The Us Journal

About this journal

Couples do not drift apart in one argument. They drift in the weeks nobody wrote down.

Two people can be fine for a month, then fine for a year, and only notice afterwards that fine had been getting quieter the whole time. Nothing happened. That is exactly the problem: nothing happened, and there is no record of it.

This is a page a week, filled in by both of you, that makes the quiet weeks visible while they are still easy to fix.

One page a week, fifty-two weeks

Each week has a closeness scale, a simple count and three honest prompts: what went well, what went wrong and the one thing you want to try next week. It takes two minutes and it is meant to be done together, not in secret.

Four seasonal reviews sit across the year. Those are the ones you read out loud, and they are usually the conversation that was overdue.

What is inside

• 52 weekly pages, one for every week of the year
• A closeness scale and a count, marked in seconds
• Three prompts a week: what went well, what went wrong, what to try next
• Four seasonal reviews written to be read aloud together
• Five short pages on doing this without it turning into a scoreboard
• Eight lined pages at the back

Who it is for

• Couples a few years in, where the good weeks and the flat weeks have started to blur
• Newlyweds who would rather build the habit before they need it
• Long distance couples with more to keep track of than most
• An anniversary present, a wedding present or a Valentine's gift that is not a candle
• Anyone in couples therapy who wants something to bring to the next session

No scoring your partner

The prompts ask what happened between you, not who was at fault. There is no rating each other and no place to keep evidence, because a journal that becomes evidence gets hidden within a month.

It is a record you can look back on when the months blur together, which is precisely when couples start telling themselves the wrong story about the year they just had.

Questions people ask

Do we both write in it? That is the idea. One book, one page a week, both handwritings on it.

What if we skip a few weeks? The pages are undated. Skip a month and the book still adds up at the end of the year.

Is it explicit? No. It asks about closeness and about what happened between you, in plain language you could leave open on a nightstand.

We are already in therapy. Is it useful? Several couples use it exactly there, because it turns up to the session with a record instead of an argument about who remembers what.

The details

• 6 x 9 inches, 96 pages, matte cover
• Undated: week one is whichever week you start
• Printed in colour on white paper
• Fits on a nightstand, which is where it needs to live

Two minutes, once a week, and the conversations you keep meaning to have stop waiting.

Also from Mara Linde

A Line a Day, a five-year memory journal, and Tell Me About You, a keepsake journal of questions for the people whose stories you have never asked for.