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1 " The road to calmer relationships therefore isn’t necessarily about removing points of contention. It’s rather about assuming that they are going to happen and that they will inevitably require quite a lot of time and thought to address "
― The School of Life , Relationships
2 " We need to imagine the turmoil, disappointment, worry and sheer confusion in people who may outwardly appear merely aggressive. "
3 " We may believe we are seeking happiness in love, but what we are really after is familiarity. "
4 " love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt. It "
5 " Two people should see a relationship as a constant opportunity to improve and be improved. When lovers teach each other uncomfortable truths, they are not giving up on love. They are trying to do something very true to love: which is to make their partners more loveable. "
6 " If we cannot always be entirely sane in our relationships, the kindest thing we can do for those who care about us is to hand over some maps that try to chart and guide others through the more disturbed regions of our internal world. "
7 " The central solution to all this trouble is to normalise a new and more accurate picture of emotional functioning: to make it clear just how healthy and mature it is to be fragile and in repeated need of reassurance – and at the same time, how difficult it is to reveal one’s vulnerable dependence. "
8 " Being told we simply have to love someone for all that they are, or else think of ourselves as bad people, is asking for the impossible. How could someone never want to change any part of us if they know us properly? Do "
9 " The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. "
10 " Our romantic impulses are continually renewed. We blame everything but our hopes. "
11 " In the choice between being loved and being honest, most of us choose the former. But "
12 " Unfortunately, under the sway of Romantic ideology, most of us end up being terrible teachers and equally terrible students. That’s because we don’t accept that it’s honest (let alone noble) to have things we might want to teach and areas where we might need to be taught. We "
13 " Hope reliably triumphs over experience. It’s always very tempting to console ourselves with an apparently very reasonable thought: the reason it didn’t work out this time was not that the expectations were too high, but that we directed them onto the wrong person. We "
14 " little power in comparison to the oceanic currents of emotion unleashed by betrayal. Loyalists wisely know the corrosive effect of major concealments. "
15 " A loyal marriage ought at all times to retain within it an awareness of the immense forbearance and pessimistic, stoic generosity which the two parties are showing one another in managing not to sleep around (or, for that matter, in refraining from killing each other). That is something to feel properly optimistic about. "
16 " The error of the crush is subtler; it lies in how easily we move from spotting a range of genuinely fine traits of character to settling on a recklessly naive romantic conclusion: that the other across the train aisle or pavement constitutes a complete answer to our inner emotional needs. "
17 " We are chaotic chemical propositions in dire need of basic principles to which we can adhere during our brief rational spells. "
18 " Love has a history and we ride – sometimes rather helplessly – on its currents. "
19 " We are creatures deeply marked by our expectations. We go around with mental pictures, lodged in our brains, of how things are supposed to go. We "
20 " Another day, coming out of the supermarket, amidst a throng of people, you catch sight of a face for no longer than eight seconds and yet, here too, you feel the same overwhelming certainty – and, subsequently, a bittersweet sadness at their disappearance in the anonymous crowd. "