8 Rules of Love: How to Find it, Keep it, and Let it Go

Part 2 addresses partner compatibility through three rules related to communicating one’s definition of love, learning from a partner, and discovering individual purpose. It corresponds to the Grhastha ashram, or second stage of the Vedic life stages, which involves household or married life, reinterpreted in the book as the stage of practicing love.

Rule 3 stresses the importance of understanding one’s definition of love and communicating it with a partner. It provides steps that follow different stages of love: attraction, dreams, struggle and growth, and trust. It begins with an anecdote of a writer saying “I love you” to a partner who had a different definition of love, to illustrate the importance of communicating this definition.

This rule extracts four phases of love from the Bhakti tradition of “falling in love with the divine” (79). It describes the stages of initial attraction, combating unrealistic dreams and creating realistic expectations, encountering and growing from differences, and building trust in relationships. For the attraction stage, Shetty suggests using the “three-date rule” to evaluate a person’s compatibility in their personality, values, and goals by using three dates to ask questions about deep topics, a date’s challenges and values, their decision-making process, and their dreams.