Quotes About Relationships

but I figured that this comment was just one of John's defenses against getting close to anybody or acknowledging his need for another human being.

anger serves another function—it pushes people away and keeps them from getting close enough to see you.

Everyone should have at least one epic love story in their lives.

You didn't fall in love with me before our first date, when I told you I had a six-year-old," I say. "You knew what to do then, didn't you?" More suffocating silence. As you've probably guessed, this conversation goes nowhere.

privacy (spaces in people's psyches that everyone needs in healthy relationships) and secrecy (which stems from shame and tends to be corrosive). Carl Jung called secrets

If we don't accept the notion that there's no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck.

losses tend to be multilayered. There's the actual loss (in my case, of Boyfriend), and the underlying loss (what it represents).

It's not that people want to get hurt again. It's that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this "repetition compulsion." Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.

Sometimes the changes you want in another person aren't on that person's agenda—even if he tells you they are.

It's well documented that touch is important for well-being throughout our lifetimes. Touch can lower blood pressure and stress levels, boost moods and immune systems.

although, as the saying goes, "Before diagnosing people with depression, make sure they're not surrounded by assholes"),

Breakups are awful," Claire says, popping some grapes in her mouth. "But we'd be negligent if we didn't do them.

I've told her about the many relationships I've seen implode simply because one person was terrified of being abandoned and so did everything in his or her power to push the other person away. She is starting to see that what makes self-sabotage so tricky is that it attempts to solve one problem (alleviate abandonment anxiety) by creating another (making her partner want to leave).

Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we'd been skating by on the project: our lives.

It's easy to conflate the intimate experience of romance or sex with the intimate experience of having somebody pay undivided attention to the details of your life, accept you fully, support you without competing agendas, and know you so deeply.

Why are we essentially outsourcing the thing that defines us as people?" Turkle asked in the video. Her question made me wonder: Was it that people couldn't tolerate being alone or that they couldn't tolerate being with other people?

Falling in love never gets old. No matter how jaded you are, how much suffering love has caused you, a new love can't help but make you feel hopeful and alive, like that very first time

She wasn't willing to look at what she was doing that made it difficult for people to give her what she wanted.

I have a feeling that there's a lot of buried love between John and Margo because I know this: love can often look like so many things that don't seem like love.

Every person you've been close to lives on somewhere inside you.

You have two ears and one mouth; there's a reason for that ratio"),

It isn't that I haven't been able to write at all. In fact, during the time I was supposed to be writing my book, I was crafting fabulously witty and flirtatious emails to Boyfriend, all while telling friends and family and even Boyfriend that I was busy writing my book. I was like the closet gambler who gets dressed for work and kisses his family goodbye each morning and then drives to the casino instead of the office.

Our must-haves and deal-breakers are the "what," when they should be the "why.

Further, for Rich, love was work and free choice, not a result of fate or destiny.