Love’s Labour

The #1 Sunday Times bestselling author examines love and relationships

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Love’s Labour

By: Stephen Grosz

Narrated by: Stephen Grosz

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Brought to you by Penguin.

Compelling new stories from the psychoanalyst's consulting room; on desire, heartbreak and learning how to love.

When it comes to love why do we find things so difficult? Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there?

In the intimate space of the consulting room, we meet the woman who can’t post her wedding invitations but then, decades later, can’t decide whether to get divorced; the friendship group that explodes when an adulterous affair begins; and the man whose partner’s death is almost too much to bear.

As an analyst, Grosz’s unerring ability is to locate what ails the heartsick. As a writer, he elegantly shows how we can deploy the agonies of love as tools for understanding.

The labour of love is the work of a lifetime but in finally learning to see ourselves and our world clearly, we find we are truly ready to love one another.

‘Illuminating, beautiful . . . This is a special book, full of little epiphanies’ Natasha Lunn, author of Conversations on Love

'This is a beautiful book' Nigella Lawson

'You will be better at love after you read this book’ Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon

© Stephen Grosz 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Stephen GroszStephen GroszVintage Digital

Love, Dating & Attraction

Marriage & Long-Term Partnerships

Personal Development

Personal Success

Psychology

Psychology & Mental Health

Relationships

Heartfelt

Love, Dating & Attraction Marriage & Long-Term Partnerships Personal Development Personal Success Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Relationships Heartfelt

Critic reviews

‘An exceptional writer and psychoanalyst … the poet laureate of human emotion’

'A profound meditation on love and healing. Powerful and important. Essential reading'

‘Love really is a labour: that's something they don't tell you in the fairy stories or the reality shows. But Stephen Grosz knows a lot about the pain and joy of human relationships and in this book he generously shares his wisdom with the rest of us’

'Full of moments of revelation that stay with you forever ... It would not be humanly possible for me to recommend his work more highly'

‘Reading Stephen Grosz is a deep sort of pleasure, and this book's movingly told true stories left me feeling wiser and more open to life’

Someone whose work I’ve long admired… Love’s Labour, is a collection of true stories about love and the ways we struggle to find and sustain it (Esther Perel)

‘This is a special book, full of little epiphanies. Grosz combines illuminating stories from therapy with such beautiful writing that you forget these people are his patients and not fictional characters. He reminds us how complex love is, how much it requires of us, and how many times we can misunderstand each other – and ourselves – in the process. It's a love story about the relationship between lovers, between a therapist and patient, and between us all, if we are brave enough to attempt it’

‘Grosz’s transfixing stories will increase your openness to and aptitude for the greatest of all emotions: you will be better at love after you read this book’

'Stephen Grosz is a beautiful writer, a clear, compelling thinker, an observant, wise, and deeply empathetic human being'

'Full of thought prompts and ideas that resonate long after you finish the book ... It’s a strange, thoughtful, deeply compelling book'

Most relevant

I knew, from the first chapter, this would be a book that changes everything for me, and, having just finished it, I can already sense this is true. I will be recommending this book to many people, and I suspect I will be doing so for the rest of my life.

It has been a decade since my first and last relationship. I was not treated well. At some point I died inside, possibly the moment they casually mentioned they were never even pregnant after I’d spent years grieving a lie they told to stop me from leaving them. Eventually they crossed a line that nearly ended my life but thankfully led to a restraining order to keep them from harming me again, and I have been free and safe on a practical basis, but deeply wounded, ever since.

Recently I have become able to open myself to others again, but with such fear and confusion, and such intense dissociation, I’ve been unable to even pass the starting line as I thought I knew what would come next. This book has changed that by adding to and crystallising a lot of work done in therapy, for it wasn’t love that hurt me, it was something I—with the innocence/naivety of youth—mistook for love. How can one begin to love a first time, when they wrongly believe they are trying to love a second? I see that now, that I can’t find love with a template, let alone one so far removed from the reality of what love is. I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now; I actually prefer the idea it remains something of a dynamic mystery or puzzle, something to solve with another, that keeps giving so long as whoever ‘we’ may be continue to keep labouring as two people together as a couple—as equals, as partners, as friends, through the good and the bad, for as long as there is freedom to stay or leave, and the will to keep trying.

Stephen Grosz, I want to thank you personally for writing this book, for helping me to gain perspective I had long been seeking without quite knowing what I was seeking, and for handling the most sensitive and heart-wrenching matters with such grace, clarity, compassion and candour—with such a prescient yet grounded sense of humanity, even archetypal, or, dare I say it, divine depth of truth and congruency with reality. Honestly, I lack the words to fully express how deeply moved I am by your words and poignant parables of pain and coldness delicately balanced with catharsis and love, but I will trust these words to have been enough to convey my sincere gratitude to you, even though I have a habitual desire to further gild this lily.