Miserable Marriage Quotes

I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.

Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. I've seen it with my own mother and father. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. I've seen that, too, in my own miserable and disastrous attempt at making another person happy. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love. Divorce isn't a cure, it's a surgical operation, even if there are no children to consider.

I’m not laughing.” I was actually crying. “And please don’t laugh at me now, but I think the reason it’s so hard for me to get over this guy is because I seriously believed David was my soul mate. ”He probably was. Your problem is you don’t understand what that word means. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can’t let this one go. It’s over, Groceries. David’s purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of your marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it. That was his job, and he did great, but now it’s over. Problem is, you can’t accept that his relationship had a real short shelf life. You’re like a dog at the dump, baby – you’re just lickin’ at the empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you’re not careful, that can’s gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it.“But I love him.” “So love him.” “But I miss him.” “So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him, then drop it. You’re just afraid to let go of the last bits of David because then you’ll be really alone, and Liz Gilbert is scared to death of what will happen if she’s really alone. But here’s what you gotta understand, Groceries. If you clear out all that space in your mind that you’re using right now to obsess about this guy, you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot – a doorway. And guess what the universe will do with the doorway? It will rush in – God will rush in – and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop using David to block that door. Let it go.

If some area of your life sucks - do something else. Life is too short - and too long - to spend it being miserable. Life may indeed be short but it is for a fact wide. It is high time we started settling for more.

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world

How miserably hypocritical, you might say, but no sooner am I offered a chance to flee Hell than I yearn to stay. Few families hold their relations as closely as do prisons. Few marriages sustain the high level of passion that exists between criminals and those who seek to bring them to justice. It’s no wonder the Zodiac Killer flirted so relentlessly with the police. Or that Jack the Ripper courted and baited detectives with his - or her - coy letters. We all wish to be pursued. We all long to be desired.

People who always want to be happy and pursue it above all else are some of the most miserable people in the world.

Another step had her backed up against the wall, and he braced his arms on both sides of her. "I'm beginning to look forward to this marriage, just so I can spend the rest of my life making you miserable." Alexandra was too angry to be intimidated. "Misery loves company, sweetheart," she shot back. "So don't think I'll be suffering mine alone." She slipped out from under his arm and marched out the door.

About halfway through I broke down crying, which I hadn't expected. I was a little ashamed, but only a little;it was her, you see, and she never taxed me with the times that I slipped from the way I thought a man should be...the way I thought I should be, at any rate. A man with a good wife is the luckiest of God's creatures, and one without must be among the most miserable, I think, the only true blessing of their lives that they don't know how poorly off they are.

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands.

When that bastard calls back, you tell him he’s won this round. I’ll marry him. But I don’t take well to being blackmailed, and tell him I intend to spend the rest of my life making him miserable, got that?

Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. And thank God for it. Your problem is, you just can't let this one go. It's over, Groceries. David's purpose was to shake you up, drive you out of that marriage that you needed to leave, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master and beat it. That was his job, and he did great, but now it's over. Problem is, you can't accept that this relationship had a real short shelf life. You're like a dog at the dump, baby - you're just lickin' at an empty tin can, trying to get more nutrition out of it. And if you're not careful, that can's gonna get stuck on your snout forever and make your life miserable. So drop it.

People also smile when they are miserable.

You are the remedy of intensity i need in my life, to spin me out of the miserable monotony of working on life's daily assembly lines.

What marriage doesn't involve uncountable accretions, a language of gestures, a sense of recognition sharp as a toothache? Unhappy, sure. What couple isn't unhappy, at least part of the time? But how can the divorce rate be, as they say, skyrocketing? How miserable would you have to get to be able to bear the actual separation, to go off and live your life so utterly unrecognized?

People don’t get married for the right reasons anymore, not that they ever did. In the past it was for status or money, and now it’s only to be sure you won’t be lonely and miserable—two things nearly every married person still feels anyway

Rin had dealt with verbal abuse from the Fangs for years. Hearing insults from this boy hardly fazed her. But slandering Tutor Feyrik, the man who had delivered her from Tikany, who had saved her from a miserable future in a forced marriage . . . that was unforgivable. Rin took two steps toward the boy and punched him in the face. Her fist connected with his eye socket with a pleasant popping noise. The boy staggered backward into the students behind him, nearly toppling to the ground. “You bitch!” he screeched. He righted himself and rushed at her. She shrank back, fists raised.

Marriage was invented to make girls miserable. I will never get married again, not ever again.

What’s killing him is the idea that I will die unhappy, in a miserable marriage. He hates that my life isn’t ending on a good note… So I told him that he’s a good man and was the love of my life, both of which are true. I tried to tell him all the things I hadn’t told him before… Mostly, I wanted him to understand the real reason I’d thought our marriage was over. It was over because we forgot to stay in love. Both of us.

Here is the problem: Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel’s back. And that is particularly true for those daily events that everyone is prone to regard as trivial—even the plates on which you eat your lunch. Life is what repeats, and it is worth getting what repeats right.

This woman lawyer said the best men wanted to be pure for their wives, and even if they weren't pure, they wanted to be the ones to teach their wives about sex. Of course they would try to persuade a girl to have sex and say they would marry her later, but as soon as she gave in, they would lose all respect for her and start saying that if she did that with them she would do that with other men and they would end up by making her life miserable.

When a situation is making you truly miserable, it's difficult to say that you are "merely" unhappy. There seems to be nothing "mere" for instance, about crying for months on end, or feeling that you are being buried alive within your own home.

All people need to be treated gently and respectfully, especially those who have been wounded. They will be unusually sensitive to rough handling. Nevertheless, all people must be challenged to see that their self-centeredness hasn’t been caused by the people who hurt them; it’s only been aggravated by the abuse. And they must do something about it, or they’re going to be miserable forever.

It is precisely because I valued myself that I was unwilling to remain miserable in a school and whole social environment that did not fit my needs. It is because the housewife had regard for herself that she refused to tolerate any longer a marriage that so totally limited her freedom and repressed her personality. It is because the businessman cared for himself that he was no longer willing to nearly kill himself in order to meet the expectations of his mother.

But if as you read this book you're saying to yourself: "I'd rather be miserably married than be alone." Well young lady, take out your clown shoes and buckle your seat belt - it's going to be a very bumpy one-woman circus.

Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God’s image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God’s glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, “Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25). He is saying, “If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both.

Maybe he was as mad as he said he was, but she could see only a species of miserable fright. Suddenly, like the thud of a boxing glove on her mouth, she saw how close to the edge of everything he was. The agency was tottering, that was bad enough, and now, on top of that, like a grisly dessert following a putrid main course, his marriage was tottering too. She felt a rush of warmth for him, for this man she had sometimes hated and had, for the last three hours at least, feared. A kind of epiphany filled her. Most of all, she hoped he would always think he had been as mad as hell, and not . . . not the way his face said he felt.

Yes," she said, but she seemed confused. "I never thought you did it. I know who I married." "Georgia," I said. "I know who I married, too. You're in me. When I touch you, your flesh communicates with my bones. You think I can't feel how sad you are?" "I'm scared," she said, her fingers transmitting a miserable willingness. "It's hard to start over.

We become miserable not because we're not married, but because many of us think marriage might finally make us happy.

I kept thinking of an old Robert Mitchum cowboy movie where he goes back to see the farmhouse where he was born and finds the house falling apart and an old man living in it by himself. "Lonely place," Robert Mitchum says. The old man says, "Nothing wrong with a lonely place as long as it's private. That's why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain't private." That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least I don't have another miserable person to worry about. I figured if you gave up your private place and it still turns out to be lonely, you're just screwed.

She said when a boy and a girl dog copulate, the head of the boy's penis swells and the vaginal muscles of the girl constrict. Even after sex, both dogs remain locked together, helpless and miserable for a brief period of time. The Mommy said this same scenario described most marriages.

There are seven deadly sins, not just one, and Christianity's understanding of marriage and chastity is intimately bound to its views on gluttony, avarice and pride. (Recall that in the Inferno, Dante consigns gluttons, misers, and spendthrifts to lower circles of hell than adulterers and fornicators.)

commitment matters. And commitment to the marriage doesn’t just mean saying, “I’m staying ’til death do us part—even if I have to make everyone miserable in the process.” It means saying, “I commit, every day, to make this marriage the best it can be.” Commitment is an active, daily decision, not a one-time vow.

