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" I read somewhere that the ancient Greeks sent condolence cards to friends who had fallen madly in love\u2014such a state was a madness, they thought, a plague to which the unfortunate sufferer could only submit until the fever passed. The need for love is unruly, subversive, weird, and tenacious, as Daniel Jones makes clear at the beginning of Love Illuminated (William Morrow), his provocative, insightful, and deeply humane meditation on what he calls in the book&amp;#039;s subtitle &amp;quot;life&amp;#039;s most mystifying subject.&amp;quot;  As the editor of The New York Times&amp;#039; compulsively readable &amp;quot;Modern Love&amp;quot; column for nearly a decade, Jones has had a wide-angle lens on this most bedeviling emotion, courtesy of the thousands of writers who have offered up their personal narratives of love lost, found, and longed for, and he draws widely from their experiences here, as well as from his own (married, with two children, to novelist Cathi Hanauer, who also edited a best-selling anthology about marriage, motherhood, and related discontents, The Bitch in the House). And yet, he maintains, he&amp;#039;s no expert: &amp;quot;Asking me what I have learned about love is like asking a pickle what it has learned about vinegar,&amp;quot; he writes. Related: Is It Normal for Your Ex to Haunt Your Marriage? Don&amp;#039;t believe him. Jones, who is himself a novelist, proves an exceptional guide\u2014droll, compassionate, nonjudgmental\u2014through all of love&amp;#039;s many phases, from the early madness of what George Eliot refers to as &amp;quot;merely canine affection&amp;quot; to the profounder reaches of lifelong commitment. Which is not to say that Jones doesn&amp;#039;t have a point of view; he does, and he argues it passionately throughout the book. Jones is an unabashed romantic, God bless him, and he celebrates love&amp;#039;s accidental nature, its capacity for mystery and\u2014more important\u2014redemption. &amp;quot;After all,&amp;quot; he writes, &amp;quot;isn&amp;#039;t that what love, at its best, is about\u2014healing wounds and being good?&amp;quot; Well, yes, sometimes, but love is just as much a fount of madness, vengeance, betrayal, and mayhem (not to mention a catalyst for most of the world&amp;#039;s great literature) as it is a stepping stone to a better self. Luckily, Jones is not at all squeamish about the murkier aspects of his subject. The sea of love, he writes with relish, is a &amp;quot;dark and scary place\u2014deep, cold, impenetrable, and populated by billions of freakish creatures lurking in the depths with their gnashing teeth and electrified appendages.&amp;quot; Jump on in\u2014the water&amp;#039;s fine! Related: Addicted to the Thrill of Married Women Love is a wild card, the accounts in Love Illuminated make clear, not something you order from a takeout menu, a strange, ungainly thing that might not look at all like what you expected, nor happen when or how you hoped it would, if you find it at all. Even in his tales of desperate romantic searches that lead to such wackadoodle way stations as fortune-tellers and matchmakers, Jones finds something to commend\u2014 going to a psychic for romantic counsel, for instance, can be a kind of amatory Ritalin, &amp;quot;getting the lost lover to focus in a certain direction, or on a window of time, or on a specific kind of person.&amp;quot; Not even the fact that the man you married transforms into a woman is as big a stumbling block as you might think. Place your bets on an open heart and the lessons a twist of fate can teach. Jones&amp;#039; insights shine brightest when he turns his attention to the ever increasing number of romantic wanderers who take to their laptops and smartphones to find their heart&amp;#039;s desire, and he is a trenchant observer of what happens when we try to cut and paste the contradictory urgings of our heads and hearts into the stern confines of a workable algorithm. The search for love, after all, was tricky enough when it was confined to a town or a neighborhood or a small circle of acquaintances not so many years ago. Now the Internet has widened that terrain into a banshee-infested wilderness, and choice threatens to drown us in infinite possibility. Jones is fascinated by the mind-boggling ways the Web offers to split the various aspects of love, from physical desire to transcendent communion, into tidy individual compartments, from the sext, which offers lust without emotion (&amp;quot;Isn&amp;#039;t it great being clever and shallow and not ruining something as potentially awesome as meaningless sex with all that stupid emotional turmoil?&amp;quot;), to its opposite number, an ongoing virtual romance between two people who never meet, a sad, self- protective substitute for love that he calls &amp;quot;Soul Mate in a Box.&amp;quot; Related: New Dating Rules: Relationship Lite  The author worries that the Internet lulls us into thinking we can rationalize love, tease out its mystery, close us off from happy accident, and defang its potential for pain\u2014but also for joy. I think there&amp;#039;s little chance of that, given the warmth and complexity of the non-fiction stories that make up Love Illuminated. Whatever your experience with love has been, you will find a fellow traveler here, among the dreamers and calculators, runners and committers, speed daters and kabbalistic matchmakers\u2014and perhaps even a trail of bread crumbs leading you to one of the happy endings, surprising twists, and next chapters they have shared with him. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/life-love/sex-relationships/advice/a12659/love-illuminated-book-review/>