I read this book when it was first published and really enjoyed it overall. The essays were heartfelt and dealt with some of the common feelings of angst about relationships and negotiations. No one ever talks about how difficult relationships can really be and in this book the discussion starts.

I'm a bit surprised that the book has elicited such negative reviews. I think it's worth reading and I personally love Seal Press books. They aren't necessarily academic, but are certainly provocative.

I can't believe the negative reviews I've just found regarding this title... and some of them written by so-called feminists themselves. How can someone be offended by a book or the stories of others' lives? Only if they choose to fear words or the expression of others' thoughts and ways of life.

Love and partnership: the very subject matter is quite personal and so, the anthology is a collection of intimate tales very openly shared showing the trials, tribulations, challenges, and discoveries of a variety of women. For the first time in reading these accounts, I've realized there are others like me...those of us who don't view relationships, sex, and love as conventional, traditional, or confined but as very unique and individual circumstances and arrangements fitting the uniqueness of the individuals involved themselves. The stories will open your mind, introduce new ways of thought, and support the idea that we are all connected, as humans and women, no matter how different we may be. The stories are inspiring, making you feel included rather than excluded, and give you the motivation to continue to seek the partnerships best suited to your own needs and wants.

It's a joy to read, full of surprises, and exactly what you'd expect from such a title. It serves to confirm the definition and benefit of true and inclusive feminism, allowing room for all of us whether we go the marriage route or not.

I found this book to be witty, charming and honest. It offers examples of how heterosexual relationships are challenged and penalized by gender hegemonhy and the social narrative of heteronormativity. Moreover, it's far from a dry or verbose scholarly text. It is clever and fun to read.

Just when you thought it was safe to venture into the psychology section of your local bookstore, this anthology of stupefying nonsense appears. Demonstrating the most intellectually flaccid tendencies of third-wave feminism, _Young Wives' Tales_ is a psychobabblish collection of anecdotes in which various women tell readers how they found love. The prerequisite for submitting to the editors of this volume must have been poor writing skills; all of the included authors are foggy sentence machines. Worse, all demonstrate what Adrienne Rich calls the middle-class fantasy that one can resolve the political and historical dilemmas of marriage in purely personal ways. Hence the series of embarassing, improvised "commitment ceremonies" documented in the volume -- all of which seem designed to provide thier participants with fodder for the next therapy session.

Heavy on self-expression and light on analysis, this book is like an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show: it's earnest, it means to improve people,and it's peppered with new age terminology. In brief stylistically undistringuished first-person essays, a series of female authors discuss their erotic parnterships. Most are married. Some aren't. All consider their amorous narratives to be somehow awesome. Readers are regaled with embarassingly personal and sentimental accounts: one woman's struggle to have an orgasm, another's tacky Las Vegas wedding, yet another's goddess ceremony in which she and her partner worshipped corn (that's right). It's not clear why we should care about any of this; because the writers have no finesse, they appear to be a group friends selected by the editors at random, so the collection has the feeling of an all-girls slumber party -- a buncha spoiled upper-middle-class chicks sittin' around rapping. And there's a deeper problem. Virtually each smarmy essay presents marriage as the path to self-improvement (in the words of one author,getting married has made her kinder toward herself). This reactionary sentiment is hard enough to take when it comes from the columns of women's magazines, but packaged as a feminist manifesto, it's truly offensive.