Last summer, when Mae Tingstrom had the idea to open a romance bookstore in Ventura, Calif., the first thing she did was search online to see whether there was already one in her region. She found The Ripped Bodice — a bookstore in Culver City that was doing so well, it was expanding to a…
Joy Lorton, 80, has been married and divorced four times. “I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, when everybody was supposed to get married and have kids, so I did that,” said Ms. Lorton, who lives in Olympia, Wash., and has three daughters, seven grandchildren and a gaggle of great-grandchildren. But each of her…
New love can consume our thoughts, supercharge our emotions and, on occasion, cause us to act out of character. “People pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love and they die for love,” said Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. “It’s one of the most…
