And They Lived Happily Ever… …Before

About the Book

This book is about the apparent incompatibility of romantic love and conventional marriage. They go together (the popular song has it) like a horse and carriage. But if the horse is ailing or otherwise not up to the task, the carriage will slowly rot away in the carriage house. It is also about the perverse fact that people bring to such relationships their expectations from the past – as they remember them. Typically, they had hopes and dreams for their future together. When these are dashed, it occurs to them that they were better off before they got hitched. It is also about the fact that when love befalls us, we lose our bearings. “Love is blind,” and all that. We drift into the conventional fairy tale about living “happily ever after.” That’s to be desired. But the fairy tale ends with that line. It never tells us what we need to do – or be – in order to live happily ever after. Under the spell of the fairy tale, which is basic fare in various forms in our culture, we set off happily enough. But how is it possible to maintain the delusion of the love state in the banality of the everyday life that inevitably ensues? Who told us that making a living or keeping a house in order is a far different world than a wedding? Who told us that babies rule the house, unless they are tended by someone else? Copulate we apparently must. But that has consequences that are not a part of the fairy tale. So people end up on the other side of the mirror. The world is not about lovers, the realization creeps upon us. It is about 40,000 other things. And those have to be dealt with … most often before anything else. Thus the title, And They Lived Happily Ever … Before. Imagination and reality are often two very different things. This book answers the question, “What Does Love Have to Do with It?” The answers may surprise you. But they will make love affairs that end in marriage far better than you might even imagine they could be.

About the Author

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Life’s Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.