Marriage. ’Tis an unholy union between two people, and for what purpose? To make them both miserable. (Stryder) I don’t believe is has to be that way. Imagine a marriage where the man and woman respect each other. Where they are partners and allies. (Rowena) You are sober and speak more foolishness than I do while drunk. (Stryder)

The only person that should wear your ring is the one person that would never… 1. Ask you to remain silent and look the other way while they hurt another. 2. Jeopardize your future by taking risks that could potentially ruin your finances or reputation. 3. Teach your children that hurting others is okay because God loves them more. God didn’t ask you to keep your family together at the expense of doing evil to others. 4. Uses religious guilt to control you, while they are doing unreligious things. 5. Doesn't believe their actions have long lasting repercussions that could affect other people negatively. 6. Reminds you of your faults, but justifies their own. 7. Uses the kids to manipulate you into believing you are nothing. As if to suggest, you couldn’t leave the relationship and establish a better Christian marriage with someone that doesn’t do these things. Thus, making you believe God hates all the divorced people and will abandon you by not bringing someone better to your life, after you decide to leave. As if! 8. They humiliate you online and in their inner circle. They let their friends, family and world know your transgressions. 9. They tell you no marriage is perfect and you are not trying, yet they are the one that has stirred up more drama through their insecurities. 10. They say they are sorry, but they don’t show proof through restoring what they have done. 11. They don’t make you a better person because you are miserable. They have only made you a victim or a bitter survivor because of their need for control over you. 12. Their version of success comes at the cost of stepping on others. 13. They make your marriage a public event, in order for you to prove your love online for them. 14. They lie, but their lies are often justified. 15. You constantly have to start over and over and over with them, as if a connection could be grown and love restored through a honeymoon phase, or constant parental supervision of one another’s down falls. 16. They tell you that they don’t care about anyone other than who they love. However, their actions don’t show they love you, rather their love has become bitter insecurity disguised in statements such as, “Look what I did for us. This is how much I care.” 17. They tell you who you can interact with and who you can’t. 18. They believe the outside world is to blame for their unhappiness. 19. They brought you to a point of improvement, but no longer have your respect. 20. They don't make you feel anything, but regret. You know in your heart you settled.

Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

It is the most miserable thing to feel ashamed at home.

As for you, do not wait until all lights are green to take off. Do not wait for all things to be in order such that they can see the future. You have to start were you are. You have to start now. You have to take action and make the commitment today. Do not accept to live another day in a miserable marriage. Apply what you are learning today and create the change that you want.

They will have difficulties to overcome,' I admitted. 'Including the differences in their religions. However, marriage is always a chancy business, Katherine. I have known individuals who appeared perfectly suited, by family background, religion, and nationality, who were thoroughly miserable.' 'So you believe in taking the chance?' 'Certainly. What is life without some risk?

And this is how things go. If you are too miserly, he will spend too much because that will become just an act of being free. He will show you that you cannot control him. If you don’t control him, he himself may understand that he is unnecessarily wasting money. But let him see!

I added, that whoever the woman was that had an estate, and would give it up to be the slave of a great man, that woman was a fool, and must be fit for nothing but a beggar; that it was my opinion a woman was as fit to govern and enjoy her own estate without a man as a man was without a woman; and that, if she had a mind to gratify herself as to sexes, she might entertain a man as a man does a mistress; that while she was thus single she was her own, and if she gave away that power she merited to be as miserable as it was possible that any creature could be. Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (1724)

She thought too that women didn't know what to do with themselves these days which could turn them into harridans. Hardly a female friend she knew wasn't miserable. Either mind dumb with children, or in the married condition married to an earnest toiler, or lonely unmarried in their successful career.

Collect a hundred, or a thousand, of those, and your life is miserable and your marriage doomed. Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight. Unpleasant as that might be in the moment, it is one less straw on the camel’s back.

It is the prospect of being close to you that makes marriage partly attractive.  I can imagine the equality which we would then enjoy, it would mean more to you than any other type of equality, and be more beautiful.  I could be a son who was freer, more thankful, less guilty, and more upright; you could be a father who was less troubled, less tyrannical, more sympathetic, and more content.  But to reach this point all that has happened would need to be undone; so we would need to be abolished. But we are as we are, and marriage is your domain and so it is forbidden to me.  At times I imagine the map of the world laid out and you stretched across it.  And all that is left for my life are the areas you don’t cover or can’t reach.  And because I see you as a giant, my territory is miserable and small and doesn’t include marriage. I

Until I met Rob, I thought, Relationships are miserable. Relationships are hard. But there are things about relationships that make them worth it. Now, I see that I was completely fucking wrong. You should expect to be happy every day. Anyone who says marriage is hard might need to see someone. My marriage is the easiest thing in my life. Other things are hard, and the thing that makes everything easier is my marriage. That’s not to say that a marriage is without challenges, but hard should not be your general state.

FUNNY QUOTE : 50% of marriages end in divorce and the other 50% are miserable (he he so funny)

We shall me much less miserable together.' -Emma Darwin to husband Charles upon grief for loss of daughter Annie

In twenty-four hours, the girl next door had managed to remind him how miserable he was in his marriage, how much fun it was to flirt, and how much trouble she could cause in his life.

In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious—unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer’s life can be distressing—negative reviews, rejections by magazines, difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers—disappointment with one’s own work, on a daily/hourly basis!—it seemed to me a very good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?

The first three years of our marriage were miserable. Until I got a divorce. A divorce from loving myself and seeking my own way. I was reading the book of Galatians one night when I stumbled on the verse, "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (2:20), and the most profound thought hit me: If I am dead, and Christ lives in me, can my wife see Him there? Finding the right person, I have since discovered, is less important than being the right person. The happiest married people I know discovered early on that the "better" comes after the "worse".

Court for money, and you will live superficially. Court for virtue, and you will live prudently. Court for fame, and you will live insincerely. Court for love, and you will live joyously. Marry for money, and you will live lavishly. Marry for virtue, and you will live honorably. Marry for fame, and you will live prominently. Marry for love, and you will live happily. Divorce for money, and you will live poorly. Divorce for virtue, and you will live peacefully. Divorce for fame, and you will live miserably. Divorce for love, and you will live tragically.

We were not a happy couple, and not a miserable couple. We were six of one and half-a-dozen of the other. How it was I don't understand, but we always seemed to be getting, with the best of motives, in one another's way. When I wanted to go upstairs, there was my wife coming down; or when my wife wanted to go down there was I coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it.

once there was a beautiful young panther who had a co-wife and a husband. Her name was Lara and she was unhappy because her husband and her co-wife were really in love; being nice to her was merely a duty panther society imposed on them. They had not even wanted to take her into their marriage as co-wife, since there were already perfectly happy. But she was an "extra" female in the group and that would not do. Her husband sometimes sniffed her breath and other emanations. He even, sometimes, made love to her. but whenever this happened, the co-wife, whose name was Lala, became upset. She and the husband, Baba, would argue, then fight, snarling and biting and whipping at each other's eyes with their tails. Pretty soon they'd become sick of this and would lie clutched in each other's paws, weeping. I am supposed to make love to her, Baba would say to Lala, his heartchosen mate. She is my wife just as you are. I did not plan things this way. This is the arrangement that came down to me. I know it, dearest, said Lala, through her tears. And this pain that I feel is what has come down to me. Surely it can't be right? These two sat on a rock in the forest and were miserable enough. But Lara, the unwanted, pregnant by now and ill, was devastated. Everyone knew she was unloved, and no other female panther wanted to share her own husband with her. Days went by when the only voice she heard was her inner one. Soon, she began to listen to it. Lara, it said, sit here, where the sun may kiss you. And she did. Lara, it said, lie here, where the moon can make love to you all night long. and she did. Lara, it said, one bright morning when she knew herself to have been well kissed and well loved: sit here on this stone and look at your beautiful self in the still waters of this stream. Calmed by the guidance offered by her inner voice, Lara sat down on the stone and leaned over the water. She took in her smooth, aubergine little snout, her delicate, pointed ears, her sleek, gleeming black fur. She was beautiful! And she was well kissed by the sun and well made love to by the moon. For one whole day, Lara was content. When her co-wife asked her fearfully why she was smiling, Lara only opened her mouth wider, in a grin. The poor co-wife ran trembling off and found their husband, Baba, and dragged him back to look at Lara. When Baba saw the smiling, well kissed, well made love to Lara, of course he could hardly wait to get his paws on her! He could tell she was in love with someone else, and this aroused all his passion. While Lala wept, Baba possessed Lara, who was looking over his shoulder at the moon. Each day it seemed to Lara that the Lara in the stream was the only Lara worth having - so beautiful, so well kissed, and so well made love to. And her inner voice assured her this was true. So, one hot day when she could not tolerate the shrieks and groans of Baba and Lala as they tried to tear each other's ears off because of her, Lara, who by now was quite indifferent to them both, leaned over and kissed her own serene reflection in the water, and held the kiss all the way to the bottom of the stream.

