Fans pick 100 books like How to Not Die Alone

This might seem like an odd choice if you’re searching for a book to cure your heartbreak—but hear me out.

I think sometimes we stay in relationships that aren’t a great fit for us entirely too long because we’re striving to have a picture-perfect life. Dr. Schafler doesn’t directly take on relationships, but she does teach you how to use your perfectionist tendencies for good, in ways that serve your life and your ambitions, instead of running your life or having you out here making terrible choices (like drunk dialing ol’dude…).

I read this book in grad school while I was working on an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books about choosing to be child-free.

Sometimes, you just need some real talk and a reminder that the deck really is stacked against you when it comes to dating. This book helped provide some much-needed perspective so that I could understand that there’s only so much control I have over my own singleness and that there are cultural factors at play. 

A lot of people know Rachel Cargle because of her activism and her community building. But her life story shows how sometimes you have to let go of what you’ve been taught to want so you’re free to go after what you really want.

Rachel wasn’t satisfied being a well-loved, stay-at-home wife in a small Ohio town. But it was hard for her to exit her marriage because we’ve all been taught to find a good man and hang on tight. Rachel did manage to leave and step onto a radically different life path. She’s open in the book about fluidity around her sexuality and exploring non-monogamy.

I contributed an essay to this collection and there’s quite a few writers I admire in this book, as well.

It’s refreshing to see other people’s perspective on what can feel like an albatross around your neck. Some of the essays are humorous, others are more poignant, but they all work together to show that a single life can look and feel a bazillion different ways—yours will be what you make it.

It is not easy to write a self-help book without sounding pompous or unrealistic. This is why The Dance of Intimacy became a model for my own self-help books.

Lerner’s writing is straightforward, personal, and practical. She is, as am I, an unabashed feminist who understands that strengthening and/or healing relationships require the participation of both partners. First published in 2009 I have recommended this wise book to hundreds of clients. 

This book from the early 1990s continues to speak volumes about society today. In completely accessible writing, it helped me to see how major historical developments (the spread of democracy and belief in human equality) occur in tandem with people’s daily lives (marriages that pursue the ideal of “democracy in intimacy”).

Couples who pursue “pure relationships” founded on sexual and emotional equality are doing something revolutionary—in a revolution that has been gathering momentum for over two centuries. Each of Anthony Giddens’s chapters illuminates different aspects of this large story, and each gave me insights into what it means to be a man or a woman seeking love and happiness in a changing world.

This is an excellent book about relationships and attachment theory, which describes our attachment styles in relationships. I loved reading this book because it taught me about my own attachment style and how I am in relationships.

This is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn about themselves in relationships. I enjoyed the concepts in the book and how relatable it was. I recommend this to every human being who would like a relationship. It is a great way to learn about yourself.

If you're looking for a book that captures the zeitgeist of contemporary relationships, here it is, well before the reign of Facebook. Calling upon social commentary, psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, feminist theory, anthropology, family theory, and linguistics, the author presents a broad-based, scholarly, and sobering analysis of the toxic trends and processes in our society which are casting Americans adrift from their emotional and psychic moorings, and leaving them unable to initiate or sustain meaningful relationships.

Because of the ever-growing impersonal nature of our society, it has become more difficult to begin and sustain intimate relationships. Indeed, it seems as if modern life is represented by a series of relationships of convenience that often lack substance. These kinds of insights make this book very appealing. The author contends that we're losing our overall ability to be involved in meaningful relationships and instead are relegated to something less. Most important, the author… show more.

Long familiar to me, John O’Donohue’s books became a particular solace when grief arrived. I would recommend any of his books.

O’Donohue lived on the western coast of Ireland, and he had a distinctive wisdom about threshold spaces—those places between the life we have known and the one we cannot yet see—and a compassionate way of inviting us to receive the grace that comes as we stumble our way across those thresholds.

Eternal Echoes is one of my favorites among O’Donohue’s books. I am especially taken by his chapter about absence, where he acknowledges the deep ache of loss while also emphasizing that our losses are not utterly empty; they hold a hidden eternity that does not abandon us. I am both consoled and challenged by his assurance that grief is a mystery that knows its way.

I love this anthology by women over fifty because it offers such a wide range of truths about our experiences with sex and intimate relationships.

More than fifty essays and poems cover a variety of honest reflections on the exquisite, the good, the not-so-good, and the challenging parts of older women relating sexually to men, to women, and to themselves.

Feelings expressed range from the ambivalence, disappointment, and ecstasy of dating, to the pleasures of being single, to the joy of long-term sex and commitment, to the acceptance of the sometimes sudden movement between these states. Can be read in one or two delicious gulps!