NEW
WAYS OF LOVING: HOW
AUTHENTICITY TRANSFORMS RELATIONSHIPS
WHO
HAS BEEN READING NEW WAYS OF
LOVING
FOR OVER THE LAST 4 DECADES?
COLLEGE CLASSES & ALTERNATIAVE ADULT EDUCATION
The first major audience was participants in the
author's
classes on love
offered by the Minnesota Free University. [See A
Brief History of
My Book on Love.]
And
this book continues to have very good potential
as a text-book for a class challenging
most traditional ideas of love.
And it could even be used in a college class
exploring loving relationships,
if the instructor wants to expose the students
to thinking that is definitely 'outside of the box'.
INTELLIGENT READERS FROM TEENS TO SENIOR CITIZENS
Despite its subject—love—New Ways of Loving
is most definitely NOT a work of pop psychology.
In fact, almost everything affirmed by popular writing about love
is contradicted and corrected by this book.
Readers who agree with this book
will find their previous ideas about love overturned and replaced.
New Ways of
Loving challenges such popular notions as:
romance, love based on need, jealousy, exclusiveness,
sex as a need, marriage, having children, & even living together. [See the
Introduction: Replacing
the Old Ways of Loving.]
Everyone who has ever had a
loving relationships —or
hopes to have a loving relationship— is a potential reader of this
book.
Page after page offers fresh perspectives for examining every aspect of
love. Every reader is empowered to
examine his or her own relationships.
Usually readers come to this book with some
particular question
that has been a problem in their own relationships.
For example, many have been caught in the illusions of romantic love.
The first chapter helps them to see how those fantasy feelings arose.
Some are hoping to solve a deep problem of jealousy.
Chapters 5 & 6 help them to see that jealousy is a cultural
construct
and that they can move beyond this feeling if they become more
Authentic.
Each chapter addresses a distinct issue in personal relationships.
See the Table
of
Contents.
PEOPLE IN THE PUBLISHING BUSINESS THEMSELVES
So far no people in the book-publishing business
have read NWL.
But this website and this open letter might change that.
Busy agents and publishers
seldom have the time to read the books they promote and publish.
But I hope this book will be the exception:
I would most hope that my literary agent
really wants to read New Ways of
Loving for her or his own reasons.
This is such an unusual book that it will be very difficult to represent
without some deep knowledge of what the book contains.
If the person who becomes my literary agent has relationship issues
that make this book very relevant to her or his own life,
then she or he can be a personal witness
concerning the benefits of reading the new perspectives presented in
NWL.
Likewise, I hope that the publisher who ultimately
takes this book
will want to explore the pages deeply and personally.
Unlike most book-proposals, the complete text of NWL is already available.
So there is no guess-work
needed to determine
whether this will be a good book.
My agent and my publisher will be able to read the whole book
before they make any commitments.
In fact New Ways of Loving
is now in its 6th edition—2007—
having been continuously improved since the first edition in 1976.
ON-LINE BOOKSELLERS WOULD BE THE MAIN MEANS OF DISTRIBUTION
Because New
Ways of Loving is a challenging
and in some ways difficult
book,
it will probably never be a best-seller.
It might not even be offered in bookstores.
But the advent of on-line booksellers like Amazon.com
allows even books that do not have enough appeal to sell in bookstores
to remain available to the reading public.
The Internet allows potential readers to look
inside the
book
to see if it really does address the questions and issues
already alive in their minds.