That’s why I never married. Marriage is lonely, but it ain’t private.” That was always my most intense fear about getting married: When everything sucked and I was by myself, I thought, Well, at least I don’t have another miserable person to worry about. I figured if you give up your private place and it still turns out to be lonely, you’re just screwed. So I felt safer not even thinking about it.

Eros does not aim at happiness. We may think he does, but when he is brought to the test it proves otherwise. Everyone knows that it is useless to try to separate lovers by proving to them that their marriage will be an unhappy one. This is not only because they will disbelieve you. They usually will, no doubt. But even if they believed, they would not be dissuaded. For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms. Even if the two lovers are mature and experienced people who know that broken hearts heal in the end and can clearly foresee that, if they once steeled themselves to go through the present agony of parting, they would almost certainly be happier ten years hence than marriage is at all likely to make them—even then, they would not part. To Eros all these calculations are irrelevant—just as the coolly brutal judgment of Lucretius is irrelevant to Venus. Even when it becomes clear beyond all evasion that marriage with the Beloved cannot lead to happiness—when it cannot even profess to offer any other life than that of tending an incurable invalid, of hopeless poverty, of exile, or of disgrace—Eros never hesitates to say, "Better this than parting. Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together." If the voice within us does not say this, it is not the voice of Eros.

Let's take another look at that awful word 'desperate.' As Stephanie Coontz points out, the fact that we throw this label on women who have refrained from marrying is absurd. 'It's understandable that many women are anxious about the prospect of finding a good husband,' Coontz wrote in Marriage, a History. 'But few modern women are actually desperate to marry. Historically, desperate is agreeing to marry a much older man whom you find physically repulsive. Desperate is closing your eyes to prostitutes and mistresses and praying you don't get a venereal disease. Desperate is having child after child because your husband won't let you use birth control or covering the bruises you got last night when you hurry to the market to shop for the evening meal. Women today may be anxious about finding a mate, but most could not even imagine being that desperate.' You didn't rush back to that mediocre relationship. You didn't grit your teeth and enter some passionless union with a perfectly nice guy who doesn't get you. There are people who are afraid to be alone, who head for the nearest warm body after each breakup, or who stay in miserable relationships because the alternative is so terrifying. But that's not you, is it?

I confess to you,my friend, that I love you, and that in my airy dreams of futurity, you have been my constant friend and companion. But it is your happiness I desire as well as my own, when I declare to you that our marriage would render me eternally miserable, unless it were the dictate of your own free choice.

These questions weren’t really about him; no, they were questions about how perceptive people were and what they missed and who else was about to announce their divorce and whether the undercurrent of tension in their own marriages would eventually lead to their demise. Did the fight I had with my wife on our actual anniversary that was particularly vicious mean we’re going to get divorced? Do we argue too much? Do we have enough sex? Is everyone else having more sex? Can you get divorced within six months of an absentminded hand-kiss at a bat mitzvah? How miserable is too miserable? How miserable is too miserable? One day he would not be recently divorced, but he would never forget those questions, the way people pretended to care for him while they were really asking after themselves.

Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world. (

Hold thy desperate hand: Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art: Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote The unreasonable fury of a beast: Unseemly woman in a seeming man! Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both! Thou hast amazed me: by my holy order, I thought thy disposition better temper’d. Hast thou slain Tybalt? wilt thou slay thyself? And stay thy lady too that lives in thee, By doing damned hate upon thyself? Why rail’st thou on thy birth, the heaven, and earth? Since birth, and heaven, and earth, all three do meet In thee at once; which thou at once wouldst lose. Fie, fie, thou shamest thy shape, thy love, thy wit; Which, like a usurer, abound’st in all, And usest none in that true use indeed Which should bedeck thy shape, thy love, thy wit: Thy noble shape is but a form of wax, Digressing from the valour of a man; Thy dear love sworn but hollow perjury, Killing that love which thou hast vow’d to cherish; Thy wit, that ornament to shape and love, Misshapen in the conduct of them both, Like powder in a skitless soldier’s flask, Is set afire by thine own ignorance, And thou dismember’d with thine own defence. What, rouse thee, man! thy Juliet is alive, For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead; There art thou happy: Tybalt would kill thee, But thou slew’st Tybalt; there are thou happy too: The law that threaten’d death becomes thy friend And turns it to exile; there art thou happy: A pack of blessings lights up upon thy back; Happiness courts thee in her best array; But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench, Thou pout’st upon thy fortune and thy love: Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable. Go, get thee to thy love, as was decreed, Ascend her chamber, hence and comfort her: But look thou stay not till the watch be set, For then thou canst not pass to Mantua; Where thou shalt live, till we can find a time To blaze your marriage, reconcile your friends, Beg pardon of the prince, and call thee back With twenty hundred thousand times more joy Than thou went’st forth in lamentation. Go before, nurse: commend me to thy lady; And bid her hasten all the house to bed, Which heavy sorrow makes them apt unto: Romeo is coming.

If you're so miserable,' my daughter said delicately, 'why don't you leave him?' Oh my darling girl, I might have said, what a good question. In her worldview, bad marriages were simply terminated, like unwanted pregnancies. She knew nothing about this subculture of women who stayed, women who couldn't logically explain their allegiances, who held tight because it was the thing they felt most comfortable doing, the thing they actually liked. she didn't understand the luxury of the familiar, the known: the same hump of back poking up under the cover in bed, the hair tufting in the ear. The husband. A figure you never strove toward, never work yourself up over, but simply lived beside season upon season, which started building up like bricks spread thick with sloppy mortar. A marriage wall would rise up between the two of you, a marriage bed, and you would lie in it gratefully.

Marriage is a prisoner's dilemma in which you get to choose the person with whom you're in cahoots. This might seem like a small change, but it potentially has a big effect on the structure of the game you're playing. If you knew that, for some reason, your partner in crime would be miserable if you weren't around - the kind of misery even a million dollars couldn't cure - then you'd worry much less about them defecting and leaving you rot in jail.

Useful friendships are the bread and butter of life. This is one reason why marriages that are not useful don’t last. Romantic feelings come and go. In useful marriages the parties depend on each other for the basics—the dull-normal stuff of everyday existence. This is true when it comes to children too. Children serve no useful purpose any more. We look at a child and say, “So long as he’s happy, that’s all that matters”—not accounting for usefulness in our account of happiness. Perhaps this is one reason that our children disappoint us—we expect them to pursue their passions, to develop their gifts, yada, yada, yada, but we don’t give them anything worth caring about. And so they shrug and they say, “Who cares?” And why should they care? And why should we be disappointed when they don’t amount to anything? We preached to them the gospel of happiness, implying, without meaning to, that they have nothing worthwhile to contribute to either a household, or the world at large. So they end up worthless and miserable.

