"Love & Contracts braids memoir with legal stories to show how contracts can complement loving relationships. Starting with a unique personal story about how I became one of two moms and a dad raising a child, it then shows that lots of people -- straight and gay, married and single, related by adoption or genetics - also use contracts and deals to create, sustain, modify, and, when necessary, end family relationships. Love comes in different packages, which I call Plan A and Plan B. Plan A - marriage, heterosexuality, and conceiving kids at home - is the most common way to be a family. But many people turn to Plan B --cohabitation, being gay, and having kids through reproductive technologies or adoption -- when law, luck or biology block Plan A. Plan B is just uncommon, not unnatural or unworthy of legal protection. But we should also notice the more informal, often implicit, arrangements I call deals. They can be big -- like vows of fidelity - or small, like I-cook-and-you-wash-up. Recognizing the roleof contracts and deals in all kinds of families shows that law and society should and often does see Plan B as a morally neutral variation of plan A. Far from cold and calculating self-interest, these exchanges can demonstrate the kind of "us-ness" that makes a family"--