Intimate behaviour is today a principal cause of social conflict in the USA. Drawing on a range of evidence, this study charts the change from a Victorian spiritual ideal of love to efforts by modern reformers to sexualize love.

Leonard Cohen is one of the great writers, performers, and most consistently daring artists of our time. Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.

After decades of feminism and deconstruction, romance remains firmly in place as a central preoccupation in the lives of most women. Divorce rates skyrocket, the traditional family is challenged from all sides, and yet romance seems indestructible. In terms of its cultural representation, the popularity of romance also appears unchallenged. Popular fiction, Hollywood cinema, television soap-operas, and the media in general all display a seemingly bottomless appetite for romantic subjects. The trappings of classic romance—white weddings, love songs, Valentine's Day--are as commercially viable as ever. In this anthology of original essays, romance is revisited from a wide spectrum of perspectives, not just in fiction and film but in a whole range of cultural phenomena. Essays range over such issues as Valentine's Day, interracial relationships, medieval erotic visions and modern romance fiction, the relationship between the lesbian poet H.D. and Bryher, the pervasive whiteness of romantic desire, lesbian erotica in the age of AIDS, and the public romance of Charles and Diana.

In Romantic Longings Steven Seidman offers an original perspective on the origins and current meaning of the American intimate culture. Drawing on a wide range of sources--sex surveys, advice literature, autobiographies, novels--he charts a change from a Victorian spiritual ideal to efforts by current reformers to sexualize love. Stressing that contemporary notions of intimacy are grounded in twentieth-century historical developments, he observes the birth of a culture of eroticism in the post-World War II years--a culture where sexuality is conceived as both a sphere of love and intimacy and a domain of pleasure and self-expression.

Observers from the West, the book contends, have incorrectly projected rigid ethnocentric notions of love and marriage onto cultures around the world. Contributors look beyond each society's "official" institutions to explore expressions of love, offering new perspectives on arranged marriages and polygamy and reexaminging as well the other side of the equation: rejection and grief.

In Screw the Fairytale, Helen Croydon traces the history of relationships in an immersive, first-person account. She shows how marriage was never supposed to be about love anyway. She investigates the prevalence of mistresses across different eras and cultures to see what we can learn from infidelity and explores the science of falling in love. Highlights of her mission take in a polyamorous commune in the Scottish Highlands (where she has to carry out a sexual pact), a wife-finding tour to the Ukraine and infiltrating a network of single professional women who've chosen to give up on finding love and get a sperm donor instead. Interviews with psychologists, evolutionists, asexuals, swingers, philanderers, long-term marrieds, mistresses and 40 year old virgins all combine to break new ground in this humorous and insightful guide to sex and love for the modern girl.