WHAT I WISH I KNEW ABOUT LOVE
Marty Wilson
Allen & Unwin
RRP: $21.99
Publication date:: April 5th 2010   

Marty Wilson is not a relationship expert, psychologist, Casanova or commitment-phobe.
Just a bloke who loves his wife. They’re both really good at being in love with each other.  As his seventh anniversary loomed Marty set out to read every book he could find about love to see if he could learn a thing or two:

What makes some people’s relationships last?
What makes others get stale or fall apart?
Why do some people seem to find real love, and how come it eludes others all their lives?

Pretty soon, and pretty inevitably, he found some major flaws in the books-about-love:

1. They may be written by ‘experts’, but they nearly always took a side.
2. They’re all way too preachy. Where was the laughter? Where was the fun?
3. What was with all these rules, techniques, tactics and games?
4. (And most importantly for a bloke) They’re all at least three or four hundred pages long!

Why has no one ever summarised this love stuff? Surely something as simple and enjoyable as love shouldn’t require such rigid guidelines!
So Marty spent a year interviewing over 100 people who were in great relationships about what makes their love life tick, asking “If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of advice about love, what would it be?”
The result is a book about love for people who never read books about love.
It’s self-help for all of us that hate self-help.
It is beautiful enough to give to a friend who needs their faith in love restored, but it’s also meaty and insightful enough to buy for yourself.

It is, quite simply, a lovely book, about love.