What exactly are the benefits and costs of couplehood? In her radical new book, Sally Cline explores how our lives can be enhanced or destroyed by intimate partnerships. Reinterpreting and enlarging definitions of heterosexual, lesbian and gay male relationships, she explodes the myth that traditional partnerships are necessarily the ideal way of life. She also distinguishes between the idealized perceptions of coupled life and the rather more complicated -- and often more rewarding -- realities.