Quote collection
85 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Modern love is the enterprise that everyone wants to be a part of, yet there's a fifty percent divorce rate in round one and a sixty-five percent divorce rate in round two."
"For some people, a one-night stand doesn't make any difference in a seven-year love affair. I don't believe the degree of betrayal is always commensurate with the egregiousness of the behavior. They are two separate things."
"Success, to me, is helping one person or many people counter the isolation and pseudoconnectivity of our lives by boosting their ability to connect to themselves and to others."
"You never know your partner as well as you think."
"Love is at once an affirmation and a transcendence of who we are."
"In desire, there must be some small amount of tension. And that tension comes with the unknown, the unpredictable. You can close yourself off at home and say, "Whew, at last I'm in a place where I don't have to worry," or you can keep yourself open to the mystery and elusiveness of your partner."
"There is no sex without a cue. People who date have their cues at home, before they meet. You think about where to go, what to eat, what to do and say. Sometimes the cue is short - - just before we reach the bar - - but sex is never just spontaneous. Spontaneity is a myth."
"For most couples who come to me - especially in the aftermath of the revelation of an affair, when they are in a state of crisis and fear the loss of a predictable future - they start to have conversations for the first time about love, sex, monogamy, and marriage. Most couples don't negotiate or don't even converse about any of these things until the crisis of the affair has actually forced them to. Why does it take infidelity to get us talking about the stuff that should be there from the start?"
"The secret to desire in a long-term relationship"
"In my community there were two groups of people, There were the ones who did not die and the ones who came back to life."
"The kiss that you have never given is just as powerful as hours of actual lovemaking. The erotic isn't just what is happening between people's legs. It is also what's happening in their erotic mind."
"What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? ... Therein lies the mystery of eroticism."
"When there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek."
"There's something very full in knowing that your partner accepts you as is."
"For me, the constitutive element of an affair is the secrecy. It is the secrecy that leads to the lying, to the deception, to the duplicity. It is the structure of an affair - not the sexual or emotional behavior or what people actually are doing."
"The meaning of secrecy is very different when the model of love is one of transparency. So to understand the politics of secrecy and revelation, you need to understand the larger culture in which the couple lives and also the culture of the couple itself. What does intimacy mean to them? Where does the couple draw the line between togetherness and separateness? That's what informs you. You always ask, "What would happen if I tell? What would happen if I don't tell?" Sometimes, the partner doesn't want to know."
"Eroticism thrives in the space between the self and the other."
"Marriage isn't meant to make you happy - it's there because it gives you a life in which you can find happiness."
"Real sexual conversations are enormously intimate and beautiful because they reveal so much about who we are and what we want. What are the emotional needs we bring to our sexuality and how do we connect to ourselves and connect to a partner? There's such a rich tapestry that can be revealed, but the vast majority of couples have never had those talks."
"Our consumer economy peddles the notions "romantic consumerism" of finding "the one," of being the one. It's the narcissistic enhancement of, "I'm the one you stopped your nomadic life for." It's one thing when you have sex for the first time when you marry, but it's another thing altogether when you stop having sex with others when you marry. So the marital commitment becomes, "I must be really special. With me, you no longer think you can find better next door." Romantic consumerism is thinking you can't find better, younger or newer."