“There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like. In business, people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. Maybe you’re too used to that. Lov…”— Morrie Schwartz, amazon.com
“Many if not most women pay for the privilege of being in a serious romantic relationship by taking on multiple full-time jobs, and for me that’s not remotely worth the trade off.”— ad infinitum, jezebel.com
“Just shut up! Here... I wanna marry you because you're the first person I wanna look at when I wake up in the morning, and the only one I wanna kiss goodnight. Because the first time that I saw these hands, I couldn't imagine not being able to hold them. But mainly, when you love someone as much as…”— Ryan Reynolds, Will Hayes, Ryan Reynolds, amazon.com
“When I tell you not to marry without love, I do not advise you to marry for love alone: there are many, many other things to be considered. Keep both heart and hand in your own possession, till you see good reason to part with them; and if such an occasion should never present itself, comfort your m…”— Anne Brontë, amazon.com
“First divorce: wife's hidden sexuality, not my fault. Second divorce: said the wrong name at the altar, kind of my fault. Third divorce: they shouldn't let you get married when you're that drunk and have stuff drawn all over your face, Nevada's fault.”— David Schwimmer, Ross Geller, David Schwimmer, imdb.com
“We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusu…”— Alain de Botton, nytimes.com
“Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the 'right' person.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“We speak of 'love' as if it were a single, undifferentiated thing, but it comprises two very different modes: being loved and loving. We should marry when we are ready to do the latter and have become aware of our unnatural--and dangerous--fixation on the former.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“It happens much as he remembers it from before, that first span with someone new. If he could collect every such scene from across his past and put them together on a single loop, the total running time might be no more than half an hour, yet these would in many ways be the finest moments of his lif…”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“We don't need to be constantly reasonable in order to have good relationships; all we need to have mastered is the occasional capacity to acknowledge with good grace that we may, in one or two areas, be somewhat insane.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“When two people belong together, there is simply--at long last--a wondrous reciprocal feeling that both parties see the world in precisely the same way.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“Marriage: a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully omitted to investigate.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“We believe we are seeking happiness in love, but we are really after is familiarity.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“There is, in the early period of love where...we can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile, and multiple; all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“Love is dividend of gratitude for our lover's insight into our own confused and troubled psyche.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“Love reaches a pitch at those moments when our beloved turns out to understand, more clearly than others have ever been able to, and perhaps even better than we do ourselves, the chaotic, embarrassing, and shameful parts of us. That someone else gets who we are and both sympathizes with us and forgi…”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com
“Love is also, and equally, about weakness, about being touched by another's fragilities and sorrows, especially when--as happens in the early days--we ourselves are in no danger of being held responsible for them.”— Alain de Botton, amazon.com