Croydon, H: Screw the Fairytale - Tapa blanda

Whenever Helen Croydon mentions that marriage and kids just aren't on her radar, everyone tells her that she'll become 'one of those old ladies with lots of cats'. But what, she asks, is so wrong with that?

Cats don't have boring in-laws that take up entire weekends and they don't soak the bathroom and scribble on walls either, do they?

Just what is the obsession with white weddings and 2.4 children anyway? For the first time in history, long-term relationships are no longer a necessity, but a luxury. Yet you're still deemed a failure if you don't find The One, and worse if you're not even looking in the first place!

Just because you don't want to share your home and bed with a significant other, it doesn't mean love is out of the question but perhaps, like Helen, the shackles of commitment are not for you. Join her as she goes on a quest to find a more realistic approach to romance to fit with today's independent lifestyles and to discover what works and what doesn't along the way.

Through hilarious anecdotes from her own love life to undercover missions, including a meeting for sex addicts, a 'wife-finding tour' to Ukraine and staying in a polyamorous commune in The Highlands along with fascinating interviews with anthropologists, psychologists, swingers, sperm donor mothers and more, journalist Helen debunks the fairytale myth that finding true love is our only route to Utopia.

Helen Croydon is an author, journalist and broadcaster specialising in topics surrounding modern relationships, health and woman's issues. She is the author of Sugar Daddy Diaries, a confessional memoir which explores the attraction of power and questions modern models of relationships. (Mainstream Publishing, March 2011) and 100 Lessons on Sex, part of a new eBook series of 100 Lessons in 100 Words or Less (Visual Aid Publishing). She writes regularly for The Times, Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Mail, and various magazines.