Reading about love: what it can bring you

Read about love lives in the Lust & Love section, published weekly in the Volkskrant. Short stories about love – gay, straight and trans.

The stories are gripping and poignant, recognizable perhaps. A back support for when things are not going well in your own relationship for a while. Because one thing is for sure, you’re not the only one.

Reading about love: tips

Also in this section, a series of stories about couples’ corona experiences. What did (and do) couples, singles and lovers run into? Read about it in Lust & Love.

Reading about love can be helpful. You can learn from it, you can recognize yourself in it, perhaps revel in it a bit (and that is allowed). As in Ernest van der Kwast’s latest novel. “Tasty scenes that always hurt a little too,” daily newspaper Trouw writes about Ilyas.

In Ilyas, Ernest describes the relationship crisis of main characters Peter and Kee. Both in Ilyas and in “real life,” there is a tipping point where the layering of the problem emerges. Very familiar to us in practice.

Relationship crisis: from contest to dialogue

Ilyas shows how difficult it can be to have a dialogue without snarling at each other. How arguments press on the sore spots. Partners shoot into survival mode and the conflict becomes a kind of contest.

In practice, we see this too, and during therapy we zoom in on it. So what happens during the conflict? And what makes one of the partners withdraw then, like character Peter in Ilyas? What do you need to make the system move? Sometimes that’s just one move by one of the partners.

Do you enjoy reading about love? Maybe you have a favorite love story or poem. Such texts can provide inspiration and support. Words from writers, thinkers who lived centuries back, just walking around with the same sores. Provides surprising comfort.

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