- Publisher:
- PENGUIN
- Year of publication:
- 2024
- ISBN:
- 978-1-959524-03-8
- Pages:
- 240
F*CKBOYS ARE BORING
A GAY MAN'S GUIDE TO DATING (FOR EVERYONE)
RYAN SHELDON
A bold book thats part memoir, manifesto, and dating guide all rolled into one. It speaks with honesty and insight, while challenging toxic dating trends and offering a better journey through it.
-DR. CHRIS DONAHUE, CSW, author of Rebel Love and Host of LoveLine
This salacious, heartbreaking, and hilarious book follows Ryan Sheldon, a gay man, brawn model (featured on billboards in Times Square, NYC), and eating disorder advocate (interviewed on the Today Show), as he shares his wild dating stories. In F*ckboys Are Boring, Sheldon offers a new way of rating dates with a compatibility scale, the first of its kind, and invites readers to create their own scale so they can make relationship choices based on their values (not just raw attraction). But it's more than love and romance, FAB is also an exploration into self-destructive behaviors (eating disorder, OCD, addiction to chaos, mental health for LGBTQIA+ people), self-worth (body image as a gay man in a larger body), and self-elevation (listening to your intuition and healing from attachment wounds) in a world that seems determined to dehumanize and diminish us. And it offers an elixir for the weary soul who wants to feel worthy of love. Because we all are.
F*ckboys Are Boring is THE guide to surviving the digital hellscape that is modern dating (for anyone who has ever dated a man...it's brutal out here!).
Who's your favorite f*ckboy? Have you drooled over a spiritual guru boy who wants to do questionable things with crystals? Did you find a fetishizer who had an obsession with your feet or watching you eat? Are you chasing the knight in shining armor so he can save you from yourself (when all he'll really do is string you along and then ghost you)? These are just a few of the f*ckboys listed in this book on the F*ckboy Wall of Shame. Yes, there are enough for an entire wall. And no, you're not alone if you've fallen for one of these gorgeous disasters. Or...maybe you are the f*ckboy. Maybe youre the problem. Its you (Girl, its all of us).
Motivational speaker, brawn model, and eating disorder advocate, Ryan Sheldon offers a path to healing while looking for love. F*ckboys Are Boring is for anyone who has struggled with self-esteem and feeling unlovable while searching for connection in this disconnected world. Whether youre gay, straight, bi-sexual, pansexual, or queer, this book offers reprieve from swipe culture and offers a new approach to dating. Instead of concepts like the 5 Love Languages, it's got a F*ckboy Decoder (so you know what they really mean when they say, "I've never met anyone like you before").
Sheldon draws on Pia Mellody's work about love avoidance, limerence, love addiction, and codependence while sharing his own experiences with healing trauma so he can date as a whole, emotionally regulated, confident human being.
But its so much more than a book about love and romance. Sheldon gets vulnerable about his struggles with mental illness, including obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), abandonment wounds, and his addiction to chaos. He shares the truth about his eating disorder recovery and what it was like to walk away from an abusive relationship. He shares openly about what it's like to date in a larger-size body in the LGBTQ community and finding love and acceptance for himself at any size. And he doesnt hold back when he shares the wild stories from dating as a gay man in New York and West Hollywood, and the lessons he learned from those experiences.
Readers will come away with their own list of dating deal-breakers, a dating scale for rating dates, guides on how to maintain boundaries and self-respect, ways to recognize red flags (like gaslighting and love-bombing), and a toolbox of resources that Sheldon has picked up through decades of therapy. If youre frustrated with the dehumanizing digital hellscape that is modern dating, F*ckboys Are Boring provides solace and support for the love-weary.
Sheldon is like your gay best friend, dishing on all his outrageous dating stories and spicy sexual encounters, offering guidance and wisdom, and crying with you as one heartbroken survivor to another. F*ckboys Are Boring offers compassionate hope to everyone (including f*ckboys) who is tired of the games and ready to find real love, both for themselves, and with a truly worthy partner.
