In 1979 Francesco Alberoni’s internationally-acclaimed book, Falling in Love and Loving, revolutionized the fields of sociology and psychology. Today, his new work, Sex and Love, marks another revolutionary turning point, giving for the first time a sense and order to the chaotic tangle of clashing and concording facets of love and sex. Alberoni systematically explores the full range of sexual and love relationships: from anonymous sex to amorous intimacy, from the frenzied coupling of two bodies to the union of two souls, from violent sex to utmost physical tenderness, and from the most rampant promiscuity to the most exclusive and faithful partnership.

In revealing the primordial bases for the way in which men and women interact, Alberoni takes an unflinching look at our secret motivations and contradictory desires, as well as at the facts we would prefer to ignore and the thoughts we had rather not admit to having. The book features an engaging and innovative mix of life stories and first-person accounts taken from literature or interviews. Each individual voice is intentionally left uncensored, and the language shifts back and forth from the brutal and obscene to the ardent and passionate, or to the painfully nostalgic if not poetically sublime. The reader is guided through the myriad of forms that sexual and love relationships take, a survey which provides true-to-life examples of impersonal and personal sex, erotic friendship, infatuation, and the galvanizing experience of falling in love, as well as of the subsequent love relationships that may either end or endure. The reader finds him or herself being swept away by a fast current of evoked and revealed desires, arousal, pleasure, ecstasy, joy, dilemmas, regrets, suffering, and hope. Francesco Alberoni’s latest work, Sex and Love, is both scientifically thorough in its approach and a relentlessly honest, sensitive, and compelling good read.