Алиса Пермякова

There is a well-known saying that character determines destiny. But what is this character? Some people have a difficult one, others an easy-going one. It can also be stubborn, or soft, or the kind that everyone acknowledges with involuntary admiration: now that is character! And it is generally held to be almost impossible to change.

Long ago, when I turned up for my first official course on the S-Theory with Dimitri Korenev at Freud's Legacy, he began by saying that there are two utterly different civilisations on our planet — and they are not men and women, but introverts and extraverts.

It all happened at an advertising agency. Sasha and Nastya were the leading specialists in the business of making things beautiful, and eternal rivals who were destined either to raise the agency to heights it had never seen before or to sink it for good.

When I first agreed to this project, I had no idea how extraordinary it would turn out to be. Working from twelve personality types and the possible compatibilities between them, I had 48 different stories to write. They are a kind of 48 manifestations of love, which depend on the features of a person's character, on activity, fears, defences and a great deal else. What is more, each of these stories needed at least one real-life example — that is, a couple of the matching characters who had mana