The NPR commentator describes her realization that she was prioritizing the wrong qualities in her search for a life partner, in an unstinting account that draws on the positive and negative responses to her 2008 "Atlantic" article.

"Smart and sassy relationship expert Siggy Flicker is your new fairy godmother. Having matched more than a thousand couples and embraced her own second chance at love, she knows finding a prince is no picnic. Now she's sharing the keys to building a fairy-tale romance, beginning with a honest assessment of what you really want to be happy. To help readers create the healthy, lasting relationships they deserve, Siggy is sharing her honest, empowering advice, including: Define the relationship you want. Set an intention and true love will follow. Forget what looks good "on paper." Sure he's Mr. Right, but is he right for you? Take a break from your dating rut with a Dating Detox. Step back and reevaluate your dating behavior. Learn how to make the most of the first five minutes. First impressions are important, so learn to send the right signals. Happily ever after means forever. Continue to work hard to keep your relationship strong and passionate. In Write Your Own Fairy Tale, readers will get a tried-and-true comprehensive guide to the first six months of dating and Siggy's exclusive plan to get over heartbreak ensuring you'll get from agony to over it in just six simple steps. Featuring practical exercises, real-life success stories, and lessons Siggy learned the hard way, Write Your Own Fairy Tale is a wake-up call for everyone looking for love--and a guide for making sure you get the happiness you truly deserve"--

The proliferation of dating websites, printed personals, and self-help relationship books reflects the new ways Americans seek close, personal relationships. Exposed to changing and often conflicting values, trends, and fashions--disseminated by popular culture, advertising, and assorted "experts"--Americans face uncertainties about the best ways to meet important emotional and social needs. How do we establish lasting and intimate personal relationships, including marriage? In Extravagant Expectations Paul Hollander investigates how Americans today pursue romantic relationships, with special reference to the advantages and drawbacks of Internet dating compared to connections made in school, college, and the workplace. By analyzing printed personals, dating websites, and advice offered by pop psychology books, he examines the qualities that people seek in a partner and also assesses the influence of the remaining conventional ideas of romantic love. Hollander suggests that notions of romantic love have changed due to conflicting values and expectations and the impact of pragmatic considerations. Individualism, high expectations, social and geographic mobility, changing sex roles, and the American national character all play a part in this fascinating and finally sobering exploration of the efforts of men and women to find love and meaning in life. --Book Jacket.

Whom do we choose when we fall in love? How do we make the love-object into what we want? These are questions which only became important at the end of the nineteenth century, as Freud began to formulate a new discipline which would be called psycholanalysis. Freud argues Klaus Theweleit, was the first theoretician of the new situation: boy versus girl in the world series of love. Theweleit looks at a number of relationships: Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville; the triangle of Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and Elfriede Heidegger; Jung and Sabina Spierlrein. But the key figure is Freud himself. Who would, who could Freud choose? As it happened, Freud proposed to Martha Bernays. The 1,500 letters of Freud’s courtship became something like the first psychoanalysis; without knowing it, Martha Bernays became an analytic-instance. But Object-Choice is not only a study of the founder of psychoanalysis, it is also an illuminating lexicon of love in the twentieth century. Freud is accompanied here by Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks and the Velvet Underground. Like Theweleits’s Male Fantasies , this is a collage book, mixing auto-biography, theory and pop culture, and always haunted by history, above all the history of Nazism. As an epilogue, Theweleit brings Freud back to the scene of his courtship, and the Beatles back to Hamburg, in an exploration of that city’s Wandsbek district, once home to an important Jewish community. His comments on the transformations and destruction that Wandsbek has endured form an elegiac tribute to German Jewry, and a powerful conclusion to this remarkable book.