The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships

The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships – Neil Strauss

Neil Strauss became famous for The Game, his bestselling account of infiltrating a community of pickup artists and learning to seduce women. But years later, after cheating on and losing Ingrid, the woman he loved, he found himself questioning everything he believed about relationships. In The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, he tells the story of his attempt to understand himself and to figure out whether monogamy was right for him.

Strauss begins by checking himself into a rehabilitation facility for sex addiction, where therapists challenge him to confront the roots of his behavior, including his relationship with his parents and childhood experiences that shaped his fear of intimacy. Unconvinced that monogamy is natural or possible, he then sets out to explore alternatives, investigating polyamory, open relationships, communes, swinging and other nontraditional arrangements, meeting a wide range of people and experimenting with different ways of living and loving.

As his journey continues, Strauss discovers that the problems he was trying to solve could not be fixed by changing the structure of his relationships, and that real change required facing his own wounds, honesty and vulnerability. The book traces his path back toward Ingrid and toward a deeper understanding of love and commitment.

Written with candor, humor and self-examination, and including interviews with experts and documents from his therapy, the book is part memoir and part investigation into modern relationships.

The Truth is a provocative read for adult readers interested in relationships, psychology and personal growth. It contains explicit sexual content and frank discussion of addiction and infidelity.