Because you do not happen to be married does not make you essentially different from others. All of us are very much alike in appearance and emotional responses, in our capacity to think, to reason, to be miserable, to be happy, to love and be loved. You are just as important as any others in the scheme of our Father in Heaven, and under His mercy no blessing to which you otherwise might be entitled will forever be withheld from you. . . . I do not worry about you young men who have recently returned from the mission field. You know as well as I what you ought to do. It is your responsibility and opportunity, under the natural process of dating and courting, to find a wonderful companion and marry in the house of the Lord. Don’t rush it unduly and don’t delay it unduly. “Marry in haste and repent at leisure” is an old proverb that still has meaning in our time. But do not dally along in a fruitless, frustrating, and frivolous dating game that only raises hopes and brings disappointment and in some cases heartache. Yours is the initiative in this matter. Act on it in the spirit that ought to prompt every honorable man who holds the priesthood of God. Live worthy of the companionship of a wonderful partner. Put aside any thought of selfish superiority and recognize and follow the teaching of the Church that the husband and wife walk side by side with neither one ahead nor behind. Happy marriage is based on a foundation of equal yoking. Let virtue garnish your courtship, and absolute fidelity be the crown jewel of your marriage.

And you’re sitting here, waiting on him, looking like a lost puppy.” I shrugged. “It was a good month. I’m hoping for more five-cups-of-coffee moments.” “Five-cups-of-coffee moments?” “You know. That serious high you get after you’ve had five cups of coffee.” “You have to keep feeding love what it needs to keep it feeling like love. Drink a lot of coffee every day, and you’ll need to drink more coffee to get the same effect.” “Caffeine and love. Both are drugs. You become dependent. It starts to own you.” “Your relationship with Chicken and Waffles sounds as miserable as my marriage.” “I’m not hooked. We’re just ships docked at the same port for now, that’s all.” “You’re restless. Aggravated. Your expression says you’re in pain and ready to jump.” I frowned at my phone. “Hurts when he doesn’t call or text me back.” “The guy you’re chasing . . . is Chicken and Waffles the type of man you’d want your son to be?” “I’m not chasing him. I’m not chasing any man.” “Play the game. What you have described to me is an abusive relationship.

Love isn’t enough to make a successful marriage when two people are as different as we are. You would want all of a man, Scarlett, his body, his heart, his soul, his thoughts. And if you did not have them, you would be miserable. And I couldn’t give you all of me. I couldn’t give all of me to anyone. And I would not want all of your mind and your soul. And you would be hurt, and then you would come to hate me—how bitterly! You would hate the books I read and the music I loved, because they took me away from you even for a moment.

But in our wholeness, we became overly proud. In our pride, we neglected to worship the gods. The mighty Zeus punished us for our neglect by cutting all the double-headed, eight-limbed, perfectly contented humans in half, thereby creating a world of cruelly severed one-headed, two-armed, two-legged miserable creatures. In this moment of mass amputation, Zeus inflicted on mankind that most painful of human conditions: the dull and constant sense that we are not quite whole. For the rest of time, humans would be born sensing that there was some missing part - a lost half, which we love almost more than we love ourselves - and that this missing part was out there someplace, spinning through the universe in the form of another person. We would also be born believing that if only we searched relentlessly enough, we might someday find that vanished half, that other soul. Through union with the other, we would recomplete our original form, never to experience loneliness again. This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal two.

MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE — [...] And is there anything more ridiculous than to see a maiden of fifteen or sixteen, consumed by desires she is compelled to suppress, wait, and, while waiting, endure worse than hell's torments until it pleases her parents, having first rendered her youth miserable, further to sacrifice her riper years by immolating them to their perfidious cupidity when they associate her, despite her wishes, with a husband who either has nothing wherewith to make himself loved, or who possesses everything to make himself hated?

A brick could be used to show you how to live a richer, fuller, more satisfying life. Don’t you want to have fulfillment and meaning saturating your existence? I can show you how you can achieve this and so much more with just a simple brick. For just $99.99—not even an even hundred bucks, I’ll send you my exclusive life philosophy that’s built around a brick. Man’s used bricks to build houses for centuries. Now let one man, me, show you how a brick can be used to build your life up bigger and stronger than you ever imagined. But act now, because supplies are limited. This amazing offer won’t last forever. You don’t want to wake up in ten years to find yourself divorced, homeless, and missing your testicles because you waited even two hours too long to obtain this information. Become a hero today—save your life. Procrastination is only for the painful things in life. We prolong the boring, but why put off for tomorrow the exciting life you could be living today? If you’re not satisfied with the information I’m providing, I’m willing to offer you a no money back guarantee. That’s right, you read that wrong. If you are not 100% dissatisfied with my product, I’ll give you your money back. For $99.99 I’m offering 99.99%, but you’ve got to be willing to penny up that percentage to 100. Why delay? The life you really want is mine, and I’m willing to give it to you—for a price. That price is a one-time fee of $99.99, which of course everyone can afford—even if they can’t afford it. Homeless people can’t afford it, but they’re the people who need my product the most. Buy my product, or face the fact that in all probability you are going to end up homeless and sexless and unloved and filthy and stinky and probably even disabled, if not physically than certainly mentally. I don’t care if your testicles taste like peanut butter—if you don’t buy my product, even a dog won’t lick your balls you miserable cur. I curse you! God damn it, what are you, slow? Pay me my money so I can show you the path to true wealth. Don’t you want to be rich? Everything takes money—your marriage, your mortgage, and even prostitutes. I can show you the path to prostitution—and it starts by ignoring my pleas to help you. I’m not the bad guy here. I just want to help. You have some serious trust issues, my friend. I have the chance to earn your trust, and all it’s going to cost you is a measly $99.99. Would it help you to trust me if I told you that I trust you? Well, I do. Sure, I trust you. I trust you to make the smart decision for your life and order my product today. Don’t sleep on this decision, because you’ll only wake up in eight hours to find yourself living in a miserable future. And the future indeed looks bleak, my friend. War, famine, children forced to pimp out their parents just to feed the dog. Is this the kind of tomorrow you’d like to live in today? I can show you how to provide enough dog food to feed your grandpa for decades. In the future I’m offering you, your wife isn’t a whore that you sell for a knife swipe of peanut butter because you’re so hungry you actually considered eating your children. Become a hero—and save your kids’ lives. Your wife doesn’t want to spread her legs for strangers. Or maybe she does, and that was a bad example. Still, the principle stands. But you won’t be standing—in the future. Remember, you’ll be confined to a wheelchair. Mushrooms are for pizzas, not clouds, but without me, your life will atom bomb into oblivion. Nobody’s dropping a bomb while I’m around. The only thing I’m dropping is the price. Boom! I just lowered the price for you, just to show you that you are a valued customer. As a VIP, your new price on my product is just $99.96. That’s a savings of over two pennies (three, to be precise). And I’ll even throw in a jar of peanut butter for free. That’s a value of over $.99. But wait, there’s more! If you call within the next ten minutes, I’ll even throw in a blanket free of charge. . .

Even fifteen hundred miles away, even on the phone, Georgie was more alive than anything else in his life. He felt his cheeks warm just thinking about seeing her again. That's what Georgie did to him, she pulled the blood to the surface of his skin. She acted on him, tidally. She made him feel like things were happening, like life was happening, and even if he was miserable sometimes, he wasn't going to sleep through it. He ran his hand over his pocket. The ring was still there. It had been there since he left the nursing home. His great aunt had pressed it into Neal's hands. 'I don't need this anymore, I never really needed it, but Harold liked to see it on my finger. It was a family ring,' she said. 'It should stay in the family.' Neal made up his mind as soon as he saw it. The future was going to happen, even if he wasn’t ready for it. Even if he was never ready for it. At least he could make sure he was with the right person. Wasn’t that the point of life? To find someone to share it with? And if you got that part right, how far wrong could you go? If you were standing next to the person you loved more than everything else, wasn’t everything else just scenery?

we know that what we find physically attractive has been for the most part culturally informed, it is wise to acknowledge that God has hardwired us for the commitment of companionship over and above sexual attraction or physical pleasure. Companionship brings deeper joy and greater pleasure than the mere physical could ever bring by itself. If you have physical attraction and no companionship in your relationship, you’ll eventually be miserable; but if you have deep companionship with each other, physical attraction isn’t as important and becomes less and less so as time passes. In the movie Cast Away, we

The waiting room, like most waiting rooms, was deserted and unremarkable. The benches were miserably uncomfortable, the ashtrays swollen with waterlogged cigarette butts, the air stale. On the walls were travel posters and most-wanted lists. The only other people there were an old man wearing a camel-color sweater and a mother with her four-year-old son. The old man sat glued in position, poring through a literary magazine. He turned the pages as slowly as if he were peeling away adhesive tape. Fifteen minutes from one page to the next. The mother and child looked like a couple whose marriage was on the rocks.

