Wild Love Theory
Love Should Never Make You Smaller
Most relationship books begin with the relationship itself. Wild Love Theory begins with the people inside it.
“Love should never make you smaller.”
A relationship's highest calling is not merely to endure. It is to help the people within it become more fully alive.
A different understanding of what relationships are for
Most relationship books teach people how to protect a relationship, repair it, communicate within it, and keep it intact. Wild Love Theory starts from a different place. A relationship is not an end in itself. It exists to serve the human beings who created it, and its highest purpose is to provide the safety, strength, and freedom each person needs to become more fully themselves.
Rather than teaching people to function more successfully within inherited rules about love, sacrifice, security, and commitment, the book examines what those rules demand, and what living by them may have cost us without our realizing it.
How fear can disguise itself as protection. How sacrifice can become an unspoken obligation. How a relationship can appear stable while someone inside it is slowly disappearing.
Scott Shirley and April Zannini offer a new moral and practical architecture for intimate relationships, one capable of supporting greater freedom without abandoning safety, responsibility, or devotion. Through personal stories, careful reasoning, and original concepts, the book gives readers language for experiences they may have felt but never been able to explain.
Wild Love Theory applies to monogamous and non-monogamous relationships alike. It prescribes no particular structure and offers no freedom without accountability.
Built on six pillars
Authenticity
Autonomy
Expansiveness
Embodiment
Compersion
Transparency
Together, they create the possibility of safety without control, commitment without self-erasure, and closeness without requiring either person to become smaller.
Whether readers ultimately agree with every conclusion or not, Wild Love Theory asks questions that relationship culture rarely asks. Once those questions are raised and patterns are identified, they are difficult to unsee.Catherine Scantlin, MS, LCMHC
Founder, Expansive Connection Coaching
About the authors
Take the ideas off the page
Join a six-week guided study of Wild Love Theory. Six live 90-minute sessions with real conversation, practical exercises, and a private group of people asking the same questions you are.
& The Men's Table
Guided by April and Scott
Beginning October 26
$89 · includes 2 free months of AYA Society
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