I Am No Longer Myself Without You: How Men Love Women Book

"In our love of women, a part of us seeks to recover our attachment to our mothers. In the men we love we seek the father we once idealised. In each case we love what has been lost to us. There is nothing to be gained in guilt, only acknowledging that to love ourselves we must love and be loved by another, and to love another we must be able to love ourselves. An last: men may struggle to love themselves and other men, be willing and be able to love their mothers and fathers and children but loving women is the hardest thing to do."Jonathan Rutherford's I Am No Longer Myself Without You claims to be "an anatomy of love". However, the reality is that what we have here is the musings of a man coming to terms with his own inability to commit or to show the kind of affection that he believes women really, really want.This is not to say it isn't fascinating stuff. Rutherford draws on the words and wisdom of many sources, ranging from Freud to the Yorkshire Ripper, Raymond Carver to George Michael. But at the end of the book we have learned very little that we didn't already know about the reasons why men find commitment and showing affection more than a little tricky, yet we are left with an intimate knowledge (well, almost intimate) of the author's love-life through the years. Whether its because of a man's mother-fixation, stemming from a fear of being abandoned by her, or perhaps because he watched too many cowboy movies as a kid where the hero rode off into the sunset alone rather than settling for a life of Little House on the Prairie-style domesticity, Rutherford offers a stream of excuses rather than solutions.However, his dissections of mother/son, father/son relationships, the male idea of romance and seduction, and the examination of the reality behind the "new man" make for a fascinating read.Women will enjoy I Am No Longer Myself Without You simply because it reiterates what they already know, and men will get all the confirmation they need that, whatever their failings in the love-stakes, they are not alone. --Susan HarrisonRead More