8/10

 

Hate to admit it, but my Mum got this one for me, clearly thinking I needed it. ‘8 Rules of Love’ by one of everyone over 40’s favourite Tiktoker, Jay Shetty (2023). Don’t worry, he was an author before he was every a Tiktoker. The title sums up the book pretty well, and before reading it, I assumed I knew everything there was to know about love. The book is in three parts, how to get it, how to keep it and how to let it go. I clearly needed the ‘how to keep it’ part. 

 

I am pretty fussy when it comes to self-help books, especially those written by men, as I do not need to be mansplained love, in particular by another emotionally unavailable boy. However, Shetty is emotionally available and not a boy anymore, so this one proved passable. The book is also damn funny, and rather than proving why he knows everything about love, Shetty comedically reveals all the things he has done wrong and why he now has a pretty damn educated idea about what works and what doesn’t. Shetty initially drew me in when on the second page, he explains the far too elaborate proposal for his wife, which included diamonds and carriages with horses. It turned out that she was allergic to horses, so she ended up in the hospital, and she definitely would not have chosen a diamond. He uses examples like this to show that most of our conventional ideas about what true love should look like are entirely faux and that we are far more wholesome than cheesy rom-coms and fairytales make us out to be. 

 

This is the kind of book that, like my mother, I’ll force my kids into reading. Like with most books, the issue is that most people need to read it, the most would never even touch the thing. The only reason that this book gets an eight and not a ten is that in the two days since I finished reading it, I have yet to find love. If it gets to a week, I’ll be sure to ask for a refund!