“Marriage is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash.”— Dr. Joyce Brothers, amazon.com
“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”— Mignon McLaughlin, amazon.com
“Marriage has no guarantees. If that's what you're looking for, go live with a car battery.”— Emma Bombeck, amazon.com
“But Guzim’s was the face we saw every day, the man who said good morning and good night to my girl, who smiled and cooed and remarked on her growth, her smile and her first words.”— Julie Margaret Hogben, nytimes.com
“Happy families are not all alike. Some are fractured and misshapen. To appreciate them, you have to adjust your line of sight, your level of expectation.”— Lara Bazelon, nytimes.com
“There was love, an abundance of it; we just had to respect and accept that it was not the love of happily ever after.”— Lara Bazelon, nytimes.com
“I felt the acute pain of losing someone I loved and the relief of being able to retreat further inside myself without his feathery fingers of adoration checking in.”— Caroline Hurwitz, nytimes.com
“We were sick of each other but we also loved each other. He slept in my bed, where my stack of books on the bedside table cast a skyline shadow across his face.”— Caroline Hurwitz, nytimes.com
“Now I know what I want: a relationship that will fill me with dopamine and steady my heartbeat when he entwines his fingers with mine.”— Melissa Hill, nytimes.com
“Unfortunately, years of schooling can’t teach you about recovering from heartbreak the way experience can.”— Melissa Hill, nytimes.com
“Absence was in the air, but presence too. My security guard lingered nearby.”— Jennifer Couzin-Frankel, nytimes.com
“Twenty years and two children later, I am still with that same man. I don’t need him, but I want him in my life.”— Karen Rinaldi, nytimes.com
“Finally, surrender became not just inevitable but exhilarating. I didn’t want to hold on to anything anymore. I wanted to fall, and I already had. And I knew that this time, too, I would be O.K.”— Natalie Lindeman, nytimes.com
“Maybe it was the way he said, ‘I’d rather spend my summer with you than any other girl.’ Maybe it was how being around him made me forget the brace and the wounds, made me feel whole and unbroken.”— Natalie Lindeman, nytimes.com
“Most people I know have a Jeremy in their lives, someone whose consequence a label can’t capture.”— Jordana Narin, nytimes.com
“But by not calling someone, say, ‘my boyfriend,’ he actually becomes something else, something indefinable. And what we have together becomes intangible. And if it’s intangible it can never end because officially there’s nothing to end. And if it never ends, there’s no real closure, no opportunity t…”— Jordana Narin, nytimes.com
“But now, more than three years after our first kiss and more than a year after our first time, I’m still not over the possibility of him, the possibility of us. And he has no idea.”— Jordana Narin, nytimes.com
“And in the end, my married friends were right: There may be a limit to passion, but love flourishes.”— Marc Jaffe, nytimes.com