Love Illuminated: Exploring Life’s Most Mystifying Subject (With the Help of 50,000 Strangers)

Love is unrivaled in its power to thrill, crush, and sustain. No subject in human history has been more thoroughly examined. And yet, as desperately as we have tried to unlock love’s mysteries-to decode it through scientific experimentation, philosophical inquiry, and even mathematical algorithms-do we really understand love any better today than Shakespeare did nearly five hundred years ago

As the editor of a column about love in the New York Times, Daniel Jones has been privy to the deepest personal revelations of tens of thousands of strangers. Deluged with stories of scheming cheaters, hopeless romantics, racy texts, and fierce devotion, he has spent much of the past decade wading through love’s muck and majesty-and has taken plenty of notes along the way. In Love Illuminated, he uses his unique perspective to tease apart life’s most mystifying subject.

Drawing from the 50,000 tales of love that have crossed his desk, Jones traces the arc of human relationships through ten phases, starting with the pursuit, destiny, vulnerability, connection, and trust of new love, and then turning to the practicality, monotony, infidelity, loyalty, and wisdom of love matured. With empathy and wry humor, he takes readers on an enlightening journey through the highs, lows, and enduring unknowns of this universal experience that rattles the head and stirs the heart.

As Jones explains, Love is about curiosity, not certainty. It’s about tossing oneself overboard into the wild seas, not remaining safely on deck.

In Love Illuminated, he pulls us into the depths of love in all its contradictions and complexities, offering glimmers of understanding along with the comforts of shared experience.