These questions weren't really about him; no, they were questions about how perceptive people were and what they missed and who else was about to announce their divorce and whether the undercurrent of tension in their own marriages would eventually lead to their demise. Did the fight I had with my wife on our actual anniversary that was particularly vicious mean we're going to get divorced? Do we argue too much? Do we have enough sex? Is everyone else having more sex? Can you get divorced within six months of an absentminded hand-kiss at a bat mitzvah? How miserable is too miserable? How miserable is too miserable? (13)

How can I make you see these things, my dear? You who are so young and unthinking that you do not know what marriage means. I know I love you. Love isn't enough to make a successful marriage when two people are as different as we are. You would want all of a man, Scarlett, his body, his heart, his soul, his thoughts. And if you did not have them, you would be miserable. And I couldn't give you all of me. I couldn't give all of me to anyone. And I would not want all of your mind and your soul. And you would be hurt, and then you would come to hate me-how bitterly! You would hate the books I read and the music I loved, because they took me away from you even for a moment.

Kristen and I always have a lot to celebrate at the end of June. First there’s Father’s Day, followed by our wedding anniversary and my birthday. But prior to the Best Practices this two-week season of parties didn’t inspire much of a celebratory mood. It always felt strange celebrating Father’s Day, given that my parenting skills had been something of a disappointment for the first three years, and the tears that Kristen had shed on our third wedding anniversary spoke rather poignantly to the fact that our marriage hadn’t been much to celebrate, either. That left my birthday, a day that was all about toasting the birth of the very person who had made Kristen’s life miserable.

The impossible class. — Poor, happy and independent! — these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! — these things can also go together — and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory? In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!

Painful Misinterpretations of ADHD Symptoms and Motives Good communication isn’t just a matter of saying the right words or starting your assumptions in the same places. Correct interpretation is critical, and in this realm couples dealing with ADHD may fail miserably for two basic reasons: An ADHD symptom is lurking that they don’t realize is influencing their interaction (and subsequent interpretation of the interaction). They “live in the world” so differently that they incorrectly assume they understand the motives that are influencing frustrating behaviors. One of the most common misinterpretations is feeling as if an ADHD spouse doesn’t love his partner anymore because he isn’t paying attention to her.

Franklin began the little essay by extolling marriage as being “the proper remedy” for sexual urges. But, if his reader “will not take this counsel” and yet still finds “sex inevitable,” he advised that “in all your amours you should prefer old women to young ones.” Franklin then provided a saucy list of eight reasons: because they have more knowledge, they make better conversation; as they lose their looks, they learn a thousand useful services “to maintain their influence over men”; “there is no hazard of children”; they are more discreet; they age from the head down, so even after their face grows wrinkled their lower bodies stay firm, “so that covering all above with a basket, and regarding only what is below the girdle, it is impossible of two women to know an old one from a young one”; it is less sinful to debauch an older woman than a virgin; there is less guilt, because the older woman will be made happy whereas the younger one will be made miserable. Finally, Franklin produces the cheeky kicker to the piece: “Lastly, they are so grateful!!”20

Don’t worry,” he said flippantly, taking her arm and starting to walk back toward the house. “I’m not going to make the ritualistic proposal that followed our last encounters. Marriage is out of the question. Among other things, I’m fresh out of large rubies and expensive furs this season.” Despite his joking tone, Elizabeth felt ill at how ugly those words sounded now, even though her reasons for saying them at the time had nothing to do with a desire for jewels or furs. You had to give him credit, she decided miserably, because he obviously took no offense at it. Evidently, in sophisticated flirtations, the rule was that no one took anything seriously. “Who’s the leading contender these days?” he asked in that same light tone as the cottage came into view. “There must be more than Belhaven and Marchman.” Elizabeth struggled valiantly to make the same transition from heated passion to flippancy that he seemed to find so easy. She wasn’t quite so successful, however, and her light tone was threaded with confusion. “In my uncle’s eyes, the leading contender is whoever has the most important title, followed by the most money.” “Of course,” he said dryly. “In which case it sounds as if Marchman may be the lucky man.” His utter lack of caring made Elizabeth’s heart squeeze in an awful, inexplicable way. Her chin lifted in self-defense. “Actually, I’m not in the market for a husband,” she informed him, trying to sound as indifferent and as amused as he. “I may have to marry someone if I can’t continue to outmaneuver my uncle, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d like to marry a much older man than I.” “Preferably a blind one,” he said sardonically, “who’ll not notice a little affair now and then?” “I meant,” she informed him with a dark glance, “that I want my freedom. Independence. And that is something a young husband isn’t likely to give me, while an elderly one might.” “Independence is all an old man will be able to give you,” Ian said blntly. “That’s quite enough,” she said. “I’m excessively tired of being forever pushed about by the men in my life. I’d like to care for Havenhurst and do as I wish to do.” “Marry an old man,” Ian interjected smoothly, “and you may be the last of the Camerons.” She looked at him blankly. “He won’t be able to give you children.” “Oh, that,” Elizabeth said, feeling a little defeated and nonplussed. “I haven’t been able to work that out yet.” “Let me know when you do,” Ian replied with biting sarcasm. “There’s a fortune to be made from a discovery like that one.

After a series of promotions—store manager at twenty-two, regional manager at twenty-four, director at twenty-seven—I was a fast-track career man, a personage of sorts. If I worked really hard, and if everything happened exactly like it was supposed to, then I could be a vice president by thirty-two, a senior vice president by thirty-five or forty, and a C-level executive—CFO, COO, CEO—by forty-five or fifty, followed of course by the golden parachute. I’d have it made then! I’d just have to be miserable for a few more years, to drudge through the corporate politics and bureaucracy I knew so well. Just keep climbing and don't look down. Misery, of course, encourages others to pull up a chair and stay a while. And so, five years ago, I convinced my best friend Ryan to join me on the ladder, even showed him the first rung. The ascent is exhilarating to rookies. They see limitless potential and endless possibilities, allured by the promise of bigger paychecks and sophisticated titles. What’s not to like? He too climbed the ladder, maneuvering each step with lapidary precision, becoming one of the top salespeople—and later, top sales managers—in the entire company.10 And now here we are, submerged in fluorescent light, young and ostensibly successful. A few years ago, a mentor of mine, a successful businessman named Karl, said to me, “You shouldn’t ask a man who earns twenty thousand dollars a year how to make a hundred thousand.” Perhaps this apothegm holds true for discontented men and happiness, as well. All these guys I emulate—the men I most want to be like, the VPs and executives—aren’t happy. In fact, they’re miserable.  Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people, but their careers have changed them, altered them physically and emotionally: they explode with anger over insignificant inconveniences; they are overweight and out of shape; they scowl with furrowed brows and complain constantly as if the world is conspiring against them, or they feign sham optimism which fools no one; they are on their second or third or fourth(!) marriages; and they almost all seem lonely. Utterly alone in a sea of yes-men and women. Don’t even get me started on their health issues.  I’m talking serious health issues: obesity, gout, cancer, heart attacks, high blood pressure, you name it. These guys are plagued with every ailment associated with stress and anxiety. Some even wear it as a morbid badge of honor, as if it’s noble or courageous or something. A coworker, a good friend of mine on a similar trajectory, recently had his first heart attack—at age thirty.  But I’m the exception, right?

Egalitarianism among foragers is concerned primarily with preventing a single individual or coalition from dominating (and thereby making life miserable for) the rest of the group. This leads foragers to be vigilant for early warning signs of people who position themselves above others. This includes dominating or bullying individuals (outside the household ot immediate family), bragging, seeking authority too eagerly, ganging up with other members of the group, and otherwise attempting to control others' behavior. Foragers would readily support the motto fo the early American general Christopher Gadsden: "Don't tread on me." Many of the norms that were common among our forager ancestors are by now deeply embedded in human nature. But these aren't our only norms. Most societies also teach their children norms specific to their society. This ability of societies to adopt different norms is part of what has let humans spread across the Earth, by adopting norms better suited to each local environment. This "cultural flexibility" also enabled our ancestors to implement the huge behavior changes required to turn hunters and gatherers into farmers and herders, roughly 10,000 years ago. Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.

