MAD ABOUT MONOGAMY : Relationships: Eager to push the erotic envelope? You may not have to go far. A wave of new books suggests that the best hunting ground for great sex is right at home.

Two years ago, when Lonnie Barbach and David Guisinger wrote a book called “Going the Distance,” they wanted it to carry the subtitle, “A Field Guide to Monogamy.” Their publisher vetoed that idea outright.

Monogamy, Barbach was told, was terminal boredom. It was death. Mentioning it on the cover would kill the book, pronto.

Fast forward the literary calendar to the winter of 1994. Barbach, a Mill Valley psychologist, has a forthcoming book called “The Erotic Edge,” stories of passion for--gasp!--married people.

Joan Lloyd, a 52-year-old grandmother and emergency medical technician in Westchester County, N.Y., is publishing her third book of “handy household sexual hints” for monogamous folks.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Dr. Harold Bloomfield, a San Diego psychiatrist, is bringing out the paperback version of “Love Secrets for a Lasting Relationship,” aimed at couples who plan to stay together until the 12th of Never.

And in the title-of-the-year category, there is “Hot Monogamy,” the book that has Texas family therapist Patricia Love hopping from talk show to talk show.

The boomlet of sex books for married people is a “very ‘90s” phenomenon, said Lisa Johnson of the publishing house E.P. Dutton, reflecting the possibility that people can actually stay together and still have passion--a notion that seemed borderline unthinkable during previous decades of greed and self-absorption. Commitment is very much in vogue, say publishers, who are churning out books with such titles as “Getting to I Do” and “Now That I’m Married, Why Isn’t Everything Perfect?”

All of which represents a welcome turn of events, said America’s sexual godmother, Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

“To think that being with one partner is now in fashion again is music to my ears,” said Dr. Ruth, who has been married to the same man for 32 years.

Dr. Ruth was quick to report that her latest literary effort, “Dr. Ruth’s Encyclopedia of Sex,” focuses extensively on avoiding the tedium that sometimes accompanies long-term partnerships.

Along with the fear of contracting AIDS or other diseases, years of economic uncertainty have helped bring about the reanointment of long-term commitment. Books about how to cheat on your spouse, which once flooded the market, have been supplanted by titles that promise ecstatic bliss to nice married people. And books about marriage in 1994 don’t just talk about balancing the checkbook, managing aggression or car-pooling the kids. They talk about sex.

Behind this trend, said Sandra Scantling, a Connecticut psychologist whose new book is “Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Sex,” is a sudden and collective awareness that “we don’t have to look outside to find joy.”

“We don’t want many partners anymore,” Scantling said. “We want one with whom ‘it’ will be extraordinary.”

Scantling said she wanted to explore how average people enhance their relationships. But she said her publisher, Dutton, balked when she wanted the phrase “Ordinary Women” in her title.

“They wanted me to say ‘Remarkable Women,’ ” she said. “And I said, who are you talking about, Eleanor Roosevelt?”

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Everyday men and women also populate the wildly successful paperbacks of Joan Lloyd. “Come Play With Me,” Lloyd’s newest book for “plain, normal people,” will be out this summer.

“I guess I wrote my books for the couple who has the same fantasy, but they never found a way to share it because they felt that nice people didn’t do things like that,” said Lloyd, who has lived with the same man for 10 years.

With her penchant for filling her books with such advice as how to avoid rug burns, Lloyd has taken to calling herself “The Sexual Heloise.” Her editor at Warner Books in New York, Jamie Raab, said Lloyd’s appeal has been enhanced by “a heightened consciousness now that if you’re not feeling excited by your relationship, you can no longer go out and have an affair.”

Even without the fear of AIDS, said Carole DeSanti, who has edited a number of the new titles for Dutton, “people have watched their friends, their families, or themselves go through serial monogamy, and they have noticed that people seem to take up the same problems in a new relationship.”

As a result, DeSanti said, marriages, or marriage-like relationships, “no longer feel so expendable. People don’t feel like they can dump the old model and trade up for a new one.”

The amorous shopping sprees of a decade or more ago have simply stopped, said one of DeSanti’s authors, New York sex therapist Eva Margolies, whose newest book also targets married couples and is called “Undressing the American Male.”

“Since we’ve been given permission to explore, most people have come to the conclusion that if anything, new partners don’t alleviate sexual problems and may make them worse,” Margolies said.

Psychologist Patricia Love, another of DeSanti’s authors, said a sense of cosmic insecurity has attracted some people to the very sense of permanence that formerly scared them when “m” words such as marriage or monogamy were discussed.

“With so much unrest in the world, there’s this need to hold on,” said Love, who acknowledged that her surname occasionally jeopardizes her professional credibility.

But Love said she has an even more “grandiose idea,” that “maybe we’re finally getting it right as a species.” Monogamy and regular sex are “biologically healthy,” Love said. “Maybe we’re figuring that out at last.”

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But as best-selling author Bloomfield pointed out, cultural expectations were a tough match for any kind of biological imperative. “I believe that my generation grew up with the idea that sex gets boring as you get older,” said Bloomfield, who is 49 and has been married to the same woman for more than 20 years.

With Ozzie and Harriet happily retiring to their twin beds every night, “there was no model” for middle-aged marriages that left the sheets steaming, Bloomfield said. Monogamy was tantamount to monotony.

“Monogamy was something you did,” Bloomfield said, nearly gagging on his next phrase, “because you were mature.”

As a consequence, Bloomfield said, speaking from experience, “for a while there, it was like if you were the couple in the room that was married for the longest time, you felt weird. You were almost embarrassed.”

But while the Old Married Couple may have been feeling dull and stodgy, the swingers in the room had problems of their own, Lonnie Barbach maintained.

“A lot of people got very tired of moving from bedroom to bedroom,” said Barbach, who has been writing about sex and relationships since 1975. Barbach described co-author and fellow psychologist Guisinger as her partner, meaning that they have lived and worked together for 10 years. Their daughter, Tess, is 7. “We just never got married,” Barbach said.

Before she wrote “The Erotic Edge,” Barbach did two books of erotica for women. “Then I thought, erotica is fun, why not do something especially for couples?” She said she makes a clear distinction between pornography, “which is degrading,” and erotica, “which centers around eros, or romantic love,” and believes such stories “allow couples who may not be comfortable talking about their fantasies to read to each other instead.”

But for married couples, psychologist Love said, erotic reading materials may vary enormously.

“One couple I know, they go to bed, he reads the Wall Street Journal, she reads erotica,” Love said.

Whatever gets you through the night, Dr. Ruth said.

“Maybe the grass is not so much greener on the other side of the lawn,” Westheimer said. “Somehow, the pendulum is swinging back.”