This book cracks open the fixed and brittle notion of "the couple" with twenty-nine personal pieces that rethink the structure of marital relations.

Ideas about love and marriage have changed dramatically over the last several decades. Across generations, creeds, sexualities, and so on, people are reexamining the nature of the traditional family. Here, essays explore and expand conventional ideas of marriage and family in American culture, offering diverse outlooks on the practice and ethics of companionship.

Part I explores challenges to the language associated with marriage and the couple—such as wife/husband, faithfulness, and cheating—and raises questions about romantic love and the exclusivity of the “legitimate” couple. Part II looks at living arrangements: people who are coupled but bring others into their relationship, couples who are together but live apart, couples with alternative living arrangements who seek connection outside of the duo, and more. Part III explores alternative loving arrangements: rejecting monogamy via additional simultaneous amorous relationships, equating friendships with romantic relationships, and dealing with love relationships that change over time.

Questioning well-worn cultural scripts, with contributors across generations and representing the full ethnic and cultural diversity of the United States, Loving Arrangements reveals the many ways we live and love today.