Delay. Here is an excellent strategy for being chronically miserable and maddening to others: Be chronically dissatisfied with everything in your life, complain constantly, but do nothing effective to change your situation. If you are in a particularly bad marriage or work situation, be sure to stay there, in that it provides a never-ending supply of material to complain about and to justify why you feel so badly. If someone suggests an alternative, reject it as something that wouldn't work or that you've already tried. Or, try it out, but make sure it doesn't work. If anyone ever criticizes you for any of this, either agree profusely with their criticism and extend it even further, or, if you feel you have enough credits to do so, finally let out your frustration and spite on them for their insensitivity, ineptitude in trying to assist you, or their stupidity in not seeing the hopelessness of your situation. Whether you continue with your habitual passive-aggressive behavior or show a rare indulgence of aggression, remember to always hold to the morally superior position. By adopting this strategy, you will remain defeated but you won't be alone. By dragging the other down with you, you can further justify your position and enjoy a certain amount of triumph. After all, you are used to this and have never expected anything different. This will be a particularly effective strategy with your children who will find it more than usually difficult to reject you. With any luck at all, they will never give up on you, and you can sustain this solution to life's problems for a life time.

The impossible class. Poor, happy and independent! — these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! — these things can also go together — and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory? In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!

In the entire endless evening his serenity received a jolt only a few times. The first was when someone who didn’t know who he was confided that only two months ago Lady Elizabeth’s uncle had sent out invitations to all her former suitors offering her hand in marriage. Suppressing his shock and loathing for her uncle, Ian had pinned an amused smile on his face and confided, “I’m acquainted with the lady’s uncle, and I regret to say he’s a little mad. As you know, that sort of thing runs,” Ian had finished smoothly, “in our finest families.” The reference to England’s hopeless King George was unmistakable, and the man had laughed uproariously at the joke. “True,” he agreed. “Lamentably true.” Then he went off to spread the word that Elizabeth’s uncle was a confirmed loose screw. Ian’s method of dealing with Sir Francis Belhaven-who, his grandfather had discovered, was boasting that Elizabeth had spent several days with him-was less subtle and even more effective. “Belhaven,” Ian said after spending a half hour searching for the repulsive knight. The stout man had whirled around in surprise, leaving his acquaintances straining to hear Ian’s low conversation with him. “I find your presence repugnant,” Ian had said in a dangerously quiet voice. “I dislike your coat, I dislike your shirt, and I dislike the knot in your neckcloth. In fact, I dislike you. Have I offended you enough yet, or shall I continue?” Belhaven’s mouth dropped open, his pasty face turning a deathly gray. “Are-are you trying to force a-duel?” “Normally one doesn’t bother shooting a repulsive toad, but in this instance I’m prepared to make an exception, since this toad doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut!” “A duel, with you?” he gasped. “Why, it would be no contest-none at all. Everyone knows what sort of marksman you are. It would be murder.” Ian leaned close, speaking between his clenched teeth. “It’s going to be murder, you miserable little opium-eater, unless you suddenly remember very vocally that you’ve been joking about Elizabeth Cameron’s visit.” At the mention of opium the glass slid from his fingers and crashed to the floor. “I have just realized I was joking.” “Good,” Ian said, restraining the urge to strangle him. “Now start remembering it all over this ballroom!” “Now that, Thornton,” said an amused voice from Ian’s shoulder as Belhaven scurried off to begin doing as bidden, “makes me hesitate to say that he is not lying.” Still angry with Belhaven, Ian turned in surprise to see John Marchman standing there. “She was with me as well,” Marchman sad. “All aboveboard, for God’s sake, so don’t look at me like I’m Belhaven. Her aunt Berta was there every moment.” “Her what?” Ian said, caught between fury and amusement. “Her Aunt Berta. Stout little woman who doesn’t say much.” “See that you follow her example,” Ian warned darkly. John Marchman, who had been privileged to fish at Ian’s marvelous stream in Scotland, gave his friend an offended look. “I daresay you’ve no business challenging my honor. I was considering marrying Elizabeth to keep her out of Belhaven’s clutches; you were only going to shoot him. It seems to me that my sacrifice was-“ “You were what?” Ian said, feeling as if he’d walked in on a play in the middle of the second act and couldn’t seem to hold onto the thread of the plot or the identity of the players. “Her uncle turned me down. Got a better offer.” “Your life will be more peaceful, believe me,” Ian said dryly, and he left to find a footman with a tray of drinks.

The temptation of being desperate, in-search-of, willingness-to-settle, must be addressed and dealt with inside your heart. You’ve already been in a tragic marriage where you thought you had made an intelligent decision to marry many years ago, only to wake up morning after morning, more alone in a bad marriage than you would have ever felt staying single. We are also very familiar with having our growth cut off and living years in servitude or quiet desperation, fear, hopelessness, or numbness, wondering if this is what marriage is all about. Now that you’re divorced, please relax and give yourself time to emotionally calm down, even as hungry and as needy as you are. You are seeking union with someone willing to work with you, work well within the confines of your faults and his/hers, who is willing to communicate easily, and be emotionally available to take it to the next step: emotional/spiritual union. Without all those caveats in place, without those guarantees tested by proof, time, and weathered trials, you might as well stay single. Does that sound too harsh? There is nothing worse than being in a one-sided, miserable, emotionally disconnected marriage.

Social conservatives do have a pretty decent predictive track record, including in many cases where their fears were dismissed as wild and apocalyptic, their projections as sky-is-falling nonsense, their theories of how society and human nature works as evidence-free fantasies. . . . If you look at the post-1960s trend data — whether it’s on family structure and social capital, fertility and marriage rates, patterns of sexual behavior and their links to flourishing relationships, or just trends in marital contentment and personal happiness more generally — the basic social conservative analysis has turned out to have more predictive power than my rigorously empirical liberal friends are inclined to admit. . . . In the late 1960s and early ’70s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate frequently predicted that legal abortion would reduce single parenthood and make marriages more stable, while the pro-life side made the allegedly-counterintuitive claim that it would have roughly the opposite effect; overall, it’s fair to say that post-Roe trends were considerably kinder to Roe’s critics than to the “every child a wanted child” conceit. Conservatives (and not only conservatives) also made various “dystopian” predictions about eugenics and the commodification of human life as reproductive science advanced in the ’70s, while many liberals argued that these fears were overblown; today, from “selective reduction” to the culling of Down’s Syndrome fetuses to worldwide trends in sex-selective abortion, from our fertility industry’s “embryo glut” to the global market in paid surrogacy, the dystopian predictions are basically just the status quo. No-fault divorce was pitched as an escape hatch for the miserable and desperate that wouldn’t affect the average marriage, but of course divorce turned out to havesocial-contagion effects as well. Religious fears that population control would turn coercive and tyrannical were scoffed at and then vindicated. Dan Quayle was laughed at until the data suggested that basically he had it right. The fairly-ancient conservative premise that social permissiveness is better for the rich than for the poor persistently bemuses the left; it also persistently describes reality. And if you dropped some of the documentation from today’s college rape crisis through a wormhole into the 1960s-era debates over shifting to coed living arrangements on campuses, I’m pretty sure that even many of the conservatives in that era would assume that someone was pranking them, that even in their worst fears it couldn’t possibly end up like this. More broadly, over the last few decades social conservatives have frequently offered “both/and” cultural analyses that liberals have found strange or incredible — arguing (as noted above) that a sexually-permissive society can easily end up with a high abortion rate and a high out-of-wedlock birthrate; or that permissive societies can end up with more births to single parents and fewer births (not only fewer than replacement, but fewer than women actually desire) overall; or that expressive individualism could lead to fewer marriages and greater unhappiness for people who do get hitched. Social liberals, on the other hand, have tended to take a view of human nature that’s a little more positivist and consumerist, in which the assumption is that some kind of “perfectly-liberated decision making” is possible and that such liberation leads to optimal outcomes overall. Hence that 1970s-era assumption that unrestricted abortion would be good for children’s family situations, hence the persistent assumption that marriages must be happier when there’s more sexual experimentation beforehand, etc.

