While Houston was chronicling Lucy O'Rourke's quest for love in the 1990s and recounting episodes from her dysfunctional childhood, the American family was changing. According to Stephanie Sado and Angela Bayer of the Population Resource Center, the median age for first marriage in the late 1990s was twenty-seven for men and twenty-five for women. But an increasing number of people were forsaking marriage to cohabitate. From 1990 to 2000, the number of unmarried couples living together soared from 3.2 million couples in 1990 to 5.5 million couples in 2000. However, the divorce rate declined during that time, from 4.8 per 1,000 to 4.2 per 1,000 in 1998. For dating, single men and women (and some married ones) increasingly turned to the "Personals," the classified section of newspapers and magazines in which people advertise for mates. Some women turned to books on dating strategy, such as Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider's bestselling The Rules: Time Tested Secrets for Capturing...