Thus the gender and age disjunction relating to romantic consumption gradually disappeared in the postwar years as Australian men also became orientated to romantic consumption through American-style films, magazines, advertisements and the advent of generic self-help books with their inevitable relationship case studies^[82] which now made the verbal culture of American romantic love – previously confined to women’s magazines and romance novels – available to men, couched in the language of psychologists and stamped with the masculine authority of ‘scientists’.

With the popularisation of self-help books, another layer was added to the Western discourse of romantic love: the search for ‘intimacy’ replaced ‘passion’ as the Holy Grail of romantic love.^[83] ‘Intimacy’ – understood as the absence of loneliness, a ‘deep communication, friendship, and sharing that will last beyond the passion of new love’ – promised to cut through the Gordian knot of consumerism and romantic love in the West, offering a ‘refuge from the social fragmentation of late capitalism’.^[84] But the route towards intimacy was ‘communication’, its gateway the consumption of self-help books and its guides the American authors who traversed the world selling their new gospel of hope.

The most successful of these at the end of the twentieth century was, of course, John Gray, whose Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships (1993) sold over six million copies in the United States alone and was translated into more than forty languages worldwide, thereby claiming to be ‘the highest selling commercial book in the 1990s next to The Bible’.^[85] Gray’s book was published in Australia in 1993 and HarperCollins Australia has kept it in print ever since, branding it a ‘modern classic’. As late as 2000, Mars and Venus was selling over 20 000 copies a year in Australia, earning it a place on the annual ‘bestseller’ list.^[86] Sales figures do not, of course, tell us anything about reader reception or whether Australians have embraced and put into practice the tenets of romantic relationships to be found in such books. Indeed, such self-help material might be read as a new genre of consolation rather than as revelations about romantic relationships.^[87] The point, however, is that these discourses on romantic relationships have become transnational, not necessarily because of their intrinsic worth, but because they are marketed transnationally in what Karen S. Falling Buzzard has argued is a global process of ‘brand marketing’ that, for instance, sold John Gray as ‘the Coca-Cola of self help’.^[88]

It is these American techniques of marketing and advertising, more than anything else, that have established the American dominance of romantic love – whether it be as expertise or entertainment – in Australia through the course of the twentieth century. By the century’s end, the culture of romantic love, not just in Australia but right throughout the English-speaking world, had become transnational, shaped by new technologies and communications systems as well as advanced consumer capitalism, fed by transnational publishing and media corporations, and sophisticated methods of marketing and international distribution. As Illouz observed, ‘emotions are influenced and even shaped by the volatile “stuff” of culture: norms, language, stereotypes, metaphors, symbols’, which means they are also ‘subject to the twin influence of the economic and political spheres’.^[89] As one cultural narrative of romantic love becomes increasingly hegemonic worldwide through the American-dominated global economy, there is less and less common knowledge or understanding of alternative cultures or expressions of love.