stories about love that aren’t love stories

If you want to read about love but don’t want the meet cute then these are for you. Love stories that aren’t traditional romances.

Why we broke up by Daniel Handler

This story is about why our two main characters broke up, we get the ending then we go all the way back to the beginning to see how the cracks started. This is a YA book written by the author of Lemony Snicket under his own name, and it’s as weird and quirky and fun as you would expect and hope from him. It’s such an interesting look at young love and how maybe we all just choose, at some points in life, to not see what’s in front of us. A fun look at what being in love or thinking we’re in love, does to us all. Buy it here.

“This is the box, Ed. Inside is everything: two bottle caps, a movie ticket from Greta in the Wild, a note from you, a box of matches, your protractor, Joan’s book, the stolen sugar, a toy truck, those ugly earrings, a comb from the motel, and the rest of it. This is it, Ed. The whole story of why we broke up.”

The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan

One of my all time favourites. This is written like a dictionary with often just one or two lines a page, sometimes just a word, that over the course of the short book shares the story of this mysterious relationship. We don’t ever get to know who our characters are, we just get to see through these excerpts and snippets of their relationship timeline. It’s such a beautifully designed book, so original and interesting and one you will re read so many times. Perfect for gifting too. Buy it here.

“basis, n.

There has to be a moment at the beginning when you wonder whether you're in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself.

If the moment doesn't pass, that's it--you're done. And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it's even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lover's face.

How does one talk about love? Do we even have the right words to describe something that can be both utterly mundane and completely transcendent, pulling us out of our everyday lives and making us feel a part of something greater than ourselves?

Taking a unique approach to this problem, the nameless narrator of David Levithan's The Lover's Dictionary has constructed the story of his relationship as a dictionary. Through these short entries, he provides an intimate window into the great events and quotidian trifles of being within a couple, giving us an indelible and deeply moving portrait of love in our time.”

A Guide To Recognising Your Saints by Ditto Montiel

You won’t often see me recommending books like this on here and by that I mean books that have any kind of sadness in them but I’m making an exception for this one. It’s such a beautiful idea, Ditto, the author, writes his memoir but rather than a timeline of his life we get essays about his saints. His saints are all the people who along the way helped him out and helped him get to where he is now. It’s Non Fiction and such a beautiful read, hard at times and sad in places but ultimately hopeful and inspiring. I loved the film too. At its core it’s about love, and how it’s really the only thing that makes the biggest difference in life and being grateful for the people who have given you their love no matter how briefly you got to share it. Buy it here.

“Orlandito "Dito" Montiel, son of Orlando, a Nicaraguan immigrant, and an Irish mother, grew wild in the streets of Astoria, Queens, pulling pranks for Greek and Italian gangsters and confessing at the church of the Immaculate Conception, gobbling hits of purple mescaline and Old English, sneaking into Times Square whore houses—"Kids from nowhere going nowhere."

This is the quintessentially American story of a young man's hunger for experience, his dawning awareness of the bigger world across the bridge, and of the loyalties that bind him to a violent past and to the flawed and desperate saints that have guided him: Dito's father, Antonio "our insane warrior hero," Bob Semen, Frank the dog walker, Jimmy Mullen, Cherry Vanilla, Ginsberg and all the others, the drunks, coke-heads, junkies, the insaniacs like Santos Antonios who said, "Now Dito remember, in life you gotta be crazy."

Dear Juliet

The Juliet Society is a a group of people who are stationed at Juliet’s house in Verona and they call themselves The Secretaries of Juliet. If you go to visit you can leave a note to Juliet about your love life and ask her for advice. Or you can send a letter to the secretaries from around the world. The secretaries, on behalf of Juliet reply as her, how they believe she would. The book is a collection of the letters sent to them and the replies that Juliet sent back. I love the whole idea, I think it’s beautiful and romantic that people make this pilgrimage to Verona to often do it too. This is one of my all time favourite books, the letters will just make your day reading them, they are so hopeful and inspiring. Buy it here.

“Real letters sent to the Shakespearean heroine in Verona, Italy—seeking guidance and sharing tales of the passion, pain, humor, and heartbreak of love.
 
