Quotes About Relationships

Studies have found similar statistics regarding young men's belief that they have the right to force a female to have sex if they have spent a substantial amount of money on the evening's entertainment or if the woman started wanting sex but then changed her mind. These studies point to the importance of focusing on changing the entitled attitudes of abusers, rather than attempting to find something wrong in their individual psychology.

Genuine love means respecting the humanity of the other person, wanting what is best for him or her, and supporting the other person's self-esteem and independence. This kind of love is incompatible with abuse and coercion.

If the man is abusive, of course he is going to deny it, partly to protect himself and partly because his perceptions are distorted. If he were ready to accept responsibility for his actions in relationships, he wouldn't be abusive.

I can't solve his problems, and it's not my fault that he thinks I should.

some abusers are rarely home at all, using the house only as a base for periodic refueling.

One exercise that can help you address this trap involves making a list of all the ways, including emotional ones, in which you feel dependent on your partner, then making another list of big or small steps you might take to begin to become more independent. These lists can guide you in focusing your energy in the directions you need to go.

Kay Douglas's book is the most supportive, realistic, and practical guide for abused women that I have encountered. A woman with this book in her hands is on the path to a new life. The author really 'gets it' about what it takes to deal with a destructive partner and takes the reader step-by-step from the beginnings of grasping what is happening to her all the way to healing once the relationship has ended. Outstanding!

A man's partner is not his child, and the freedoms he "grants" her are not credits to be spent like chips when the urge to control her arises.

abuse is a problem of values, not of psychology.

Abusive and controlling men tend to have an endless collection of strategies to avoid having to look at their behavior and change it. They are highly attached to an unequal, privileged position in their relationships with women, and as a result are simply not willing to operate respectfully, since that would mean operating as equals.

but men who have abusive fathers do; the disrespect that abusive men show their female partners and their daughters is often absorbed by their sons. So while a small number

The purpose of this book is to equip women with the ability to protect themselves, physically and psychologically, from angry and controlling men.

We grew up together but we won't grow old together.

Lani felt certain that hers and Dawson's worlds would never collide. She was wrong.

God created Adam lord of all living creatures, but Eve spoiled it all.

People relinquish ownership of their lives so quickly (especially where love is concerned) that the responsibility for what happens to us relative to knowing those people automatically falls on them as if we had no control.

Volto à família: um ambiente duro em casa não prepara para enfrentar a dureza da vida, como alguns preconizam. Ao contrário: para saber defender-me no terreno violento em que vivemos preciso ter uma sólida raiz de afetos.

To get to know someone new, you need to touch a lot.

War-waging and peace-making are as old as ants and apes.

How strange it is to realize now that although I was frightened of the emptiness between us, that emptiness was not his fault but mine: I was waiting to see what he would give me, how he would entertain me. And yet I was incapable of being profoundly interested in him or, maybe, in anyone. Just the reverse of what I thought at the time, when it seemed so simple: he was too callow, or too cautious, or just too young, not complex enough yet, and so he did not entertain me, and it was his fault.

The people in your happy memories have to be the same people who want to have you in their own happy memories.

There are also men in the world. Sometimes we forget, and think there are only women—endless hills and plains of unresisting women. We make little jokes and comfort each other and our lives pass quickly. But every now and then, it is true, a man rises unexpectedly in our midst like a pine tree, and looks savagely at us, and sends us hobbling away in great floods to hide in the caves and gullies until he is gone.

I should check now and then to make sure I am not alone too much, or unhappy with other people too often.

Maybe he also felt angry or insulted, if it occurred to him then or later that maybe he hadn't made a mistake but that I had deliberately stood him up, and not the way I did it — alone up there in the apartment, uncomfortable and embarrassed, chickening out, hiding out — but, he would imagine, in collusion with someone else, a girlfriend or boyfriend, confiding in them, snickering over him.