Quotes About Relationships

Stop searching yourself trying to understand why someone else treated you the way they did. The answer is not inside you; it's inside them, out of reach.

By making love conditional, tough love undermines familial affection, removing the one refuge where people can ordinarily assume they are loved for who they are, not what they do.

And it is very true that the most tender, complicated, most generous part of our being blossoms without any effort, when it comes to the love of a dog.

Why is it that married people always say Come in when everything they do says Get out? They talk about their miseries and then ask you why you're unmarried.

Most beds aren't as intimate as people think they are.

Marriage, [...], the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.

Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.

No one-not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone

Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Criticism is a privilege that you earn — it shouldn't be your opening move in an interaction…

In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.

the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.

Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.

as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we're judging is mismatched.

the futility of something is not always (in love and in politics) a sufficient argument against it.

Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

People are in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotions overrides irritability.

Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.

If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8-or roughly 150. The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.

The point about Connectors is that by having a foot in so many different worlds, they have the effect of bringing them all together.

My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person—Jacob—who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life.

These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles—these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize—are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.