Every year, over ten thousand letters addressed to Juliet Capulet arrive in Verona, Italy, the famous hometown of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. These handwritten letters come from people all over the world, seeking guidance and support from Juliet herself.
 
Capturing the pain, joy, humor, and confusion of love, the sixty letters in this book offer encouragement, comfort, hope—and a nod to the human condition. Including responses from Juliet herself (in the form of a group known as Juliet's Secretaries), this romantic and relatable collection proves that love is the universal language.”

I’ll Have What She’s Having by Erin Carlson

I’m a Nora Ephron superfan and this book is exactly what I’d always wanted. The author digs deep into each Nora film, giving you behind the scenes details and all the backstage info that we never knew about. It’s a book about the love stories that have shaped our lives. Buy it here.

“A backstage look at the making of Nora Ephron's revered trilogy--When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle--which brought romantic comedies back to the fore, and an intimate portrait of the beloved writer/director who inspired a generation of Hollywood women, from Mindy Kaling to Lena Dunham.

In I'll Have What She's Having entertainment journalist Erin Carlson tells the story of the real Nora Ephron and how she reinvented the romcom through her trio of instant classics. With a cast of famous faces including Rob Reiner, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Billy Crystal, Carlson takes readers on a rollicking, revelatory trip to Ephron's New York City, where reality took a backseat to romance and Ephron--who always knew what she wanted and how she wanted it--ruled the set with an attention to detail that made her actors feel safe but sometimes exasperated crew members.

Along the way, Carlson examines how Ephron explored in the cinema answers to the questions that plagued her own romantic life and how she regained faith in love after one broken engagement and two failed marriages. Carlson also explores countless other questions Ephron's fans have wondered about: What sparked Reiner to snap out of his bachelor blues during the making of When Harry Met Sally? Why was Ryan, a gifted comedian trapped in the body of a fairytale princess, not the first choice for the role? After she and Hanks each separatel balked at playing Mail's Kathleen Kelly and Sleepless' Sam Baldwin, what changed their minds? And perhaps most importantly: What was Dave Chappelle doing . . . in a turtleneck? An intimate portrait of a one of America's most iconic filmmakers and a look behind the scenes of her crowning achievements, I'll Have What She's Havingis a vivid account of the days and nights when Ephron, along with assorted cynical collaborators, learned to show her heart on the screen.”

How To Fall In Love With Anyone by Mandy Len Catron

Do you remember this article, well this is the book from the women in that story. I have been obsessed by the questionnaire in the article and book since I found out about it when I was younger, the romantic in me is just in love with the idea of it, so when I first read the authors real life experience of it in the article, I knew I had to read the book. This is an exploration of love as a theme in all our lives. Buy it here.

“What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer.

In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship.

In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.”

Friends Like These by Danny Wallace

This is all about friendship and the love of friends, specifically those friends that knew you first, the ones that saw the tears, the skint knees, and even now all these years later, no matter how long it’s been since you’ve spoke with them, you know their landline number and birthday by heart. The author of this book decides years after after drifting apart, to ask his old friends if they want to come out to play again. It’s such a special book, it will inspire you to call your old friends (I did) and also gives you a reminder to just have fun. Buy it here.

“Danny Wallace is about to turn thirty and his life has become a cliché. Recently married and living in a smart new area of town, he's swapped pints down the pub for lattes and brunch. For the first time in his life, he's feeling, well ... grown-up.

But something's not right. Something's missing. Until he finds an old address book containing just twelve names. His best mates as a kid. Where are they now? Who are they now? And how are they coping with being grown-up too?

And so begins a journey from A-Z, tracking down and meeting his old gang. He travels from Berlin to Tokyo, from Sydney to LA. He even goes to Loughborough. He meets Fijian chiefs. German rappers. Some ninjas. And a carvery manager who's managed to solve time travel. But how will they respond to a man they haven't seen in twenty years, turning up and asking if they're coming out to play?

Part-comedy, part-travelogue, part-memoir, Friends Like These is the story of what can happen when you track down your past, and of where the friendships you thought you'd outgrown can take you today...”