ABSTRACT
Human life is a set of stories and personal relationships are the main characters. We live out the plotlines of these stories creating, celebrating, contemplating, discussing, cursing, lamenting, despising, struggling over, under, and through a vast topography of different relationships. As the authors in the current (and previous) dark side volumes attest, personal relationships can be complex prisms reflecting the light and dark sides of human relating. Because we are essentially storytelling creatures (Bruner, 1990; Fisher, 1987)—homo narrans (Fisher) or naïve scientists (Heider, 1958)—we are compelled to make sense of our relationships by telling stories about them to ourselves, to our relational partners, to friends, to anyone who will listen as we communicate to give meaning to our experiences. One of the
primary ways we do this is in everyday talk (Duck, 1994) and thus, telling our stories helps us manage our personal relationships.
