Love Story in Three Acts
Gerrold, David (pseudonym for Jerrold David Friedmann). "Love Story in Three Acts". Nova 1. Harry Harrison, editor. New York City: Delacorte Press, 1970. Anthologized Cybersex, edited by Richard Glyn Jones. For other reprints and translations, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, page online as of January 2023 at link here.[1]
Jones's headnote (italics omitted) tells us that much of DG's "work has been in television," including "a number of Star Trek scripts and tie-ins. He is perhaps best known for his 1972 novel When Harlie Was One, which describes the evolution of intelligence in a computer [...]. Gerrold was one of the earliest writers to explore the sexual/technological future — as in this story from 1970" (p. [98]).
The story will be of interest for gender relations as look to from 1970, cigarette-smoking in future worlds, the foreseen state of television and other media — and mending socks: Brave New World had appeared in 1932 to declare "Ending is better than mending." Concerning us: what we'd call cybernetic monitoring and, in the upscale model, guiding of sexual intercourse (plus references to at least one other possibility of mechanized sex, if solo in that case). The mildly technophobic view of the husband is that one should become a "puppet," controlled by the devices. The resolution of that tension is ironically upbeat.
RDE, finishing, 30Jan23