As author Robin Goodwin writes, “This book is an attempt to deal with one big question: what happens to people's everyday relationships when there are significant changes in their society?” This is a very important question because relationships have differed substantially across both time and cultures. Take love. Members of many contemporary societies value love, consider it the basis for marriage, think it should be sexual, and seek opposite sex romantic partners. This hasn't always and everywhere been the case. In ancient Greece, for example, members of that society valued platonic forms of love. In their milieu, love wasn't linked with marriage, an institution that was then typically motivated by economic and political reasons. The ultimate in relationships for early Athenians was the nonsexual adoration of another, best exemplified in the bonds between two men. More recently, societies such as China have seen dramatic changes in the bases on which marriages are formed, going from predominantly arranged marriages to love matches. With shifts such as this occurring, it is crucial to know how sociocultural contexts and changes in societies affect the way we relate to others.

Research on relationships has thrived in the past 25 to 30 years. But research on how societal change influences relationships has not been a major focus. A few writers (e.g., Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), often from a sociological perspective, have written on this. Their analyses are largely scattered in diverse publications and have been neither integrated nor compared.