In the early twenty-first century shifts in gender and sexuality, work and mobility patterns and especially technology have provoked interest in perceived threats to social bonding on a global scale. This edited collection explores the fracturing of couple culture but also its persistence.

Mary Harrod is Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of From France with Love: Gender and Identity in French Romantic Comedy (2015), Heightened Genre and Women's Filmmaking in Hollywood (2021) and the co-edited collections The Europeanness of European Cinema (2015) and Women Do Genre in Film and Television (2017, winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Best Edited Collection Prize 2019).

Suzanne Leonard is Professor of English and Director of the Master's Degree in Gender and Cultural Studies at Simmons University in Boston, USA. She is the author of Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century (2018) and Fatal Attraction (2009) and co-editor of Fifty Hollywood Directors (2014).

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin, Ireland. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, she is the author, editor or co-editor of 12 books, the most recent of which is Shadow of a Doubt (2021). She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Television and New Media and Chair of the Irish Fulbright Commission.

Introduction: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture - Before and After COVID-19; 1 Abject Desires in the Age of Anger: Incels, Femcels and the Gender Politics of Unfuckability; 2 Love Technologies: Televisual Matchmaking and Algorithmic Attraction; 3 Negotiating Romantic Relationships in the Cell Phone Age: The Jamaican Context; 4 Facing the Fig Tree: Contemporary Intimacy Culture in Master of None; 5 Open (to) Marriage: Saving Sanctioned Coupling through Consensual Nonmonogamy Narratives; 6 Aliens, Mermaids and Cartoons: Neoliberal Gender Politics in Twenty-First Century South Korean Dramas; 7 Romantic, Transnational and Messy: Intimate Spaces/Cosmopolitan Spaces in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong; 8 Mixed Feelings: (Inter)Raced Romance and the Post-Millennial Romantic Comedy; 9 The Bittersweet Queer Romance: Affect and Temporality in Weekend and Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo; 10 Plaisirs d'amour: Love and Popular Fiction in Contemporary France; 11 His Baby Daddy is an Alien?!: Mpreg Fantasies and Queer Reproductive Intimacies in Contemporary M/M Science Fiction Romance ; 12 Bibliographic Traces: The Material Book and the Quest for Intimacy in Spike Jonze's Her