Quotes About Relationships

The swiping culture lures us with infinite possibilities, but it also exerts a subtle tyranny. The constant awareness of ready alternatives invites unfavorable comparisons, weakens commitment, and prevents us from enjoying the present moment.

However authentic the feelings of love, the dalliance was only ever meant to be a beautiful fiction.

Once divorce carried all the stigma. Now, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame.

By turning our backs on other loves, we confirm the uniqueness of our "significant other." "I have found The One. I can stop looking." Miraculously, our desire for others is supposed to evaporate, vanquished by the power of this singular attraction.

Neutralizing each other's complexity affords us a kind of manageable otherness.

We blame our partners for failing to make us whole.

When you love someone, how does it feel? And when you desire someone, how is it different? Does good intimacy always lead to good sex?

In our efforts to protect ourselves from intimate betrayal, we demand access, control, transparency. And we run the risk of unknowingly eradicating the very space between us that keeps desire alive. Fire needs air.

My husband deals with pain; I deal with pleasure. They are intimately acquainted.

By telling them not to touch I was mapping a space that would give her room to go after him. That, in turn, would give him the feeling of being desired.

A couple's emotional life together and their physical life together each have their ebbs and flows, their ups and downs, but these don't always correspond. They intersect, they influence each other, but they're also distinct.

Marriage is imperfect. We start with a desire for oneness, and then we discover our differences. Our fears are aroused by the prospect of all the things we're never going to have. We

We have hundreds of virtual "friends" but no one we can ask to feed the cat. We are a lot more free than our grandparents were, but also more disconnected.

Given the transient nature of life, given its ceaseless flux, there is more than a hint of arrogance in the assumption that we can make our relationships permanent, and that security can actually be fixed.

In London alone, there are 80,000 prostitutes. What are they but . . . human sacrifices offered up on the altar of monogamy? —Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism

When we cordon off our erotic interiors, we are left with sex that is truncated, devoid of vibrancy, and not particularly intimate. What people fail to see is that dull, boring sexual relationships are often a consequence of shutting down the imagination in just this way.

Marriage is imperfect. We start with a desire for oneness, and then we discover our differences.

It is ironic that some people, like Guy, will minimize the emotional involvement to lessen the offense ("It meant nothing!"), while others, like Charmaine, will highlight the emotional nature of the bond for exactly the same purpose ("Nothing happened!").

When people live on top of each other, there is no isolation to transcend, and they are far less interested in embracing western, middle-class ideals of intimacy. Their lives are entwined enough as it is.

Some relationships originate in feelings of warmth, tenderness, and nurturance, and the partners choose to remain in these calmer waters. They prefer a love that is built on patience more than on passion. To them, finding serenity in a lasting bond is what counts. There is no one way, and there is no right way.

Infidelity hurts. But when we grant it a special status in the hierarchy of marital misdemeanors, we risk allowing it to overshadow the egregious behaviors that may have preceded it or even led to it.

When people become fused—when two become one—connection can no longer happen. There is no one to connect with. Thus separateness is a precondition for connection: this is the essential paradox of intimacy and sex.

In this setup, the pressure is always on the non-talker to change, rather than on the talker to be more versatile. This situation minimizes the importance of nonverbal communication: doing nice things for each other, making attentive gestures, or sharing projects in a spirit of collaboration.

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