Can This Be Love?

Women who are having a live-in love affair may already have consultedand been entertained byRaphael's advice in her Glamour magazine column. Those pieces are collected here for handy reference by those who have brought The Relationship home with them, offering guidance on what to expect and how to keep living together contentedly. The author covers the bases, from the problems of ""loss of sovereignty'' over the bathroom to learning to fight fair and keeping the romance active even when he insists on sleeping in his Coors Beer t-shirt. Bemused tolerance is Raphael's suggested key to coping (always remind yourself what it was like when you lived with mother), even if he likes the bedroom at 55 and your toes are freezing. The author's realistic portrait of live-in love occasionally begs the subversive question, ``Is it really worth it?,'' but to take it all too seriously is, perhaps, to miss the point here. November 20