Problematic Love Quotes

Being in love with your best friend is problematic.

As far as Reagan was concerned, Cath was already problematically weird. "It's bad enough that you have homemade Simon Snow posters," Reagan had said last night while she was getting ready for bed. "Do you have to have gay homemade Simon Snow posters?" Cath had looked up at the drawing over her desk of Simon and Baz holding hands. "Leave them alone," she said. "They're in love.

Your conflicts, all the difficult things, the problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard. They are actually yours. They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else. The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself. You are not going in the right direction unless there is something pricking you in the side, telling you, “Look here! This way!” That part of you loves you so much that it doesn’t want you to lose the chance. It will go to extreme measures to wake you up, it will make you suffer greatly if you don’t listen. What else can it do? That is its purpose.

Once, very long ago, Time fell in love with Fate. This, as you might imagine, proved problematic. Their romance disrupted the flow of time. It tangled the strings of fortune into knots.  The stars watched from the heavens nervously, worrying what might occur. What might happen to the days and nights were time to suffer a broken heart? What catastrophes might result if the same fate awaited Fate itself? The stars conspired and separated the two. For a while they breathed easier in the heavens. Time continued to flow as it always had, or perhaps imperceptibly slower. Fate weaved together the paths that were meant to intertwine, though perhaps a string was missed here and there. But eventually, Fate and Time found each other again.  In the heavens, the stars sighed, twinkling and fretting. They asked the Moon her advice. The Moon in turn called upon the parliament of owls to decide how best to proceed. The parliament of owls convened to discuss the matter amongst themselves night after night. They argued and debated while the world slept around them, and the world continued to turn, unaware that such important matters were under discussion while it slumbered.  The parliament of owls came to the logical conclusion that if the problem was in the combination, one of the elements should be removed. They chose to keep the one they felt more important. The parliament of owls told their decision to the stars and the stars agreed. The Moon did not, but on this night she was dark and could not offer her opinion.  So it was decided, and Fate was pulled apart. Ripped into pieces by beaks and claws. Fate’s screams echoed through the deepest corners and the highest heavens but no one dared to intervene save for a small brave mouse who snuck into the fray, creeping unnoticed through the blood and bone and feathers, and took Fate’s heart and kept it safe. When the furor died down there was nothing else left of Fate.  The owl who consumed Fate’s eyes gained great site, greater site then any that had been granted to a mortal creature before. The Parliament crowned him the Owl King. In the heavens the stars sparkled with relief but the moon was full of sorrow. And so time goes as it should and events that were once fated to happen are left instead to chance, and Chance never falls in love with anything for long. But the world is strange and endings are not truly endings no matter how the stars might wish it so.  Occasionally Fate can pull itself together again.  And Time is always waiting.

You okay?” I ask, cautious. “Yeah.” A deep inhale. “Yeah. I just wanted to listen to you exist.

So is setting an example for your niece about how she doesn’t need to turn herself inside out to be loved. How she doesn’t need to set herself on fire to keep someone else warm. Demanding to have your own needs met isn’t problematic—it’s heroic, and kids are watching. They’re always watching. If you set an example that tells her the only way she’s worthy of love is by giving everyone everything, she’ll internalize that message.

Because if we ever end up in an accident, I'd rather die than survive you.

I have never wanted anything as desperately, as ungovernably, as persistently as I want you. Not a single goddamn thing. Not my dead mother back. Not revenge. Not the well-being of the people I love. Not professional success, not even my own happiness. Absolutely nothing has consumed me as mercilessly as you have.

Do you want me to leave?” “It would be best if—” “Not the question I—” “No, Maya. I never want you to be anywhere but with me.

Because one day, Conor Harkness decided that he wanted someone to know him. And he chose me.

The mythological Narcissus rejected the advances of the nymph Echo and was punished by the goddess Nemesis. He was consigned to pine away as he fell in love with his own reflection - exactly as Echo had pined away for him. How apt. Narcissists are punished by echoes and reflections of their problematic personalities up to this very day. Narcissists are said to be in love with themselves. But this is a fallacy. Narcissus is not in love with himself. He is in love with his reflection. There is a major difference between one's True Self and reflected-self.

Since the first day I met you, you have been the best thing in my life. And you weren’t even in it.

Often in my lectures when I use the phrase “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” to describe our nation’s political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe.

I love you, Maya. And no. It’s never going to pass.

When anxiety becomes problematic, most people try vainly to think their way out of trouble. But worry has its roots in the reptilian brain, minimally responsive to will. As a wise psychoanalyst once remarked of the autonomic nervous system (which carries the outgoing fear messages from the reptilian brain), "It's so far from the head it doesn't even know there is a head." (49)

I am a corporate lawyer, girl. My tolerance for boring is higher than the debt ceiling.

You have no football, just an organized system of overgrown men giving each other CTE.

Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it—what’s more American than that?

It’s the way you take over the space around you. You remind me constantly, loudly, indecently, of all the little things that make you you. It’s impossible to escape, and it makes me very angry.

Is the love interest a problematic, obsessive, walking red flag that belongs in prison? Yes. Would he chase you through the woods, blow your back out and tell you to take it like a good girl? Also yes. But would he steal your panties? Watch you sleep? Mark your name into his chest? Kill for you, then treat you like a princess? I think you know the answer to that. And you know what? Us girlies are proud to call his red flags green.

All of these things you listed, a dog could do.

You are mine, and used to me touching you. You welcome it. It’s…We have a life, Maya. That’s ours.

The most important part of becoming better people, I’ll say yet again, is that we care about whether what we do is good or bad, and therefore try to do the right thing. If we love a problematic person or thing too much to part with it altogether, I think that means we have to keep two ideas in our head at the same time: I love this thing. The person who made it is troubling.

