In this prologue, I outline the core argument of this book, which is that humans are often moved and motivated by felt changes in their network of social relationships (i.e., selvations). I preview the importance of social relationships in moving and motivating us and contrast it with the quite different mainstream assumptions in academia and Western society about social motivation (which revolve around the self). I suggest that different assumptions have different implications, and that a shift from self to selvations implies that humans have a relational social-motivational essence, generated by selvations, which are translated into culturally appropriate thought, feeling, and behavior through the culturally construed self. In the new and integrative selvations theory I propose, this line of thought reflects the two steps in a broader motivational process that directs us toward regulating relationships. This conceptualization enables theoretical integration and a bigger picture of humans as essentially relational beings.