Related to the social satire is the theme of the possibility of loving relationships in the modern world. None of Muriel Spark's fictional works, The Ballad of Peckham Rye included, contain examples of successful, loving marriages. Indeed, the relationship of the sexes in her world is generally tinged with conflict, dissatisfaction, and even violence. Spark herself was unhappily married for a time, a period of her life she recounts in her autobiographical Curriculum Vitae. When she was a young woman, a friend of hers was even murdered by her own husband. As Spark tells the story,

A school-friend of mine—she wasn't a close friend—was murdered. She looked very like me.... In the hotel where I was staying, this girl was killed. I heard it. I heard the bangs. That was a terrible experience.

Spark herself was afraid that her own husband, who was mentally unstable, just might do the same to her. Other relationships described in her autobiography also end on a generally sour note. In an interview Spark commented on her treatment of male-female relationships: "I don't deal with men and women and love. I don't see that the relationship between men and women is very good these days." Certainly that general tenor is present in The Ballad of Peckham Rye. The relationship at the center of the novel—the one between Dixie Morse and Humphrey Place—seems sordid and unsatisfactory on many counts. Dixie exists merely to acquire money and possessions, and her family, from the squabbling parents to the unsavory thirteen-year-old brother- cum-blackmailer Leslie, is certainly even less attractive. Humphrey himself cannot say why he wishes to stay with Dixie. Indeed, one of the bright spots of the novel occurs when Humphrey seems to be freed from Dixie and what one critic has called his "life-denying relationship" with her. This freedom is only temporary, however: the narrator informs us that Humphrey returns to Peckham two months after the jilting to marry Dixie after all. As they drive off into the sunset at the end of the novel, Dixie says, "I feel as if I've been twenty years married instead of two hours." The narrator's account of Humphrey's mind-set in response to this is simultaneously hopeful and resigned:

He thought this a pity for a girl of eighteen. But it was a sunny day for November, and, as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the children playing there and the women coming home from work with their shopping-bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.

Other male-female relationships in The Ballad of Peckham Rye are similarly conflicted. Trevor Lomas is continually on the lookout for men for whom Beauty might reject him— and there are a number, Dougal Douglas included. Dixie Morse is the product of a failed marriage, and her mother and stepfather are also generally at odds. Mr. Druce and his wife have not spoken to each other since she said, "Quack, quack" to him at lunch. Instead, he carries on a rather sordid affair with Merle Coverdale, which ends in her brutal murder. In an essay entitled "On Love," Spark describes the only form of love that she finds attractive: the copulation of animals. She ends the essay by saying:

The aspects of love that one could discuss are endless. But certainly, as the old songs say, love is the sweetest thing, and it makes the world go round.

This pronouncement is meant to be taken ironically, of course, especially if the Ballad counts as one of the old songs.