5 Favorite Books About Love
It’s Feburary: the month of love. Love shows up in so many places in our lives: with our significant person, with our families, with our neighbors and even in our ability to properly love ourselves. There are thousands of amazing books out there, here are 5 of my favorites.
The Five Love Languages
by Gary Chapman
Even Mr. Perfect was willing to read this book. (It is a pretty easy book to get through.) Chapman writes about the five different ways we all give and receive love. If you want to love your people well, understanding their love language and learning to speak it is key. This book is a great one for learning to love your signifiant other, but also can be applied universally to all of your love relationships.
“Your emotional love language and the language of your spouse may be as different as Chinese from English. No matter how hard you try to express love in English, if your spouse understands only Chinese, you will never understand how to love each other…Being sincere is not enough. We must be willing to learn our spouse’s primary love language if we are to be effective communicators of love.”
Love Does
by Bob Goff
Bob Goff makes a convincing argument that love is a word of action. Love isn’t just about thoughts and feelings: he believes that love DOES. And his stories about what that looks like in real life will inspire you to get creative in how you love your world.
“In the end, love doesn’t just keep thinking about it or planning for it. Simply put: love does!”
Eat Pray Love
by Elizabeth Gilbert
When this book first came out I was struggling to recover from a soul-crushing divorce. So perhaps that is why it is on my list: Gilbert’s journey to rediscover how to love herself and to love her life resonated with me. For those who have found themselves totally untethered from themselves, this is a love story about rediscovering your center.
“People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you’re fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.”
No Greater Love
by Mother Teresa
As an example of sacrificial love, you would be hard pressed to find someone better than Mother Teresa. No Greater Love is a compliation of her words and teachings that will inspire you to consider the way you love others in the light of how you are loved by God.
“I am not sure exactly what heaven will be like, but I know that when we die and it comes time for God to judge us, he will not ask, ‘How many good things have you done in your life?’ rather he will ask, ‘How much love did you put into what you did?”
Boundaries
by Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend
Boundaries might seem like an odd choice in a list of books about love, but healthy love is often in short supply. It is a common misconception boundaries aren’t appropriate with the people we love. Cloud & Townsend explain why real love is one with proper boundaries and how to create them. If you often struggle with feelings of obligation or feel like you are constantly out of control, read this book. It is a game changer.
“Just as homeowners set physical property lines around their land, we need to set mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries for our lives to help us distinguish what is our responsibility and what isn’t.”
I hope that one (or all!) of these go on your to-be-read pile this month. There is never a wrong time to learn to love people better!
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