Are you holding on to relationships that hurt you – controlling elders, irresponsible partners, needy friends, and the like? Can you imagine what would happen if you tidied  your emotional life the way Marie Kondo tidies a house? Author Yang Chia-Ling offers us simple, rational methods to reclaim precious time and energy by freeing ourselves of exhausting negative relationships.

Are you holding on to relationships that hurt you, like controlling elders, irresponsible partners, and needy friends? Ties like these, although they begin with love, can leave us feeling pressured, misused, and exhausted. Oftentimes, we maintain them anyway out of hope or feelings of responsibility. Yet author Yang Chia-Ling is here to prove that we serve ourselves best by sweeping such relationships out the front door.

Keep the Right People is a clear, step-by-step road map to emotional self-preservation that begins by teaching us how to identify the problems in our relationships, equips us emotionally to move forward, then guides us in the delicate process of “relationship tidying”. Yang anticipates the problems that may occur during the “tidying” process, and offers us strategies for understanding and dealing with those problems. Finally, for those of us unwilling to go through the process, she offers insight into what might be holding us back.

Yang Chia-Ling integrates psychological evidence with cultural insights in a cogent analysis of human relationships that aims to help us reclaim our time and emotional energy, two of our most precious commodities in this fast-paced age.