Love, phew! As you grow older, and by when it’s likely that you’ve tolerated the insouciance of many heartbreakers, the idea of romantic love may rarely make you smile. Nor do the love stories of Nicholas Sparks or Danielle Steel, and Nora Ephron, in particular, whose rom-coms were known to melt even the steely. By this time, you may have noticed that I’ve dropped the word “love” four times already. Believe me, I’m exhausted too. The disillusionment is real.

As I take the elevator to the 21st floor of Taj Lands End in Bandra West, with Jay Shetty’s 8 Rules of Love: How to Find it, Keep it and Let it go (Thorsons, HarperCollins) sitting in my hands, I am fearing that my own judgment about “love” will cloud the impending interview. Los Angeles-based Shetty, who I meet in one of the suites, is no stranger to this disenchantment. The 35-year-old author, podcaster and former monk grew up on a diet of Hollywood and Bollywood mush. “I loved those movies, and I thought that’s what love looked like,” he says, laughing while recalling being ruined by the Shah Rukh Khan-Madhuri Dixit-Karisma Kapoor starrer Dil To Pagal Hai (1997). “And so, when I first started seeing my wife [vegan, plant-based chef and entrepreneur Radhika Devlukia-Shetty] and going on dates, I was always trying to do what I saw in the movies... it had to be flowers at the door, or a beautiful restaurant and a fancy dinner. Radhi would tell me, ‘we could have just stayed home, and made a sandwich or something’.”