#on

An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying good night, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realize that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife. ↗

— Nikki Gemmell

#marriage #love

I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate. ↗

— Curtis Sittenfeld

#relationships #marriage

She'd either be a heartless mother and wife or a spineless enabler, when all she really wanted was the man she'd once believed him to be. ↗

— Nicholas Sparks

#choices-and-consequences #heartbreak #marriage #marriage

Husbands and wives, recognize that in marriage you have become one flesh. If you live for your private pleasure at the expense of your spouse, you are living against yourself and destroying your joy. But if you devote yourself with all your heart to the holy joy of your spouse, you will also be living for your joy and making a marriage after the image of Christ and His church. ↗

— John Piper

#church #joy #marriage #oneness #marriage

Mutuality is accomplished by two whole persons; and if each partner truly intends to be but the fraction of a relationship (thinking my whole makes up half of us) he or she will soon discover that these halves do not fit perfectly together. The mathematics can work only if each subtracts something of himself or herself, shears it off, and lays it aside forever. There will come, then, a moment of shock when one spouse realizes, ‘you won’t want the whole of me? Not the whole of me, but only a part of me, makes up the whole of us?” P 45 ↗

— Walter Wangerin Jr.

#oneness #marriage

How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle, And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle. What was it, anyway, that angry thing that flew at me? I am unused to banshees crying Boo at me. Your wife can’t be a banshee— Or can she? ↗

— Ogden Nash

#drinking #hangover #marriage #poetry #relationships

That's the mistake people make - always searching for the perfect match, when they would be just as happy if they settled for somebody reasonably good. ↗

— Farahad Zama

#matrimony #marriage

Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother, on his approaching marriage, were all that was affectionate and insincere. ↗

— Jane Austen

#insincerity #marriage #marriage

I remember saying once to my friend Susan, when my marriage was becoming intolerable, "I don't want my children growing up in a household like this." Susan said, "Why don't you leave those so-called children out of the discussion? They don't even exist yet. Why can't you just admit that you don't want to live in unhappiness anymore? ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#not-settling-for-second-best #love

She thought that they could live together for twenty years and he might never consider asking her about marriage. Tom didn’t follow the usual patterns. If marriage was what she wanted, then she would have to be the one to propose to him. ↗

— Bonnie Dee

#bonnie-dee #sarah #tom #marriage