About
Who is writing this
Affection Library is written by two people who spent a long time getting this wrong, and eventually got better at it.
Where the material came from
Neither of us is a therapist, and we are not going to write as though we were. What we have is twelve years with each other: two people who argued badly for a long time, worked out how to argue better, and kept notes.
That is where all of this came from. We spent years having a version of the same argument — different words each time, the same shape underneath — until we stopped trying to win it and started trying to understand what it was actually about. What we found useful, what took years longer than it should have, and what we still get wrong on a bad week: that is the material.
So everything here is written from the inside. It is not a clinical programme and it is not a system with a name and a trademark.
What we will not do
- Tell you a relationship can be repaired in a weekend, or by one person doing all of it.
- Quote a number we cannot source. There are no statistics on this site, because we do not have any we would stand behind.
- Write as though one of you is the problem and the other is the audience. This is written for both of you, whoever you are, in whatever arrangement you have.
- Publish a testimonial. Nobody has bought anything here yet, and inventing a reader would poison everything else on the page.
Where the library is up to
Most of the shelves are empty. The first book is in draft, the worksheets follow it, and the course is being built. The writing is on the blog. The check-in is finished — twenty questions, about three minutes, free, and no email needed to see the result. There is a longer quiz about how much capacity you actually have this week, and four shorter ones about patterns, red flags, what it is like to be with you, and sexual style. That is the honest starting point, and it is what we would point a friend at.
Try this together
Ask each other: what is the argument we keep having? Not the last one — the one underneath it, the one that keeps coming back in new clothes. Write down what you each think it is, separately, then swap. Most couples are surprised.
If you want to say something, disagree with something, or tell us the book was wrong about you, get in touch. It reaches us.