Words of Wisdom

"When a relationship functions properly there's no power struggle, there's no sense of inequality, there are no important needs that are aching to be met. There's a sense of being at home with each other."
Mira Kirshenbaum, Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad

"The lesson to be learned from the long and happily married couples is that bad times can pass, and good times return."
Catherine Johnson, Lucky in Love

"If you think that sticking to your guns and refusing to please your partner is a winning position, think again. There is no way that you can win if your partner loses."
Shirley Glass, Not "Just Friends"

"More marriages might survive if the partners realized that sometimes the better comes after the worse."
Doug Larson

"Commitment is not a one-time event; it's an ongoing process."
Linda and Charlie Bloom, 101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married

"Marriage isn't about dividing things up 50/50 anymore. That's what roommates do when they share the rent. Marriage should be about supporting and helping one another, despite 'fairness.'"
Amy Morin, Five Realistic Expectations About Marriage

"Happiness and longevity in a relationship occur when folks wake up in the morning and ask themselves how they can make their partner's day better."
Wombat, Kiss and Blog

For more great quotations about love and marriage see, The Things That Matter

Offline

I am taking a few days off from blogging while I spend some time with family members.

Are You Afraid to Be Vulnerable?

by guest blogger Larry James

It's all about trust! Simple… but, for most, not easy.

"Being truly vulnerable, transparent and genuine – becoming intimate – with your partner is not for the faint of heart. It takes a willingness to learn how your partner wants to be loved, emotionally and sexually, and to honor that. It requires you to have the emotional strength and spiritual courage of a warrior: committed to take on the difficult challenge ahead and never surrender. To succeed will be the greatest victory imaginable." ~ Lori and Bob Hollander, RelationshipsWork.com

Better Blogging

Everyone has a story to tell. Thanks to the accessibility of the World Wide Web and the proliferation of social media, telling those stories has become easier than ever before. It is possible to find blogs on just about every subject you can imagine (and some that you probably can't), written by people from every walk of life, every age, every point of view. Finding blogs that are worth the effort is considerably more challenging.

I regularly monitor many different blogs on a variety of subjects. The best and most successful among them usually exhibit certain key characteristics that any aspiring blogger would do well to emulate.

What We Give For Love

In his song "Dreams of the Everyday Housewife" Chris Gantry imagines a long-married woman's nostalgia as she remembers the pleasures of her youth and the boy she might have married, but didn't. He describes her as "the everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me." Marrying him meant that she sacrificed what she might have had. But she probably didn't see it that way at the time. When they married, in her eyes she was choosing the good life. Whatever she gave up, it was done in exchange for something she valued.

Grow Old Along With Me

Robert Browning began his poem "Rabbi ben Ezra" with these words:

        Grow old along with me!
        The best is yet to be.

John Lennon borrowed Browning's words as the inspiration for one of his last songs. It has been recorded by a number of artists, including Glen Campbell and Mary Chapin Carpenter. The lyrics are deceptively simple, conveying the depth of love and commitment that hold us together through a lifetime of challenges and rewards. This is what we mean when we recite, "To have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, as long as we both shall live."

        Grow old along with me
        Whatever fate decrees
        We will see it through
        For our love is true

What could be better than to experience it all, side by side with the one you love and trust most in the world? And at the end, to sit and watch the sunset, holding hands with the person who shares all those memories with you.

Marriage Advice: The Bottom Line

 

There is an infinite supply of marriage advice, readily available everywhere, all the time. Books, TV shows, videos, seminars, online courses, blogs, magazine and newspaper articles, friends and relatives, fortune cookies -- all dispensing unlimited wisdom to anyone who needs it.

The problem is, all these brilliant authorities can't quite seem to agree. What is the best way to handle finances? Should you ever go to bed mad? Can long-distance relationships succeed? How should you express anger? How important is sex? What is the best way to approach conflicts with in-laws? Do you really need a regular date night? Everyone has a different theory, a special technique, some new research. When the experts disagree, how can any of us ever decide what is right?