Before You Overthink

We have more information about love than any generation before us. And somehow, less certainty about how to find it, feel it, keep it.

Attachment styles. Red flags. Love languages. Dating coaches. Podcasts. AI. We know what to look for. What to avoid. What everything might mean. And somehow, we have become less certain about what we feel.

We analyse the text before we feel the excitement. We question the chemistry before we let it move us. We turn uncertainty into a problem to solve.

Is this chemistry or anxiety? Is this a red flag? Am I settling? Are they emotionally unavailable? Is this my childhood wounds talking?

We keep looking for the answer before allowing ourselves to have the experience.

And somewhere along the way, love starts to feel like an assessment centre.

This book explores a different way. Not a return to naïveté. Something more difficult, and more beautiful: learning to trust ourselves enough to feel.

Because the answer isn't to think less about love.

Perhaps it's to feel more of it.

Before You Overthink — notes on love, longing, and fear, by Val Quarta

We have never understood love this well. We have never been this bad at it.

Before You Overthink is a collection of personal essays on desire, longing, tenderness, heartbreak, and the unbearable and beautiful space where nothing has been decided yet. Each one takes us on the author's journey, discovering the beliefs behind the patterns and learning to rewrite the stories.

It is for the romantic who learned to protect herself with analysis. For the overthinker who can explain every feeling instead of feeling it. For the skeptic who still hopes. For anyone who has stood at the edge of something beautiful and wondered whether to reach for it or run.

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About the author

Val Quarta

Val Quarta is an Italian writer with a background in psychology and neuroscience. Her work lives somewhere between a love letter and a conversation with yourself at 2 a.m.

She writes about love the way it actually arrives: in romance, and everywhere else. In friendship, in devotion, in the people who stay and the ones who could not. She is interested in what all our knowing is costing us, and in the question underneath it. Can you know a person from a story, or only from staying long enough to find out?

Her second book, Before You Overthink, is a collection of essays on love, longing, and fear.

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