I’ve been saying for a while that the world, particularly the West, is in a sort of romantic interregnum. What does all this political Sturm und Drang do to our love lives?

Two radical writers have trained their gaze on love in new books: Love in a F

cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together .

Dean Spade is a self-help book that would make the fascists’ skin crawl.

Shon Faye’s Love in Exile is a memoir of sorts, a meditation on love through personal and political experience.

The right is trying to stop the collapse of heterosexuality by brute force, writes Frida Ghitis .

Ghitis: Queer communities have built alternate structures of care that heterosexuals are just now beginning to learn from, valuing friendship and ongoing connection rather than serial monogamy common to straight daters.

She says that romantic advice ignores this history in order to personalize our problems and tell us that at some level they come from the kind of person we are.

Frida Ghitis : I'm leery of a self-help culture that flattens out complex ideas into personality types that you can discover by taking a quiz.

She says we navigate in our personal lives a kind of dialectic between the individual and the social.

Ghitis says there are no easy answers to relationship questions.