Talk of Love

In exploring how Americans engage the culture of love, that author also probes what it means to have a culture. A culture includes platitudes and cliches, cynicism and disillusionment co-exist with high ideals, and people draw on these mixed messages to build and make sense of their lives. The Middle Americans interviewed for this book treasure the Hollywood picture of a perfect and sudden love, but they also recognize that love takes work; that "real love" is built by commitment and compromise, by taking the good with the bad and, above all, by communicating. This paradox between all-or-nothing romance and mature slow-growing partnerships is what this book resolves. In the process, the author discovers that culture gets organized inside the minds of individuals, and outside the self too, in different social contexts, codes and institutions.