Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sometimes we are much better at judging people based on how they treat everyone other than ourselves. We make a million excuses for why they treat us how they do.
Women are encouraged to go on an emotional journey of self-care after a divorce, while men are expected to need help learning how to cook and parent on their own.
It's absolutely amazing to me that anyone allowed their children to watch 'The Ren & Stimpy Show' in the '90s; it's dark, gross, nihilistic, and absolutely bizarre.
The benefits of a healthy, thriving relationship may not be nearly as exciting as watching your career take off, but both aspects of your life are equally important.
Men - not all men but a good majority of the ones I have known and worked with - tend to think of difficult situations in their lives as problems that need to be solved.
You're not a victim of your divorce. What you decide to do with yourself and your personal life after your marriage ends is your decision, and completely under your control.
If you've had a marriage that ended because of a betrayal in trust on your spouse's behalf, the idea of trusting another person with your heart can seem completely ridiculous.
The period that directly follows the dissolution of a long term relationship is extremely volatile, with emotions running the gamut from misery to elation to relief to terror.
I always tell people, 'Take a class or volunteer.' It really helps you get out of your own little pocket of people you always see and gets you exposed to a new group of people.
Sometimes we put so much effort into things we're doing, like dating or wedding planning, that we don't stop to think about whether or not we even want the results of that effort.
I'm tired of hearing about 'Damages,' I don't care how life-changing 'The Wire' is, and I don't want to hear another word about 'Battlestar Galactica' or its super-awesome ending.
Nothing makes me feel more mushy and full of love for my husband than going back and looking at our flirtation unfolding online. I love reading our old e-mails, texts, and Gchats.
If a show is wickedly, hugely popular, like 'Mad Men,' I assume that the masses, in their infinite inferiority to me, don't know what good TV is and that everyone is just brainwashed.
In high school, I decided that all of my female friends were stupid and traded them for guy friends. I loved horror movies and heavy metal and used these interests to become a 'guys' girl.'
If you've experienced cheating in a new marriage, the real work is not obsessively combing through all the details of what happened, but rather figuring out if your relationship is worth saving.
There's nothing like listening to the drone of QVC's always-bubbly pitchwomen, as they try to move loose-fitting tunics with 'just the right amount of sparkle,' to soothe you into a healing slumber.
As my marriage was slowly dissolving into silent meals and awkward nights of avoiding conversation, I started pondering an unmarried future and wondered if I'd ever be able to hack being single again.
I am somewhat grateful to the disintegration of my marriage for teaching me a lot about myself and about relationships, and though I wish it hadn't been such a taxing lesson, I wouldn't change a thing.
We all have an idea of how we like to be treated that we would like others to adhere to, and somehow we've gotten in our heads that the perfect person for us will just know what this code of behavior is.
Don't sacrifice alone time with your spouse just because the kids seem needy. A united front requires adult time alone, so put it in the calendar and make it a priority. A house cannot stand on a shaky foundation.
After my divorce, I took some time off from having a romantic life to begin the tough work of figuring out where I'd gone wrong and what on Earth I could do to understand how to be a whole person in a relationship.
Your wedding day is supposed to be your big day, and yet a lot of engaged couples find that instead of creating an event that will be important to them, they're dodging through a minefield of modern etiquette traps.
When I was young and less wise, I thought that being a feminist meant being independent. It meant not sacrificing your needs for anyone else's and not relying on anyone else for even a smidgen of your happiness or well being.
For so long, TV consisted of a limited number of shows a year, and those shows had to appeal to as many people as possible. The joy of TV now is that shows don't have to be broad anymore - they can be small, weird, and niche.
Divorce is one of the most destructive, emotionally traumatic experiences a human being can go through, no matter if you're the instigator or the recipient. It's hard, and it hurts, and it takes a long time to feel normal again.
It's easy to isolate yourself when you're buried in work, or to rely only on work friends for empathy. And while your work friends will always 'get it' more than your life partner, they don't know how to comfort you like your partner does.
