This book is for anyone looking to re-evaluate or improve their intimate relationship. It will help you to consider the place of your relationship in your life as a whole and to think about how it’s been supporting you or otherwise up to this point.

If things have not been working as well as you would like, it will give you steps that you can take to get things back on track. And if things have been going well, it will give you ways of taking things to the next level.

If you are reading this book together with your partner, it will give you different ways of understanding what has been happening up until now and what you may decide to reconsider. If communication with your partner is difficult or you’ve decided to read this book alone, you will better understand the things you can put into place yourself to improve things or to recognise that it may be time to move on.

If you are not in a relationship currently, you will better understand past relationships and the challenges that you’ve experienced so that you can consider how you can avoid those challenges in the future. There are always lessons waiting for us to learn them, and we have the choice as to whether we are ready to learn those lessons.

Sometimes we need to go through a cycle or challenge multiple times before being ready to learn our lesson. Wherever you are on that journey, this book will help you make sense of things and to consider what kind of relationship is really going to serve you, and what it may require from you in terms of how you need to show up to make that relationship possible.

What clearer barometer of our overall well being than the well-functioning or otherwise of our relationships, and especially the relationship with our intimate partner? With our work with couples at Aligned with Love, we have the privilege of engaging with couples every day where they are encountering substantial challenges that have got them to a point of no return. “Either we sort this now, or it could be the end of our relationship”, they often say when they first reach out.

It is sometimes said that our destiny is shaped in our moments of decision, and making a decision about how best to resolve our relationship challenge is one of those forks in the road that can lead us to a very different place. Once we choose a path, the option of retracing our steps and changing our mind may not be a straightforward process.

Even if we come back to that point, the other road may be closed or blocked by the time we get there. .