I was among the first elected officials in the country to endorse gay marriage. The political wise guys said I was taking a big chance: Boston is a heavily Catholic city. So I conducted a focus group with Frankie, a neighbor who runs a garage:   ME: What do you think about this same-sex marriage? FRANKIE: If they want to be miserable, let ’em do it.   I knew I was safe after that.

Who wanted to pass someone on the street and greet them only to be rewarded with a miserable sigh?

The morning following Shaselle’s arrest and release, I descended the Grand Staircase to the entry hall below and was drawn toward the antechamber by raised voices. I entered to find one of my worst nightmares unfolding--Steldor and Narian were in heated argument, both seeming to have discounted where they were and who might overhear. They stood opposite one another across the room from me, Steldor likely having come from Cannan’s office, while Narian had probably been passing through on his way to the Hearing Hall. I stared transfixed, not knowing what they were arguing about, but certain they would not appreciate my interference. “What business have you in the Bastion?” my betrothed demanded. “Business that is not yours, Cokyrian,” Steldor spat. Narian glowered at the former King. “Much as you might detest the thought, Steldor, I am no longer your enemy.” “These scars on my back argue differently.” “I was merciful in leaving you alive. You asked for execution and I ordered a lashing. If not for your ridiculous pride, you’d acknowledge that.” Steldor laughed mirthlessly. “I owe you nothing after all you’ve taken from me.” “Alera is not a possession,” Narian astutely shot back. “Alera hadn’t entered my mind.” The curl in Steldor’s lip revealed the lie, and the hostility he exuded would have made most men run in the other direction. But Narian wasn’t most men. “And yet I see you around this Bastion, her home, more than any soldier or son need be. You yearn for any chance glimpse of her.” “I come to the palace on business, you mongrel pup.” “Then pray tell, what business is that?” I stood miserably by, for it was apparent neither of them was aware of my presence. Still, the argument had come full circle, and I prayed it would soon be over. “I don’t have to tell you anything,” Steldor seethed. “You are not my superior.” His dark eyes glinted malevolently, a look he had once or twice directed at me during our unfortunate marriage. “True enough. But you are nonetheless one of my subjects.” Steldor’s fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, telling me how close he was to unleashing his hellish temper. Before I could intervene, he threw a right cross at Narian’s chin, which the commander adroitly dodged, stepping back and raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I suggest you walk away, Steldor,” he said, unnervingly calm. “I did so once,” my former husband retorted. “I don’t intend to do so again.” Narian perused his opponent, judging his strengths and weaknesses, then struck Steldor in the middle of his chest with the heel of his palm, sending him staggering backward. In a flash, a dagger appeared in Steldor’s hand, and panic seized me. Would they spill each other’s blood right here, right now? “Stop!” I cried. “Both of you!” They straightened warily at the sound of my voice, and I hurried to stand between them, so distraught my hands were shaking. “I don’t know what this is about,” I beseeched, hoping Cannan would hear and lend assistance. “But please, for my sake, leave things be.” They glared at each other over the top of my head, then Steldor moved away, his eyes on Narian until he could place a hand on the door leading into the Grand Entry. “Queen Alera,” he pointedly acknowledged me. “I humbly honor your request.” With a disdainful smirk for Narian, he tossed the knife onto the floor, then exited, pulling the door firmly closed behind him. Narian crossed to snatch up the weapon, examining it carefully before showing it to me. “Do you plan to tell me that you recognize this blade?” he asked, and I stared at him, dumbfounded. With a stiff nod, he strode through the same door Steldor had used, leaving me alone.

Kristen had dreamed of having children since she was herself a child and had always thought that she would love motherhood as much as she would love her babies. “I know that being a mom will be demanding,” she told me once. “But I don’t think it will change me much. I’ll still have my life, and our baby will be part of it.” She envisioned long walks through the neighborhood with Emily. She envisioned herself mastering the endlessly repeating three-hour cycle of playing, feeding, sleeping, and diaper changing. Most of all, she envisioned a full parenting partnership, in which I’d help whenever I was home—morning, nighttime, and weekends. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until she told me, which she did after Emily was born. At first, the newness of parenthood made it seem as though everything was going according to our expectations. We’ll be up all day and all night for a few weeks, but then we’ll hit our stride and our lives will go back to normal, plus one baby. Kristen took a few months off from work to focus all of her attention on Emily, knowing that it would be hard to juggle the contradicting demands of an infant and a career. She was determined to own motherhood. “We’re still in that tough transition,” Kristen would tell me, trying to console Emily at four A.M. “Pretty soon, we’ll find our routine. I hope.” But things didn’t go as we had planned. There were complications with breast-feeding. Emily wasn’t gaining weight; she wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t play. She was born in December, when it was far too cold to go for walks outdoors. While I was at work, Kristen would sit on the floor with Emily in the dark—all the lights off, all the shades closed—and cry. She’d think about her friends, all of whom had made motherhood look so easy with their own babies. “Mary had no problem breast-feeding,” she’d tell me. “Jenny said that these first few months had been her favorite. Why can’t I get the hang of this?” I didn’t have any answers, but still I offered solutions, none of which she wanted to hear: “Talk to a lactation consultant about the feeding issues.” “Establish a routine and stick to it.” Eventually, she stopped talking altogether. While Kristen struggled, I watched from the sidelines, unaware that she needed help. I excused myself from the nighttime and morning responsibilities, as the interruptions to my daily schedule became too much for me to handle. We didn’t know this was because of a developmental disorder; I just looked incredibly selfish. I contributed, but not fully. I’d return from work, and Kristen would go upstairs to sleep for a few hours while I’d carry Emily from room to room, gently bouncing her as I walked, trying to keep her from crying. But eventually eleven o’clock would roll around and I’d go to bed, and Kristen would be awake the rest of the night with her. The next morning, I would wake up and leave for work, while Kristen stared down the barrel of another day alone. To my surprise, I grew increasingly disappointed in her: She wanted to have children. Why is she miserable all the time? What’s her problem? I also resented what I had come to recognize as our failing marriage. I’d expected our marriage to be happy, fulfilling, overflowing with constant affection. My wife was supposed to be able to handle things like motherhood with aplomb. Kristen loved me, and she loved Emily, but that wasn’t enough for me. In my version of a happy marriage, my wife would also love the difficulties of being my wife and being a mom. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to earn the happiness, the fulfillment, the affection. Nor had it occurred to me that she might have her own perspective on marriage and motherhood.

True Love… it’s the most wonderful human emotion and one of the most elusive. We search for it, trying to find that one person in the whole world worthy enough to spend our lives with. When you look at the trail of broken hearts, the rivers of tears and the broken dreams, it’s quite obvious that it’s not an easy dream to achieve. Don’t we rightly call it the Quest for Love? That’s why when we think we’ve found the right person, we are giddy with happiness and relief. Finally! The answer to our prayers has come after such a long wait. We are safe. We are loved. A lot of women view marriage this way and I blame that on all the Walt Disney cartoons we watched as little girls. There’s this beautiful helpless princess locked away in a castle and here comes this handsome prince to save her from her miserable life. Classic. Then, after the grand wedding ball, the movie ends with: “And They Lived Happily Ever After.” That’s it? What happened afterwards? Nothing’s mentioned about that. We are made to think that it all ends there, that the couple’s happiness is secured and a given. They love each other, right? They went through all that trouble just to be together. So they’ll be happy. End of story.

Kristen and I always have a lot to celebrate at the end of June. First there’s Father’s Day, followed by our wedding anniversary and my birthday. But prior to the Best Practices this two-week season of parties didn’t inspire much of a celebratory mood. It always felt strange celebrating Father’s Day, given that my parenting skills had been something of a disappointment for the first three years, and the tears that Kristen had shed on our third wedding anniversary spoke rather poignantly to the fact that our marriage hadn’t been much to celebrate, either. That left my birthday, a day that was all about toasting the birth of the very person who had made Kristen’s life miserable. But after fifteen months of hard work and soul-searching, Kristen and I were finally able to look forward to this season with real anticipation. We were communicating again, and I was beginning to hit my stride as a father and as a husband. I was folding laundry, Kristen was taking her first uninterrupted showers in years, and when America’s Next Top Model wasn’t on during its regularly scheduled hour, I stayed cool as a cucumber. And that gave us plenty of reason to break out the streamers and party hats. Heck, we could have made a layer cake. In light of all this, I decided that June would be the best time to embark on my most ambitious Best Practice yet: being fun.

