Requiem for romantic love, marriage and children? Explorations in intimate relations in China, Japan and South Korea
Are we in a time when the ideal of romantic love and its practice as a cocooned, stable dyad eventually ripening into family come to an end? Or have so many new forms of mobile intimacies emerged for mobile people that romantic love is but one option for intimacy among many? Has the fluidity of gender boundaries and the relatively easy access to sex via the internet and pornography made romantic love seem old hat, more like Stendhal’s desiccated bough with the crystals all melted?