Quotes About Relationships

Love is one of society's many socially accepted forms of madness.

We got married: society's solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.

God's image…is found not best in individual humans, but in humans as they relate to each other.

It's always been my personal feeling that unless you are married, there is something that is not very dignified about talking about who you are dating.

Abuse and respect are diametric opposites: You do not respect someone whom you abuse, and you do not abuse someone whom you respect.

It is fine to commiserate with a man about his bad experience with a previous partner, but the instant he uses her as an excuse to mistreat you, stop believing anything he tells you about that relationship and instead recognize it as a sign that he has problems with relating to women.

But whether you stay or go, the critical decision you can make is to stop letting your partner distort the lens of your life, always forcing his way into the center of the picture. You deserve to have your life be about you; you are worth it.

Abuse grows from attitudes and values, not feelings. The roots are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control.

The sense of ownership is one reason why abuse tends to get worse as relationships get more serious. The more history and commitment that develop in the couple, the more the abuser comes to think of his partner as a prized object. Possessiveness is at the core of the abuser's mindset, the spring from which all the other streams spout; on some level he feels that he owns you and therefore has the right to treat you as he sees fit.

When people conclude that anger causes abuse, they are confusing cause and effect. Ray was not abusive because he was angry; he was angry because he was abusive. Abusers carry attitudes that produce fury.

I am often asked whether physical aggression by women toward men, such as a slap in the face, is abuse. The answer is: "It depends." Men typically experience women's shoves or slaps as annoying and infuriating rather than intimidating, so the long-term emotional effects are less damaging. It is rare to find a man who has gradually lost his freedom or self-esteem because of a woman's aggressiveness.

The underlying attitude comes bursting out of his words: He believes his wife is keeping something of his away from him when she doesn't want intimate contact. He sees sexual rights to a woman as akin to mineral rights to land—and he owns them.

Outside of my professional life, I have known many couples over the years who had passion and electricity between them and who treated each other well. But unfortunately there is wide acceptance in our society of the unhealthy notion that passion and aggression are interwoven and that cruel verbal exchanges and bomblike explosions are the price you pay for a relationship that is exciting, deep, and sexy. Popular romantic movies and soap operas sometimes reinforce this image.

Why does Wendell think that Aysha is the one who has been doing all the yelling and complaining? Because in his mind she's supposed to be listening, not talking. If she expresses herself at all, that's too much.

And you are not "enabling" your partner to mistreat you; he is entirely responsible for his own actions.

the disrespect that abusive men so often direct toward women in general tends to be born of their cultural values and conditioning rather than personal experiences of being victimized by women.

Abusers drive wedges between people, by accident or by design.

Outside of my professional life, I have known many couples over the years who had passion and electricity between them and who treated each other well. But unfortunately there is wide acceptance in our society of the unhealthy notion that passion and aggression are interwoven and that cruel verbal exchanges and bomblike explosions are the price you pay for a relationship that is exciting, deep, and sexy. Popular romantic movies and soap operas sometimes reinforce this image. Most

For many abusive men, pornography has shaped their sexuality since they were teenagers or even younger. It has helped to form their view of what women are like and what they ought to be. When a graduate of what I call "The Pornography School of Sexuality" discovers, for example, that his partner does not find a slap in the face arousing, he thinks that's evidence of something sexually wrong with her.

He often has difficulty conceiving of her as a human being. This tendency in abusers is known as objectification or depersonalization.

Free labor from her; leisure and freedom for him

Abused women aren't "codependent." It is abusers, not their partners, who create abusive relationships.

don't make him do the things he does. When men blame women for their own behavior, that's one of the benchmarks of abuse.

This style of abuser loses interest in sex if his partner starts to assert herself as an equal human being deserving of respect, or he begins to coerce or assault her sexually. In short, he wants sex on his terms or not at all.