This book is about all of the kinds of relationships people can have. It is a very insightful book about how relationships emerge. But it is also about how indispensable they are to our ongoing sense of being who we are in the worlds we inhabit. We have relationships with various people. But we also have relationships with our possessions, with our pets, and with our pens and car keys. We have relationships with the foods we eat, the places we go, and the diversions we take. We have relationships with the news we attend to, the gossip we consume, and the places we are familiar with. We have relationships with our clothes, our lotions and potions, our grooming equipment, our computers and our snow shovels. Taken together, all of the relationships we have had, have today, and will have in the future attach us to our worlds in an admixture of pushes and pulls on our attention and our behavior. Metaphorically, it might visually look much like an intricate circular spider web, with us individually stuck at the core. We use the singular "relationship" here because we want to explore what it is that all relationships have in common: relationship.

Relationships are sticky. They are far easier to fall into than to escape from. They are often demanding, requiring our attention when we wanted to devote our attention elsewhere. The drama of misplaced keys or a balky computer can take over our lives. We have hopes for certain relationships. We can be disappointed in how they turn out. But most of the myriad relationships that affect our lives just sort of happen. If they don't serve our purposes as we think we deserve, we drop them. A piece of clothing that just doesn't look right in the light can be dropped. That's something you can't do with your own baby. You have a relationship with your body. If you're rich, you can get a remodeling job. If you're not, you may be stuck with the body you've got.

Some relationships bring us down. Other relationships lift us up. In this book, you will learn how to create the kinds of relationships you need to get to where you want to go. The relationship you have with yourself is key. This book reveals to you how, if you get that right, most of the other relationships you live in, and by, will fall into place.