#relations

If a man can possess a woman sexually -really possess- he won't need to control her ideas, her opinions, her clothes, her friends, even her other lovers. ↗

— Toni Bentley

#sex #idea

Relationships are never about power, and one way to avoid the will to power is to choose to limit oneself- to serve. ↗

— Wm. Paul Young

#service #tragedy

I had a dream about you. You were old, and I was an infant, yet we looked identical. And probably because I knew you were going to die soon, I decided to kill you. I told myself it was the merciful thing to do, but secretly I knew the truth—I’d murdered you for your diapers. 
 ↗

— Dora J. Arod

#dreams #funny #humor #life #relationships

A friend is someone whose face you can see in the dark. ↗

— Frances O'Roark Dowell

#real #relationships #language

Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they're trying to find someone who's going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take. ↗

— Anthony Robbins

#challenge

You don't fix a man the way you do a fault in a pipe or a leak in a roof. You take him as he is, Mary Brenna, or you don't take him at all...adjustments can't be all made on one side, darling, else the balance goes off and what's being built just falls down. ↗

— Nora Roberts

#balance

Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner's love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother's love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant. ↗

— Bell Hooks

#commitment #love #men #relationships #women

It's just like when you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep. ↗

— Malcolm X

#integration #metaphor #race-relations #coffee

People generally didn't cheat in good relationships. ↗

— Emily Giffin

#relationships #cheating

Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#relationships #weirdness #weird