A Year of Laughter, Wisdom and Practice for Couples
the Funny Thing about Love
Fifty-two weeks. Fifty-two cartoons. One small practice at a time for getting couples talking again, laughing again, and reaching for each other.
How it begins
Have you heard the one about the honeymooners on the flight to Rio?
“We are now lifting off for romantic Rio de Janeiro. You have the good fortune to be traveling on the world’s first fully automated flight… We hope you enjoy this new service and assure you that nothing can go wrong…
nothing can go wrong… can go wrong… go wrong… go wrong…”
When couples arrive for the first session of the intensive four-month PAIRS course I teach, they are often fearful of what lies ahead. Some couples are barely speaking, on the verge of divorce. Much has gone wrong…
I have a simple but foolproof strategy for diffusing the anxiety in the room: I make them laugh. I tell jokes. I recount rueful but hilarious anecdotes of the vagaries of love, often at my own expense. The use of humor creates a comfort zone, and soon the tension dissolves.
Lori Heyman Gordon, from the Introduction
How to use this book
A carefully plotted tour, taken one week at a time.
Each topic uses a cartoon as the focus for a short discussion of a specific relationship issue, followed by a brief task: a journaling assignment, guided imagery, questionnaire, behavior change or practical skill. A few exercises build on earlier ones, so keep your notes.
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I
Why We Love
Three chapters, eleven weeks. A philosophical and psychological overview: the dreams we carried in, the imperfect partner we actually married, and what real intimacy asks of us.
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II
How to Love
Nine chapters, forty-one weeks. The ingredients of healthy relationships: Intention, Safety, Nourishment, Knowing Yourself, Connection, Conflict, Change, Maintenance and Vision.
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III
Love Through the Seasons
Six topics outside the weekly plan, for when life brings a new baby, a blended family, money trouble, illness, aging or grief. A toolbox you keep in the hall closet.
The year
Fifty-two weeks, fifty-two cartoons
Eleven entries are Lori’s own words, marked with . Open any week for its cartoon, an opening reading and that week’s exercise.
Part III
Love through the seasons
Every partnership passes through seasons. These are the times when couples are most likely to drift apart, and also the times when they can grow closest. The strongest predictor of how a couple will fare is whether they face it together, as a team against the problem.
From the conclusion
What I hope you take with you
- Behind almost every bad behavior is a good need. When your partner is at their worst, look for what they’re longing for. Then look for what you’re longing for too.
- You can only change yourself. It’s the most frustrating truth in the book, and the most freeing.
- Small things, done often, beat grand gestures done rarely. A real kiss goodbye. A kept promise. Ten minutes of listening.
- Practice, practice. You’ll slide backward. Everyone does. Begin again.
- Lighten up. If you can laugh together, you can get through almost anything together.
About the author
Lori Heyman Gordon 1929–2019
Lori Heyman Gordon was a marriage and family therapist and the creator of PAIRS, the Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills. She grew up on Staten Island, New York, and lost both her parents while still in high school. She graduated from Cornell University in 1950 and earned a master’s degree from the Catholic University School of Social Work in 1963.
In 1975 she began teaching in a new graduate program on marriage and family relationships at American University in Washington, D.C., where she developed the 120-hour PAIRS course. Over the following decades she trained more than a thousand therapists in the United States and abroad to teach it. In 2018 the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs licensed a version of PAIRS for veteran families.
She was the author of Passage to Intimacy, Love Knots and If You Really Loved Me…, and received the Impact Award from the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education in 2002. She died at her home in Bethesda, Maryland, in March 2019, at the age of ninety, with The Funny Thing About Love still in progress.
About PAIRS
Education, at least as much as therapy
“The mission of PAIRS is to teach those attitudes, emotional understandings and behaviors that nurture and sustain healthy marital and family relationships and to make this knowledge broadly available on behalf of a safer, saner and more loving world.”
Couples learn how to talk to each other and to listen, how to fight and resolve conflicts. They explore their family histories, their inner voices, their dreams and expectations. “It’s a big commitment,” Lori wrote, “and it works.”
Find a PAIRS classThat, after all, is the funny thing about love. The more of it you give away, the more of it you have.
Begin with week one