You know about the bestselling book, Fifty Shades of Grey. No need to dissect it here. Decide for yourself if it’s erotica, or pornography, or just a really really sexy love story. The fact is it started off as Twilight fan fiction, and fan fiction has rather elastic standards in storytelling. Twilight itself (the first  … Read more

As millions of Americans scramble to put their federal income taxes together at the last minute, let’s briefly ponder the roles that taxes and money play in romances. Romance heroines are almost never rich. They usually must work or acquire income to cover their basic needs, or someone in their family must support them. From  … Read more

Do you want to “hear” the thoughts of both main characters in a romance? Does knowing the feelings of the hero help the story or hinder it? How much is enough? Can we know too much? Not so long ago, heroes of romance were opaque. Romances were written strictly from the heroine’s point of view,  … Read more

We want love. We spend countless hours dreaming about love, imagining what love will be like. Then we devote more hours, days, and even years seeking love. We meet people, and we get involved. We try to discern if love exists in relationships we enter into that are possibly defined by lust, convenience, or even  … Read more

Whether demystifying the world of online dating or connecting the dots between two political icons, H. Michael Bastien writes with insight into how people act and react to each other in his book The Common Sense Clicker: Guide to Online Dating. Bastien’s background in psychology and information systems finds a niche in the electronic dating  … Read more

Valentine’s Day, February 14th, has come and gone. Ah, but President’s Day is around the corner. Time to plan a festive meal with a red, white, and blue theme. Make a dessert with strawberries, white frosting, and blueberries. Maybe buy an actual flag, too. There isn’t much else to do on President’s Day except shop  … Read more

Every once in a while I have to devote some time to just admiring male pulchritude. Yes, men can be beautiful. They are handsome, attractive, cute, stern, adorable, tough, and sexy. It’s February, the month when too much ice and snow annoy too many people in the temperate zones. It’s the month when some of  … Read more

Love is wonderful. It can also make you crazy. Today’s very open society, in which men and women mingle freely at work and at play, in public and private spaces, has led to complicated, intimate romantic expectations. Lots of them, major and minor. In this we have an advantage over people of past eras, because  … Read more

“Anything Goes” isn’t just the name of a Broadway musical that has been successfully performed in every decade since it debuted in 1934. It’s also the truth about our society in the 21st century. Never have there been as many choices available to women at every step of their lives. As we look at the  … Read more

You’ve probably explored YouTube’s vast collection of video kisses, which includes movie kisses, television kisses, music video kisses, behaviors just like kissing, passionate glances indicating a desire to kiss, and more. I just found them and am totally surprised. I thought I was the only person in the world who treasured a few seconds of  … Read more