Quotes About Relationships

You have never experienced anything this ferocious or intentional with another person.

And no one can ever figure out what you want, and you won't tell them, and you realize the person who loves you isn't the one you thought it would be, and you don't trust him to love you in a way you would enjoy.

Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other.

names of places we've been together, names of people we'd be together.

I couldn't make you love me and I'm tired of pulling your teeth.

but you say the same thing every time. Let's not talk about it, let's just not talk.

Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other. We know who our enemies are. We know.

The finest woman in nature should not detain me an hour from you; but you must sometimes suffer the rivalship of the wisest men.

Men are usually trying to get into my bed, not out of it.

He looked over at me now, his eyes wet. "Will you come and lay down with me first?" "Well, gee, Lyle . . . gee. Actually, I think Miss Manners would advise against it. I mean, with my lover waiting down in the car and all. I think you have a good bit to learn about timing—about the social graces. I'm pretty sure we'd both feel very, very bad afterwards. Also, these days I'm a bit overextended in that department.

In the end, everybody gay in Albany knows everybody gay in Albany. Eventually you always end up in the bed you started out in. I mean, this is the Hudson Valley, Newell, not West Hollywood. You can do it.

When I worked as a lecturer, I had a colleague who said "The trouble with students is that they are always at your feet or at your throat." The same could be said of devotees. My colleague's words are a wonderfully concise summary of the problem of projection.

In order to love people usefully you need to be focused on them and not yourself.

Somewhere out there is someone who wants exactly the kind of person you are, complete with all the flaws and failings you come with.

So do yourself a favour. Go away and hide somewhere while you lick your wounds. Enjoy your friends and your family, and wait until you've recovered a bit before you start looking for a new partner. And when you do, try to pick someone whose scars are relatively well-healed too – because of course this works the other way round as well. That way you can both see each other as you really are, and start your relationship the way you want to continue it.

We trigger each other, it seems, some dysfunctional Rube Goldberg mousetrap, a laugh, then a slap, a razor gliding over a mirror, a glass filled, a glass emptied, a ball rolling down a length of pipe, a pipe filling up and overflowing with smoke. On our best days, we see each other for all that we are, and we find a way to make each other better.

Women in these societies often dislike marriage specifically because as wives they are obliged to produce food for men, and they have to work harder than they would as unmarried women.

Men need their personal cooks because the guarantee of an evening meal frees them to spend the day doing what they want, and allows them to entertain other men. They can find opportunities for sexual interactions more easily than they can find a food provider.

Another version of the same formula applied to many Tiwi marriages. In this highly polygynous culture, old men took most of the young wives, so more than 90 percent of men's first marriages were to widows much older than themselves, sometimes as old as sixty. The old wives might have been past child-bearing age and physically unattractive, but young men delighted in the marriages because they were then fed.

A wife who cooks badly might be beaten, shouted at, chased, or have her possessions broken, but she can respond to abuse by refusing to cook or threatening to leave. Such disputes seem to be characteristic mostly of new marriages.

Under this system, an unmarried woman who offers food to a man is effectively flirting, if not offering betrothal. Male anthropologists have to be aware of this to avoid embarrassment in such societies. Cofeeding is often the only marriage ceremony, such that if an unmarried pair are seen eating together, they are henceforward regarded as married.

Women's evolved strategic responses to male demonism have included countermeasures and defiance, but they also included collaboration. That is to say, while men have evolved to be demonic males, it seems likely that women have evolved to prefer demonic males (or imitation demonic males) as mates.

I don't want to touch you skin to skin. I want to touch you deeply, beneath the surface, where our real stories lie.

It seems to me sometimes that seasons leave us in the way people do, never just gone, but degree by degree, fading like the smell on a loved one's favourite sweater, until the vanishing one day evolves into memory.