#chi

The best gift you can give to your kids is a happy marriage. ↗

— Ricky Shetty

#fatherhood #kids #marriage #parenting #marriage

Stop glaring at me, baby. You were the one who attacked me and got you knocked up.” Patrick turned to smile at her. He had a knack for reading her mind. “I’m pregnant, and it’s your fault.” “You took advantage of a sleeping man.” He walked up to her, wrapped his arms around her waist, and dropped a kiss on her lips. “How was I to refuse a woman what she wanted?” “Say no.” “When it comes to you that word doesn’t exist to me. ↗

— Sam Crescent

#marriage

I sit on the bed and kick off my shoes, and he kneels before me and takes the riding boots, holding one open for my bare foot. I hesitate; it is such an intimate gesture between a young woman and a man. His smiling upward glance tells me that he understands my hesitation but is ignoring it. I point my toe and he holds the boot, I slide my foot in and he pulls the boot over my calf. He takes the soft leather ties and fastens the boot, at my ankle, then at my calf, and then just below my knee. He looks up at me, his hand gently on my toe. I can feel the warmth of his hand through the soft leather. I imagine my toes curling in pleasure at his touch. ‘Anne, will you marry me?’ he asks simply, as he kneels before me. ↗

— Philippa Gregory

#intimacy #love #marriage-proposal #richard-iii #touching

The small hopes and plans and pleasures of children should be tenderly respected by grown-up people, and never rudely thwarted or ridiculed. ↗

— Louisa May Alcott

#men

Why is being an unmarried woman something that we should be ashamed of, as if we’ve failed? Men don’t feel this way. When they haven’t married, they make it sound like they’ve gotten away with something. Their single status makes them even more appealing to the other sex. ↗

— Eileen Cook

#men

Why is it women have to bring all this angst into sex? We should be more like men. In. Out. Over. Next. ↗

— Lara Rios

#romance #men

As it happened, I didn't grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear. ↗

— Joan Didion

#love

But deciding not to have children is a very, very hard decision for a woman to make: the atmosphere is worryingly inconducive to saying, "I choose not to," or "it all sounds a bit vile, tbh." We call these women "selfish" The inference of the word "childless" is negative: one of lack, and loss. We think of nonmothers as rangy lone wolves--rattling around, as dangerous as teenage boys or men. We make women feel that their narrative has ground to a halt in their thirities if they don't "finish things" properly and have children. ↗

— Caitlin Moran

#choice #danger #feminism #mothers #men

Children were the foot wedged in the closing door, the glimmer of hope that in reincarnation there would be some house to go to, even if one came back as a dog, or a mouse, or flea that lived on the bodies of men. If...there was a raising of the dead, then a child would be sure to see that its parents were awakened. ↗

— Abraham Verghese

#men

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's. ↗

— George Eliot

#men