hen I was in college, for the short time I was there, I studied under a philosophy professor who mentored me in doing research in academia. She was a successful philosopher — barely 35 and already tenured at an Ivy League institution —and sincerely interested in the pursuit of ideas and in helping me, a lowly undergraduate, with my research. She was specifically a moral psychologist (a philosopher who studies the meaning of emotions, feelings, and reactive attitudes) and I had entered into the ambitious project of writing a series of papers on the moral psychology of romantic love.

The subject was understudied in moral psychology, despite the fact that romantic love is one of the most (if not the most) significant psychological states an individual feels in his/her life. While collecting academic articles on the subject, I thought it would be important to read a few books written by academics and published by popular presses like Simon & Schuster or Random House to get an idea of how people currently talk about understanding romantic love.