Page 6 - Advanced Romance

Advanced Romance* 3
be saved in an almost religious sense by a tall dark stranger or a shapely radiant neighbor. Love’s morals have historically been policed by religion, and one of its sub-fundamentalisms is that God has made some special someone for you. I hope so.
Secondly, to analyze romance is often thought
as equivalent to promoting immorality, be it reckless polygamy, destructive promiscuity, or some other highly-criticized sexual deviance. That is, promoting the heartless player, the abusive spouse, or some other polymorphous perversity.
And thirdly, until very recently, our culture had restrictively defined the way to love and made all
other ways taboo. For thousands of years of Western Civilization that defined way was heterosexual missionary monogamy. All other possibilities were dangerously taboo until the 1960s. Now hetero-miss- mono is no longer the inviolate monarch and other postures and other orientations (such as LGBTQ+) are tolerated in many states and countries.
These options join with traditional heterosexuality to form the additional variations of serial monogamy, polyamory, open, swinging, monogamish, relationship anarchy, polyandry, polygyny, etc.1 But this book will not go extensively into those immense new sexual jungles, but instead will examine the impulse behind all these types of attraction, the engine of all these types of romantic love, and what that means in the