Riazi-Farzad

Are you interested in relationships? Of course, you are. But, what is a relationship? If you look for the word ’relationship’ in a search engine and take away the results that offer definitions only, you will find that the top results are about relationships where there is a sexual element. What you will also notice is that there is a plethora of advice about how to improve your love life. However, the issues we face regarding our romantic relationships stem from a lack of basic understanding of the nature of relationships in general. A romantic relationship is a relationship first. In this (course)book, I take you by the proverbial hand and take you on a journey - a journey into the pendulous but enchanting, sometimes dangerous, often confusing, but always exciting land of relationships. On this journey, we take our typical understandings of the nature of relationships and transform them in ways that enable us to create what I have called Satisfying and Mutually Empowering Relationships (SMERs). Here, I have introduced the term ’affinitology’ as part of my attempt to set into motion the development of a new science of interpersonal relationships modelled on the medical sciences. It draws from the growing knowledge base in modern psychology, along with personal experience with thousands of students and clients as well as my own decades of research in physical, medical and social sciences, spiced with ancient wisdom gleaned from my life-long interest in Persian mysticism. When I set off on this journey, I had no idea that I would end up somewhere so completely different from what I had envisaged... I started by putting together a simple course structure. As I began to fill out the various sections, it soon became apparent that this was going to turn out to be more than just a training manual to accompany a course; it was becoming a full-blown textbook on a topic that no one had treated in this way before. It began to grow and evolve in ways that I never anticipated when I conceived the project. Sometimes it felt like it had a life of its own and my mind and body were simply a medium for its expression. I set many challenges for myself when writing this book. One of these was to blur the distinction between a textbook and a self help book. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed researching, developing, writing and sharing it.