Quotes About Relationships

I thought you loved me.

Noam knew it was already too late to repair his mistakes. Whatever he and Dara had was broken now. And it was no one's fault but his own.

When you give your all to another person and he throws it in your face, you stop short and wonder why.

You show your vulnerability through relationships, and those feelings are your soft spot. You need to have a soft spot.

And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.

The daughter can become the mother's opportunity either to make up for the past and right wrongs or to exact retribution for her losses. The mother's own experience of the long-ago family serves as an overlay to her mothering: Past and present are inextricably intertwined.

If you scratch below the glossy surface of many "enviable" marriages, often you'll find a disenchanted wife whose husband finds the landscape of her emotions as uninteresting as the moon's.

A daughter is a mother's gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self. And mothers are their daughters' role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.

The good father does not have to be perfect . Rather, he has to be good enough to help his daughter to become a woman who is reasonably self-confident, self-sufficient, and free of crippling self-doubt, and to feel at ease in the company of men.

Another reason it's dangerous to acknowledge that you were unloved is that it implies the possibility that your mother may have been right-you are unlovable.

Another step is that daughters can learn to monitor their own feelings and instincts by saying, "I feel uncomfortable (angry, dominated, usurped, inadequate, guilty, furious) with my mother more often than I do not. I have to pay attention to that, because it shows in how I treat my friends (lover, spouse, kids, colleagues). There is validity here. I don't have to blame or excuse my mother-I just have to see her so I can see myself.

It isn't just the physical presence of the father that matters- it's his engagement and involvement. An emotionally remote or rejecting or actively punitive father leads to girls' feeling pretty apprehensive around men.

The psychological absence of fathers can be nearly as devastating as physical absence. When fathers are alive but not a predictable presence actively participating in their daughter's lives the relationship becomes a permanent "maybe.

Many daughters live out their lives avoiding or abiding or arguing with their mothers-burying the long-ago injury or insult or childhood deprivation under a blanket of forgetfulness-and not confronting it head-on. It's humiliating to remember the ways in which one demeaned oneself in order to prevent being in a mother's bad graces, the willingness to do anything in order to not be rejected, when rejection felt like death.

At the same time, the daughters, in adulthood, must also make the effort to really know their mothers—which many daughters do not—in order to understand what forces shaped those mothers. These daughters need to discover what torment may have unwittingly informed their mothers' parental choices, and to see their mothers as composites of strengths and weaknesses, rather than as all good or all bad.

But many more daughters of distant fathers are unable to reach orgasm, or achieve it with consistency with any man. Indeed these daughters have the most trouble in bed: for them, affection and arousal are synonymous with rejection.

Parental neglect even in intact families, can have a shattering effect on how daughters- even those with loving mothers- feel about men.

When fathers are lovingly involved with their daughters from birth, the daughters reap the benefits all their lives. Daughters who had fathers they could count on are the most likely to be drawn to men who treat them well, to see their lovers as dependable people who won't suddenly disappear, and to be consistently orgasmic.

Most people can recall schoolyard confrontations with with bullies. Boys were expected to deal with them by standing their ground and slugging it out, even, as one man told me, "if you knew you were going to get your head bashed in. You had to show you could take it, and you'd die rather than cry." But for girls, the surest and safest way to avoid being picked on or terrorized is to get the bully to like you.

It is always better to admire the best among our foes rather than the worst among our friends

Love is being able to talk to someone else without effort, without hiding, and at the same time to feel absolutely comfortable not saying a word. At least that's one way I've figured out hot to describe love.

Marriage is slavery, I said. And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn't intend for us to be slaves to each other.

Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That's what makes it deadly.

In the end, my father had it right. He called me nothing at all.