A NEW BOOK THAT EXPLORES AN OLD TABOO
A collection of revealing personal stories and commentary
- You will want to read this book if:
- You have a rich relationship history—and
- Talking about a former lover feels like a forbidden subject in your current relationship.
- Something about that doesn’t feel quite right.
- You wonder what might happen if it were different–if you could tell your partner.
- You value your relationship and want to enrich and deepen it.
- Hearing others reveal their most cherished past love stories would fascinate you.
At the core of If Only I Could Tell You: Where Past Loves and Current Intimacy Meet are interviews with twenty-eight women and men who disclose how memories of former loves continue to echo in their hearts and current relationships. They tell us what they actually do with those memories–and where their choices have led.
While conventional wisdom counsels the seemingly no-risk choice of minimal disclosure, the experience revealed and comments offered here suggest that, for some couples, conversations about past loves can be a meaningful way to increase intimacy. The authors, drawing from their own experience and from these stories, encourage you to consider what might be lost if the whole subject of past loves is relegated to a place marked "off limits."
This book will not tell you what choices to make. It offers an unusual view into the lives of others, one which enables you to encounter, in a more conscious way, your own feelings about past loves, questions of intimacy, and the meeting place between the two.
Praise for If Only I Could Tell You
Kate Harper and Leon Marasco have found an interesting and significant subject: not only the importance of past loves, but the nature of intimacy itself. The book would be worth reading for the interviews alone, which are both moving and profoundly thought-provoking. Denying the importance of one's past loves, it becomes clear, is not only one strike against any present love and the struggle for intimacy, it's also a strike against the unity of the self.
- Tim Brookes, author of Guitar