KR | Under The Covers Newsletter - February 2026

Welcome to Under The Covers, a monthly newsletter that aims to expand your sensual sphere with cultural recommendations. 

As heart-shaped decorations fill up building facades for Valentine’s, I wanted to steer our course from romantic relationships and towards something different: the intimacy inside friendships.

1. Challengers (2024, dir. Luca Guadagnino) — Film.

Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is an incredible film about toxic codependencies, where intimacy is seen as a powerful currency that turns lovers into opponents, friends into rivals. The movie follows two longtime tennis players, Patrick and Art, whose friendship implodes as their shared fondness for Tashi, a prodigious young woman in tennis, starts to overcome their lives.

I love the way intimacy is portrayed in this movie. Everything happens against this athletic backdrop where the default mode seems like you’re in constant competition with someone. It makes things sexy, which applies even to Patrick and Art’s dynamic. There’s subtle - yet unmistakable tension between them. And while the film leaves it largely unexplored, you feel immersed in this scrappy mano-a-mano battle they have going.

2. The Line of Beauty by Hollinghurst — Book.

I’m fully convinced that this Booker Prize-winning novel is one of the most sensual books I’ve read in a long while. I’ve always thought of desire less like a shock of lightning and more like a heatwave, flashing, enveloping your body ever-so-slowly. 

That is what I think Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty captures perfectly. That yearning for someone whom you haven’t even touched but rules your body so, even from afar. For the protagonist in the book, Nick, that’s Toby, a wealthy man from Oxford he rooms with at Notting Hill. “The pursuit of love,” Nick notes. “Seems to need the cultivation of indifference.” 

3. How to Fix America’s Midlife Male Friendships by Michael Clinton for Esquire — Article.

Michael Clinton’s argument is simple and straightforward: men in their 40s and 50s are losing close friendships. Not gradually - completely. Many American men reach a point in their lives where they have zero real male friendships by the time that they retire. As is true for most, their social lives are built around their partners and family life. In fact, alarmingly, one study concluded 92% of men report having no friends to chat with.

The piece chronicles Clinton’s interviews with men who are seeking to change the adult friendships in their lives. . 

Unsurprisingly, closeness is all tied to the amount of vulnerability a man allows. One man describes that communicating his emotions honestly helped positively change his friendships. Men who can't be emotionally open with their friends also struggle to be emotionally open with their lovers. Both sexual and platonic connections require a level of honesty that men, societally, are deterred from engaging in.

4. Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love — Session.

"We're best friends. I genuinely love being with her. I just don't feel turned on anymore." If that sounds like your situation, no need to panic. It’s much more common than you might imagine.

Robert Sternberg, who is a renowned psychologist, calls this the Triangular Theory of Love. He explains that there are three main components to love: intimacy, passion, and commitment. When all three are present, you have a consummate type of love. But if you take one away, you’ll find yourself lonely in the relationship, especially long-term ones.

Long-term lovers are known to settle. Two people can genuinely like each other. They stay loyal and build a life together. When passion fades away, so will desire. It’s warm and stable, yes. And,  completely unsexy. More often than not, that coincides with the moment the couple stops being playful. They stop surprising each other.

Here's what most people get wrong - they treat companionate love as the endgame, like desire is something that naturally fades and friendship is what remains. Sternberg's framework suggests the opposite. Intimacy is one of the three pillars of desire. Without it, passion has nothing to hold onto. 

Friendships don’t kill passion, passivity does. Couples that maintain desire over years are the ones who genuinely enjoy each other’s company. They stay curious about who the other person is becoming. They laugh together. They tease each other. They treat the friendship as something alive, not something that already happened. 

5. Sinéad O’Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U” — Song.

Prince wrote this in 1984. He gave it to one of his side projects, The Family, and it sat there for years…. Sinéad O'Connor turned it into one of the most haunting recordings in pop history.

Here's my favorite detail : Prince wrote it about his housekeeper leaving. Not a lover, a friend. Someone whose absence from his daily life was so significant it became a song about total loss. The line between the person you love and the person you can't function without isn't always a romantic one.

O'Connor's indelible music video helps give the song a more sensual side. Even though the video has nothing to do with romance, it's about longing. About someone who was woven into every part of your life, and now isn't. For O’Connor, it was her mom, who passed away at a very young age. 

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