meaningful part of my professional life and enriches my own marriage and relationships too. 

Working toward the freedom of centering the work I care about most (and daily swims in the sea) is really exciting and I think this book can help y'all figure out what really matters most to you in your day-to-day life and how to spend more time doing those things.

Take away idea: Money seems scary to most people. This book makes money seem like something anyone can figure out (and you can). It is not a fear-based approach, but an empowering toolkit to get you where you want to go. 

5.) My Favorite Pool Read

The Witches are Coming by Lindy West makes me laugh (often out loud) in public places and is a cultural critique that still somehow inspires hope and instills camaraderie among readers. She writes a lot about her relationship and marriage in this book and I really appreciated the humor and honesty  with which she captures how love moves us to places we often never expected. For example, in the selection below she writes about how she came to live with a trumpet player (which she finds awful) but then goes on to write how much she loves the unexpected life they have built together. 

“My husband plays the trumpet, which is a sort of loud pretzel originally invented to blow down the walls of fucking Jericho and, later, to let Civil War soldiers know it was time to kill each other in a river while you chilled eating pigeon in your officer’s tent twenty miles away, yet somehow, in modern times, it has become socially acceptable to toot the bad cone inside your house before 10:00 a.m. because “it’s your job” and your wife should “get up.” What a world! If one was feeling uncharitable, one might describe the trumpet as a machine where you put in compressed air and divorce comes out…” 

Take away idea: We are living in wild times y’all. Finding the voices and communities that center you are so important. And if you can have a laugh while figuring out how you want to help shape our shared and collective future, all the better. 

Ok I have a much more extensive list of books I love on love, so I plan on having future installments of this book club series! Please send me any others you have loved or are wanting to read.

Lots of love,

Professor Stonecipher