Quotes About Relationships

If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it.

It takes two to have a fight.

What is making contact? It is hard to define, but people do know when they have or have not made contact… Sometimes it seems that humans have lost the art. The range of possibilities for contact open to human beings is extremely large, ranging from conversations that can last hours to something as brief as a pull on a pigtail. However, just a small attempt to make contact with the other person on a regular basis can put a distant relationship back on track.

So if there is one most important gift we can give to the next generation it is that of a solid and satisfying marriage relationship.

The human dyad is so unstable that when two people who are important to each other develop a problem, which they invariably do, they automatically look around for a third person to include in the anxious situation in some way. The third person is brought into participation in the anxiety of the original twosome, and thus anxiety flows around the triangle.

The five familiar and well-defined relationship patterns, as described by Bowen, are: Conflict Distance Cutoff Dysfunctional spouse (also called over/underfunctioning reciprocity) Dysfunctional child (also called triangling)

The central dilemma in managing the individuality/togetherness force for each person is how to keep the focus on one's own life and life direction but still stay in open, clear communication with the other significant people in that life.

Sometimes relationships are an attempt to complete the self the same way it was completed in the original family system.

The most common and important triangle that people find when they begin to examine their patterns is the one that was formed between themselves and their two parents or caregivers at birth.

The real problem is, to some degree, that the partners in a difficult relations are "no-selfs." Too much of each self has been absorbed into the relationship.

People with low levels of emotional maturity or differentiation attract other people with low maturity levels, and people with higher levels attract higher level people.

I'm done playing Brokeback Riverdale with you.

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better

one's family is made up of supporting players in one's personal drama. One never supposes that they starred in some possibly gaudy and certainly deeply felt show of their own.

Marriage isn't just domesticity, or the continuance of the race, or institutionalized sex, or a form of property right. And it damned well isn't happiness, as that word is generally used. I think it's a way of finding your soul.

He gave me this advice one time: Never marry your childhood sweetheart, he said; the reasons that make you choose her will all turn into reasons why you should have rejected her.

How they chirped over their cups.

What was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much a mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to acquire another--not even a young and beautiful one with whom I could play Oedipus to both our hearts' content. If I could manage it, I had no intention of being anybody's own dear laddie, ever again.

She's too much like him in temperament. Married couples should complement each other, and not merely double their losses. There's much to be said for the square peg in the round hole, as the Cubist told the Vorticist.

I don't think Emily was quite up to the demands of being everything to Chips. Love lays heavy burdens on the loved one, sometimes

I am constantly astonished by the people, otherwise intelligent, who think that anything so complex and delicate as a marriage can be left to take care of itself. One sees them fussing about all sorts of lesser concerns, apparently unaware that side by side with them — often in the same bed — a human creature is perishing from lack of affection, of emotional malnutrition.

If Heloise had been more clear-headed she'd have seen that Abelard was a frightful nerd in human relationships.

I was a talking lover, which most women hate.

He came of a generation to which any girl, before she is married, is a kind of unexploded bomb.