I Built two Houses
No house collapses overnight. Neither does your story.
After a breakup you don't just lose a person.This book won't teach you how to love. It shows you how you love. And that's different.
Recognize Yourself
It hits you later. In the car, while you're cooking, when you're trying to sleep. And you start asking: what did I get wrong? What didn't I see? What do I actually want, when I say I want a relationship?This book won't promise you'll feel better after three pages. It promises something else: that you'll stop, step by step, telling yourself the same story about who you are without noticing you're doing it.
"Did it make you feel good, or did it make you feel alive?""You check the gutters while the weather is good.""A house isn't measured by how many times it never cracked. It's measured by how many times it was repaired well."
Why it's unlike every other book on relationships
It's not written by a psychologist. It's written by someone who got his hands into it.
A structure can stand on paper and still fail in real life. Marco saw it by following two real houses step by step, and he learned the same thing about relationships: a structure doesn't fail where you're watching it. It fails where you stop watching.Three points of view no manual puts together.
The foundations and load calculations of two houses followed step by step. The focus and aperture of the photographer. The bug and the single point of failure of someone who designs software. Three lenses for seeing what usually stays out of focus.It's not theory. It's an open work site.
"I'm not writing this from beneath a finished roof. I'm writing it from a worksite still in progress."
What's inside
The Foundations — who you are inside a relationship: what sets you off, what settles you, what you hide.The Frame — compatibility and load calculations: values, directions, love languages.The Testing — conflict, cracks and repairs: how to stay when things get hard.Maintenance — intimacy and the small acts of ordinary days, where the bond is really measured.The Maintenance Booklet — about forty pages of forms and worksheets, to print and come back to.The visions — Marco's photographs, a second point of view beside the words.
The Author
Marco Solidoro works as an IT consultant and takes photographs. He built two houses: one he sold, the other is still an open work site in Revigliasco. He learned the most important things about relationships the most expensive way — by watching what he thought was solid collapse. This book was born there, in the scraps of silence between one work site and the next.
At the end of a story you don't just decide what to throw away. You decide which stones to keep for the house that comes next.