Introduction
Dysfunctionally Yours Forever is not a love story.
It is about what happens after the initial impact of falling in love recedes into the daily impact of everyday life. The grand gestures fade. The music stops. Two people who once chose each other wake up in a bedroom that smells like last night’s dinner and this morning’s silence.
Ben was never the problem. Naomi was never the problem. They were never threats—only mirrors. They did not break the marriage. They merely illuminated what was already broken: his habit of looking for escape routes before he’s even arrived, her habit of treating trust as a surveillance problem.
This book is not about infidelity. It is about the thousand small erosions that precede any grand betrayal. The cereal bowl in the sink. The phone left face-up on the counter. The location sharing that feels like safety until it feels like a cage. The photograph taken without permission and kept in a drawer for years.
The world is full of people performing roles—the good husband, the vigilant wife, the supportive best friend, the mother who stayed and calls it strength. We learn these scripts so early, so thoroughly, that we forget we are reading from a page. Then we marry someone who is reading from their own script, and we wonder why the dialogue does not match.
Dysfunctionally Yours Forever refuses to judge the performances. It refuses to condemn the compromises. It simply holds them up to the light and says: Look. This is what it costs.
Some readers will call it slow. Some will call it bleak. Some will recognise themselves in the quiet terror of a marriage held together by unspoken rules and the stubborn, exhausting choice to stay.
This is not a book about fixing things. It is about staying broken together—and the strange, uncomfortable mercy of that choice.
Dysfunctionally yours forever is not just a subtitle.
It is a promise.
