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How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly QUOTES

How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly QUOTES

1 " We were born with four words engraved on our bodies and in our hearts: Love me, hold me. "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

2 " The way we were first loved and the ways we have been loved ever since form our definition of what love means to us. Some people really feel loved when someone gives them a gift. Others experience it when people stand up for them. Still others feel loved when someone goes the extra mile to help them. If our mother showed love by holding us in our pain or joy, without engulfing or controlling us, that will be the behavior that always feels like love to us. We feel love now as we first received it; we give love the way others gave it to us. Thus, since love is unique to each person, we read and write love, receive and give it, in the style designed by our past experience. Yet, like good handwriting, our unique signature can be read by others. "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

3 " It is always appropriate to ask for love, but to ask any other adult (including our parents in the present) to meet our primal needs is unfair and unrealistic. Most of us emerge from childhood with conscious and unconscious primal wounds and emotional unfinished business. What we leave incomplete we are doomed to repeat. The untreated traumas of childhood become the frustrating dramas of adulthood. Our fantasy of the “perfect partner,” or our disappointments in a relationship we do not change or leave, or the dramas that keep arising in our relationships reveal our unique unmet primal wounds and needs. We try so hard to get from others what once we missed. What was missed can never be made up for, only mourned and let go of. Only then are we able to relate to adults as adults. "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

4 " It is, of course, true that discrimination in trusting others is necessary if we are to have quality relationships. Selectivity is important for our safety and security, because it means trusting only those who have proven their dependability. This makes sense but only in how we love, not that we love. Thus, our ways of showing love differ according to the commitment we have to various individuals in our lives. But our scope of love does not have to set or be set by limitations. We can be careful about our boundaries when others come close but free of boundaries in how far our love extends. There are boundaries in the topography of love but no barriers. "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

5 " I must admit, however, that this is mostly a book of guesses—as any book on love must be. My guess is that loving is what we are here for, that love is what every one of us deserves to receive and is here to give, that love alone makes this earth the heaven it was meant to be. The guess turns into a conundrum when we realize that so many of us prefer the signs that point to heaven over heaven itself. We yearn for and talk about the love we want. We lament the love we have been deprived of. Yet we sometimes fail to take the steps that can help it happen for us.
The puzzle becomes even more confounding when we sometimes prefer the hell of no love at all, which we bring on by our own unskillful choices or by our endurance of abuse or betrayal, especially from those who say they love us. This book proposes that love is real when we dare to become as loving as we can be toward ourselves and others and as careful as we can be not to confuse a history with someone or a connection that does not work for us with true love. "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

6 " What if all that happens to us is exactly what schools us in how to evolve in love in the course of life? That is the very definition of synchronicity, meaningful coincidence: Just the right events and people come along to allow us to articulate the love we are inside. All of them are emissaries of some nuance of light we need to let the full colors of our love appear in all their incandescence. "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

7 " I now understand that all the people I have ever known have come into my life to teach me about love. I am coming to trust that every moment of affection I received has been carefully recorded in me, ready for playback. The love I received from others shows me how to love those who need it from me. This is how the people who loved me have helped write this book.
Specific memories also come through about how much people have had to put up with from me. What did they see in me that made them stick with me when I was so damned afraid to return their love? Maybe they saw something lovable in me that I need to see in myself. Their uninterrupted love also helps me trust that I must have shown more love than I give myself credit for. "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

8 " Real love includes romantic fascination but then moves on through conflict to commitment. It is not always pleasurable, but it is reliably enduring. Infatuation craves exhilaration as well as safety and security; love provides them through sustained trustworthiness. "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

9 " Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. All the greatest things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they and they only who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be conscious of how much it owes to them, nor above all of what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. —MARCEL PROUST, Guermantes Way, Vol. I "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly

10 " Then we become more adult, because we are fulfilling the inner urge that all humans were born with: to go on a heroic journey, to move on rather than stay stuck. Where we are is not our fate. It is where we can best begin the journey. "

― David Richo , How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly