The relationship between love and happiness

The last time Carrie Jenkins was on our show was six years ago for episode 113, where she discussed her book What Love Is and What It Could Be. Today, she’s back to talk about her newest book, Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning and to enlighten us about her analysis of the relationship between love and happiness.

Throughout this episode, Carrie goes over the following topics:

1. Eudaimonic love: what it is and how she developed/identified it as a way to express what love could be.

2. The Happiness and Romantic Paradoxes: what they are and how they relate to each other.

3. Western notions of love and why we should move away from definitions of love that only focus on feelings.

4. How New Relationship Energy (NRE) relates to Western ideas of romantic love.

5. “Love crafting,” or the practice of making relationships meaningful for the people in them, rather than creating nuclear families that function as units of consumption.

Find more from Carrie at her website along with all the books she has written, and be sure to pick up a copy of Sad Love!