Such a woeful face!" he teased, adjusting the overcoat. "Cheer up, lest they all think you do not want me!" "It's not that, Lord Gareth." "Then what is it?" "It doesn't matter. Come, let's just get on with it." Let's just get on with it. Her air of resigned defeat alarmed and hurt him. What was wrong? Did she find him wanting? Was she angry with him, thinking he was marrying her only to get back at Lucien? Or was she — please God, no — comparing him to Charles and finding him lacking? After all, that's what everyone else had always done. As he offered his elbow, she stayed him with gentle pressure on his arm. "But then again, maybe the reverend's right, Lord Gareth," she said slowly, for his ears alone. "I'm just a colonial nobody, and you can do much better than me." "I'm not even going to honor that remark with an answer," he said with false brightness. Bloody hell. Is it Charles? "And furthermore, I think it's time we dispense with the 'Lord Gareth' and 'Miss Paige' bit, don't you? After all, we shall soon be married." "Marriage is not a union in which to enter lightly —" "I can assure you, my sweet, we are not entering it lightly. You need a husband. Charlotte needs a father. And I —" he grinned and dramatically clapped a hand to his chest before executing a little bow — "am in a position to help you both. One cannot get any more serious than that, eh?" "This isn't funny, Lord Gareth." "It's not so very terrible, either." "I don't think this is quite what Charles had in mind when he bade me to come to England —" "Look Juliet, Charles is dead. Whatever he had in mind no longer matters. You and I are alive, and we must seek the best solution to your — and Charlotte's — predicament."  He lifted her chin with his finger and smiled down into her troubled eyes. "Now, let's see some joy on that pretty face of yours. I don't want my friends to think you're miserable about marrying me." Juliet

He extended his hands, his brow smoothing and his lips curving into a smile when Abigail placed her hands in his. His hands were warm and comforting, his smile the one she had dreamt of so often. If dreams came true, soon he would say the words she longed to hear: I love you. Ethan’s smile faded slightly as he said, “I know you dislike the West and Army life, but there’s no way around it. I owe the Army another year. Will you wait for me?” Those weren’t the words she had expected. “Wait for what?” Abigail wouldn’t make the mistake of assuming she knew what Ethan meant. Though the look in his eyes, a look that mirrored her own, spoke of love, she needed the words. Why wouldn’t he say them? Ethan rolled his eyes. “There I go again, putting the cart before the horse. It’s your fault, you know. I was never this way before I met you.” He tightened his grip on her hands. “I love you, Abigail. I love your smile, your kind heart, your impulsive nature. I love everything about you.” Ethan paused, and she sensed that the man who had faced death without flinching was afraid of her reaction. “Is it possible that you love me?” Her dream had come true. Her heart overflowing with happiness, Abigail smiled at the man she loved so dearly. She had longed for three special words, and Ethan had given them to her. Not once but three times. And if that weren’t enough, the momentary fear she’d seen had shown her the depth of his love. Ethan loved her. He loved her, and now she could tell him of her own love. “Of course I love you.” Abigail infused her words with every ounce of sincerity she possessed. Ethan must never, ever doubt how much she loved him. “I think I’ve loved you from the first time I saw you, although I didn’t recognize it at the time. I thought God brought me to Wyoming to help Charlotte, but as the weeks passed, it seemed that he had more in store for me. Now I know what it was. He brought me to you.” “And used you to show me what love is.” Ethan rose, tugging Abigail to her feet. “Will you make my life complete? Will you marry me when my time with the Army is ended?” There was only one possible answer. “No.” As Ethan’s eyes widened, Abigail saw disbelief on his face. “You won’t? I don’t understand. If you love me, why won’t you marry me? Don’t you want to?” Again, there was only one answer. “I do want to marry you, Ethan. More than anything else.” His confusion was endearing, and Abigail knew they’d speak of this moment for years to come. “Then why did you refuse me?” “It wasn’t your proposal I refused; it was the timing. Why should we wait a year?” “Because you hate Army life. I don’t want to start our marriage knowing you’re miserable.” “Oh, you silly man.” Abigail smiled to take the sting from her words. “How could I be miserable if I’m with you? The only thing that would make me miserable is being apart. I love you, Ethan. I want to spend the rest of my life as your wife . . . starting now.” Ethan’s smile threatened to split his face. “That’s the Abigail I love: headstrong and impulsive, with a heart that’s bigger than all of Wyoming. I wouldn’t have you any other way.

a big mess. Somebody needs to start somewhere, and though I hope that both partners are going to be willing to start and do exactly what God says, I want to encourage you to go ahead and be first. But even if it seems that one of you is more willing than the other one, continue doing what is right as a service to the Lord. Love has to start somewhere. If what you are doing now is not working, then you have nothing to lose. Everything will stay the same until someone makes a change. If you want to see what God can do then, wives, be submissive and adapt yourselves to your own husbands as a service to the Lord. There is probably no one better qualified than I am to try to teach women how to submit and adapt because I was the least likely person to ever want to adapt to anything or anyone. I wanted everything and everybody to adapt to me. And when I first began to read in the Bible that a wife was to adapt to her own husband, it gave me the creeps! Just the thought of adapting made me uncomfortable. It is amazing how miserable we can make ourselves because we will not adapt to some simple little thing that somebody’s asking us to do. But because of

cott Hicks chose to leave Claire out of Shine altogether. One reason for this may be that including her would have altered the impression that Gillian was David’s savior, and that David probably remained a virgin into middle age. In the film Gillian injects love, music, and light into what is depicted as David’s otherwise gray and miserable world; then toward the end of the story, they are shown having sex. But perhaps the real reason for leaving Claire out was that even Hicks could not quite stomach the things that Gillian had to say about her. Of the many cruel, spiteful things included by Gillian in her book, perhaps the most unpardonable is what is written about Claire. Referring to her by her Hungarian name, Clara, Claire is described as “the world’s greatest bitch.” Gillian quotes David as saying that marrying Claire was “the greatest mistake of his life” and that their marriage was “made in hell and consecrated by and presided over by the Devil.” She writes that Claire “would publicly ridicule and bully” David and that “David shivered at the memory” of Claire.

Love revives the barbarian; - it wouldn't mean much, if it didn't. In this one respect, I suppose no man, however civilized, would wish the woman he loves to be his equal. Marriage by capture can't quite be done away with. You say you have not the least love for me; if you had, should I like you to confess it instantly? A man must plead and woo; but there are different ways. I can't kneel before you and exclaim about my miserable unworthiness - for I am not unworthy of you. I shall never call you queen and goddess - unless in delirium, and I think I should soon weary of a woman who put her head under my foot. Just because I am stronger than you, and have stronger passions, I take that advantage, - try to overcome, as I may, the womanly resistance which is one of your charms.

How many marriages are turned into slave-master relationships because a man could not simply say no and laugh at the ensuing outrage. She will get angry and she will move on. Those husbands suffer through miserable lifetimes because they did not want to deal with a painful argument.Think of the women that threaten or outright withhold sex from their husbands due to small disagreements. It is not the act, but even the threat shows the man's weakness. He has shown that he is weak there and will cave for the tiniest morsel of physical gratification,because if a woman thinks the threat will work, sex has completely devolved to a scheduled activity for her. The passion and animal spirits are gone. She knows he cannot say no and deal with her upset at him. She knows he will not verbally retaliate with barbs that cut far deeper than simply withholding sex.

How miserably things seem to be arranged in this world,” he wrote. “If we have no friends, we have no pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained by the loss.

The whole weight of the burden of marriage, an institution on which society is based, falls upon us; for the man liberty, duties for the woman. We must give up our whole lives to you, you are only bound to give us a few moments of yours. A man, in fact, makes a choice, while we blindly submit. Oh, monsieur, to you I can speak freely. Marriage, in these days, seems to me to be legalized prostitution. This is the cause of my wretchedness. But among so many miserable creatures so unhappily yoked, I alone am bound to be silent, I alone am to blame for my misery. My marriage was my own doing.