I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina, weird and pudgy, without too many other kids to play with. I spent a lot of time watching TV. It was my reassurance that the outside world was bigger and more colorful than the one I lived in.
When someone insists that you watch a show that's already been on for a few seasons, they're basically saying, 'Hey, you're not doing anything for the next five weeks, are you? Because have I got a plan for you every single night! It's 'Weeds!''
In my professional and personal life, when I meet people who feel broken after a divorce, they can usually be divided into two categories: those who truly believe there's something wrong with them, and those that are using their status as armor.
Dealing with wedding stuff is a bit of a double-edged sword - it seems that divorcees are expected to either burn it all on the front lawn, tears silently coursing down their faces, or keep the stuff, shrine-like, concealed somewhere in their homes.
Everybody's got baggage, and not just the classic, 'Oh I have so much baggage,' but everyone comes with so much context, and you're not just dating a person: you're dating all their context, too. Part of relationships is negotiating each other's context.
You didn't have to know anything about show business to appreciate the characters' humor, because at its heart, 'Party Down' was about following dreams, dealing with rejection, and surviving all the lame jobs we've all had to work just to get by in the meantime.
Some divorcees turn their pain inward. They brood, and they grieve for a long time, always wondering if they could have done something differently to keep this from happening. They make every problem in their relationship into something they could have prevented.
Ghosts of Marriages Past can haunt many aspects of a new relationship - your expectations of what a man should do, how you behave in conflict, your ideas of how commitment should look - they can even make your new man look untrustworthy when he's really behaving normally.
I haven't always been the best advocate for my own body. I was a too-tall, pudgy child who felt completely out of control of the genetic lottery ticket she'd been given, so in retaliation, I shut down. I ignored my body and hated it for not being tiny and cute like my friends' bodies.
Often, when cheating happens, we rush to place blame solely on one person - either the person who did the cheating, or more insidiously, if it happened to us, we blame ourselves for not being 'good enough' to keep them around. But putting it all on one person doesn't paint the entire picture.
I'd watch shows like 'The Kids in the Hall' or 'Twin Peaks,' and I'd see weird people being celebrated and appreciated without compromising their weirdness. On 'The Facts of Life,' I'd see girls who were pudgy, beautiful, popular, tomboyish - many ways of being female - and I'd feel quietly reassured.
I don't remember being put into the coma, but I do have a lot of weird memories from being under. This may be because I was in a coma via medicine rather than trauma. That time period played out for me as one long rambling dream where I was at a hospital to visit my boyfriend, who I thought was in an accident.
People get married for a wide array of reasons and have all sorts of expectations of how marriage will change the relationship. And while it's true that turning the person you're dating into a legal partner does affect certain things, those who expect marriage to be a cure-all for all your relationship woes are sorely mistaken.
Marriage is not a magical potion that serves to amplify adoration, reduce deep-seated feelings of resentment, erase fears of commitment, or answer questions about whether or not this is the right move. Marriage is a ceremony that cements your current bond to another human being, and while that's a huge thing, that's all it does.
Sacrificing your relationship for your career sounds noble and romantic from the outside, but the reality is that it can create a pattern of self-destruction that will ultimately burn you out on the career you've worked so hard to build. It's a trap and, for some, an easy way out of having to maintain relationships under stress.
In my experience as a therapist and as a friend, it seems that the majority of the breakup resources available are for women and not men. Women, who tend to be more vocal about their emotional struggles, are the squeaky wheel that gets the grease from friends, from online communities, from books, and from therapeutic approaches.
A lot of people end up getting married more out of expectation than out of passion for each other, but if your options have ever been, 'We either get married or break up,' be careful. Marriage should be a new addition you add to the house that is your relationship, not the structure you impose on the house once it's already built.
Keeping physical items from the past is important - we keep old toys, grandparents' jewelry, yearbooks, dance recital programs - and we assign meaning to them. Those items become the memories, and that's a very healthy thing to do. The problems occur when we have too many of those sentimental items, and they start weighing us down.