KR | Under The Covers Newsletter - May 2026

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

There is very little that compares to the first hit of new romantic love. It pricks you like frostbite, and suddenly overcomes you with intense, longing, can’t sleep heat. 

In lockstep with the warming weather of spring, we’re getting ourselves wet in new lust, aka The Honeymoon Phase. You know the feeling: constantly checking your phone… can’t get them out of your head. Everything they say feels like the funniest, smartest, most interesting thing you’ve ever heard. And just like that, you believe in love again!

In this edition of Under the Covers, we celebrate the beginning—the moments when romance is budding and the feeling of desire fills you for days on end.

Here are this month’s recommendations:

I. Punch-Drunk Love (2002, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson). Film.

If someone asked me to show them what falling in love feels like inside your body, I’d suggest this movie. It’s a rom-com, yet there’s something about the way it presents love that makes it more than butterflies fluttering in your stomach.

The film follows Adam Sandler’s character, Barry, a shy and timid guy whose lonely and uneventful life shifts when he meets a girl named Lena (played by Emily Watson). The way that director Paul Thomas Anderson depicts this change is incredible. That feeling of falling in love makes the film almost start vibrating: The camera tilts, the colors flood the screen, and the percussion swells - you almost feel the score in your teeth.

It’s a wry and dry depiction of what it’s like going about life without ever feeling loved or safe — and suddenly feeling like everything in life that never made sense finally does. 

The film captures not just love or lust, but the sudden return of joie de vivre.

II. The Lover by Marguerite Duras (1984). Book.

At 117 pages, this book is a brisk read that settles deep in your bones. 

Marguerite Duras wrote this autobiographical novel at the age of 70, reflecting on a love affair she had at fifteen in colonial Vietnam.

Following a clandestine relationship between a young French girl and a wealthy Chinese-Vietnamese man, Duras writes desire with stunning clarity without inhibition or pretense. The young French girl knows what she wants and how to enact this yearning, while remaining keenly aware of the nuances of engaging in an affair during a time of war, where everything—including romantic relations—exists in a continuum of exchange.

Capturing perfectly the rush you feel when you’ve finally mustered the courage to be erotically vulnerable with someone, and your two bodies become your entire world.

III. "To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This" by Mandy Len Catron (The New York Times, 2015). Article.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that falling in love occurs naturally. You step out into the world and bump into the one person who instantly tenderizes your heart. And…..what if falling in love could be a choice and less happenstance?

A decade after The New York Times published Mandy Len Carlton’s essay To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This, that premise remains one of the most interesting and hotly debated topics pretty much ever written on romantic love. 

Written around an exercise created by a psychologist named Arthur Aron with a set of thirty-six questions designed to induce closeness between strangers. These questions start light, escalate, and by the end, you’d be sharing things you’ve never shared with anyone.

Aron’s exercise posits that love or any relational binding starts with a willingness to be seen, and that most of us avoid that willingness like it’s a death spell. And that, too, makes it that much intoxicating when we enter that early stage with someone knowing how much they yearn for the version of us they perceive to be that lovable.

IV. Limerence (Dorothy Tennov, 1979). Session.

Limerence is the darker side of the “honeymoon phase.” Psychologist Dorothy Tennov coined the term in 1979 after interviewing over 500 people about their experiences of falling in love. 

Limerence is the consistent and intrusive thinking about the other person, heart-pounding physical sensations, idealization of the other person, and a desperate need to reciprocate these feelings. 

The brain in limerence surges with dopamine, the same neurotransmitter associated with addictive substances. It is, in a sense, what we could call an addiction to another person. You are hooked on the relationship with the idolized other in much the same neurochemical way an addict becomes hooked on heroin.

For many of us, we have been in limerence with zero problems as long as the other is also feeling the same way. Real trouble begins when the other is not available or not interested. 

V. Prince, “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (1979). Song.

Perfectly capturing the light and airy feeling of finally submitting to the plain truth of erotically desiring someone!

The title itself abandons all pretense about his intentions…he is making himself clear. He doesn’t promise forever, he just wants in. “I wanna be the only one that makes you come running,” Prince sings in a passionate cry against a bright arrangement of funky guitars and bass.

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Happy Spring! Remember: The honeymoon stage isn’t a trick your brain plays on you. It's a reminder that your body and your heart are wired to seek connection, even when it scares you. 

As always, I'm in your corner.

—Keeley

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