Quotes from Emily V. Gordon

There is no level of professional rejection that can compare to almost dying.

Holiday food is rich and indulgent. Going-home-to-see-family food is richer and even more indulgent.

Marriage, even a happy and successful one, can be extremely stressful, but that stress is worth it if you're marrying the best person for you.

It's easy to isolate yourself when you're buried in work, or to rely only on work friends for empathy. And while your work friends will always 'get it' more than your life partner, they don't know how to comfort you like your partner does.

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

Don't expect yourself to immediately love your stepchildren. In fact, you may hate them for a bit.

In high school, I decided that all of my female friends were stupid and traded them for guy friends. I loved horror movies and heavy metal and used these interests to become a 'guys' girl.'

Marriage is not a magical potion that serves to amplify adoration, reduce deep-seated feelings of resentment, erase fears of commitment, or answer questions about whether or not this is the right move. Marriage is a ceremony that cements your current bond to another human being, and while that's a huge thing, that's all it does.

Awkward conversations are painful, but they're way easier than divorce, resentment, and heartbreak.

If a show is wickedly, hugely popular, like 'Mad Men,' I assume that the masses, in their infinite inferiority to me, don't know what good TV is and that everyone is just brainwashed.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but I imagine a lot of married and divorced people have insights to share about how they felt during their engagement.

Sacrificing your relationship for your career sounds noble and romantic from the outside, but the reality is that it can create a pattern of self-destruction that will ultimately burn you out on the career you've worked so hard to build. It's a trap and, for some, an easy way out of having to maintain relationships under stress.

A lot of new stepparents fall into the trap of letting children disobey household expectations in order to gain favor with them.

Divorce is one of the most destructive, emotionally traumatic experiences a human being can go through, no matter if you're the instigator or the recipient. It's hard, and it hurts, and it takes a long time to feel normal again.

Your life story is a gift, and it should be treated as such.

We all have an idea of how we like to be treated that we would like others to adhere to, and somehow we've gotten in our heads that the perfect person for us will just know what this code of behavior is.

Far from 'rotting my brain,' as I was often told would happen, TV helped me feel less alone at a time when I spent so much time alone.

Sometimes we are much better at judging people based on how they treat everyone other than ourselves. We make a million excuses for why they treat us how they do.

As any daytime judge show can tell you, spending someone's money or taking their stuff because they hurt your feelings is not justified.

If you've had a marriage that ended because of a betrayal in trust on your spouse's behalf, the idea of trusting another person with your heart can seem completely ridiculous.

Often, when cheating happens, we rush to place blame solely on one person - either the person who did the cheating, or more insidiously, if it happened to us, we blame ourselves for not being 'good enough' to keep them around. But putting it all on one person doesn't paint the entire picture.

Burlesque dancing didn't solve all my post-divorce problems, but what it did do was force me to court myself for a little while.

Men - not all men but a good majority of the ones I have known and worked with - tend to think of difficult situations in their lives as problems that need to be solved.

I am somewhat grateful to the disintegration of my marriage for teaching me a lot about myself and about relationships, and though I wish it hadn't been such a taxing lesson, I wouldn't change a thing.