Screw the Fairytale: what if you don’t want marriage and kids?”
Helen Croydon

To Helen Croydon, the idea of marriage and kids has just never appealed. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to fall in love. Meaningless, casual sex is of no interest yet the shackles of commitment is terrifying and, quite frankly, boring. So Helen sets out to explore alternative models of relationships to the conventional, committed, monogamous, 24-7, happily-ever-after fairytale.

Through immersive reportage, startling new research and tales from her own colourful love life, Helen argues that the de facto cohabiting marriage in a detached house with 2.4 children is no longer appropriate nor desirable in our modern, fast-paced world of opportunity. She finds mounting evidence that more people, like her, are saying ‘stuff the fairytale!’ and finding alternative relationship lifestyles.

Highlights of her mission takes in a polyamorous commune in the Scottish Highlands (where she has to carry out a sexual pact), a wife-finding tour to Ukraine with European men looking for Russian brides, infiltrating a network of single professional women who’ve chosen to give up on finding love and get a sperm donor and interviews with psychologists, evolutionists, asexuals, swingers, philanderers, long-term marrieds, mistresses and 40-year-old virgins.

Helen traces the history of relationships, showing how marriage was never supposed to be about love anyway. She investigates the prevalence of mistresses across different eras and cultures to see what we can learn from infidelity and she explores the science of falling in love, discovering that it has the same affect on the brain as crack addiction!