Demanding to have your own needs met isn’t problematic—it’s heroic, and kids are watching. They’re always watching. If you set an example that tells her the only way she’s worthy of love is by giving everyone everything, she’ll internalize that message.

When clients relinquish symptoms, succeed in achieving a personal goal, or make healthier choices for themselves, subsequently many will feel anxious, guilty, or depressed. That is, when clients make progress in treatment and get better, new therapists understandably are excited. But sometimes they will also be dismayed as they watch the client sabotage her success by gaining back unwanted weight or missing the next session after an important breakthrough and deep sharing with the therapist. Thus, loyalty and allegiance to symptoms—maladaptive behaviors originally developed to manage the “bad” or painfully frustrating aspects of parents—are not maladaptive to insecurely attached children. Such loyalty preserves “object ties,” or the connection to the “good” or loving aspects of the parent. Attachment fears of being left alone, helpless, or unwanted can be activated if clients disengage from the symptoms that represent these internalized “bad” objects (for example, if the client resolves an eating disorder or terminates a problematic relationship with a controlling/jealous partner). The goal of the interpersonal process approach is to help clients modify these early maladaptive schemas or internal working models by providing them with experiential or in vivo re-learning (that is, a “corrective emotional experience”). Through this real-life experience with the therapist, clients learn that, at least sometimes, some relationships can be different and do not have to follow the same familiar but problematic lines they have come to expect.

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality, and their unpopular, awkward, or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of, and can win, the goodwill of others if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicators must have been blessed with caregivers who knew how to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offspring might sometimes—for a while, at least—be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar, or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love.

Yeah, well, the ones who happily claim and embrace their own sense of themselves as privileged ain't my primary concern. I don't worry about them first. But, I would love it if they got to the point where they had the capacity to worry about themselves. Because then maybe we could talk. That's like that Fred Hampton shit: he'd be like, "white power to white people. Black power to black people." What I think he meant is, "look: the problematic of coalition is that coalition isn't something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it's fucked up for you, in the same way that it's fucked up for us. I don't need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?

Attraction. It was a problematic thing to contemplate. So many sides to it, so many different meanings and levels. Not the same thing as love, but tied up in it inextricably.

Make love to the present and give birth to your own beautiful future. If you make love to the demons of guilt and worries, you will give birth to a problematic future.

But nowhere is this a more urgent task than in matters of eros, the first and best hope of human connectedness in a world where all connectedness has become problematic

You built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence,” my therapist once

So, you and Rue are taking care of it?” He gives me an appalled look. “I would never ask Rue to talk on the phone with someone.

He casts a level look in my direction. "Because if we end up in an accident, I’d rather die than survive you." My heart stops. Doesn’t restart for whole seconds.

Maybe he was the love of my life. No, I am certain that he was. But happy endings are not the rule. Sometimes you give it your all, and things still don’t turn out well. Sometimes A for effort looks just like an F in a funhouse mirror. It’s okay. I’ve survived a lot of bad shit, and I know the trick to pull through. Breathe. Just breathe. And then breathe again.

Initially, the God of the Old Testament might seem overwhelming and domineering to you, or tyrannical, or perhaps even evil, which is good. It is the first telling that God is indeed God, by sheer definition, and not some ear-tickling fairy by which one in his depravity is guaranteed to find another form of stale romanticism or love at first sight. For such a first impression as the latter would be problematic to the essence of Christianity. Therefore the Christians are right in saying that the nature of imperfect men cannot ultimately co-exist with the nature of a perfect God; and that the hope of each man is now desperately found in God's sending of Christ.

A new feeling floods me: That he and I are on the same side of an invisible line, and the rest of the world is elsewhere. Our very own Isola Bella. Sandbar accessibility subject to changes in sea levels.

What has happened now is that I’ve fallen madly in love with a woman. And it seems to me so absolutely natural and genuine - there’s nothing problematic about it at all. I just feel proud and uncontrollably glad. These last weeks have been like one long dance of rich adventure, tenderness, intensity - an expedition into new domains of great simplicity and beauty.

You built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence,” my therapist once said, and I enjoy the mental image of it. The idea of life as something I could choose, cultivate day by day, curate and nurture. Being mindful, instead of reactive.

I have argued that this sort of thinking is problematic in at least two regards: First, the notion that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in continued existence—that they do not have an interest in their lives—involves relying on a speciesist concept of what sort of self-awareness matters morally. I have argued that every sentient being necessarily has an interest in continued existence—every sentient being values her or his life—and that to say that only those animals (human animals) who have a particular sort of self-awareness have an interest in not being treated as commodities begs the fundamental moral question. Even if, as some maintain, nonhuman animals live in an “eternal present”—and I think that is empirically not the case at the very least for most of the nonhumans we routinely exploit who do have memories of the past and a sense of the future—they have, in each moment, an interest in continuing to exist. To say that this does not count morally is simply speciesist. Second, even if animals do not have an interest in continuing to live and only have interests in not suffering, the notion that, as a practical matter, we will ever be able to accord those interests the morally required weight is simply fantasy. The notion that we property owners are ever going to accord any sort of significant weight to the interests of property in not suffering is simply unrealistic. Is it possible in theory? Yes. Is it possible as a matter of practicality in the real world. Absolutely not. Welfarists often talk about treating “farmed animals” in the way that we treat dogs and cats whom we love and regard as members of our family. Does anyone really think that is practically possible? The fact that we would not think of eating our dogs and cats is some indication that it is not.

Cultural appropriation happens when members of a dominant group—in the United States, white people—take elements from the culture of a people who are disempowered. It’s problematic for a number of reasons. For one, it trivializes historic oppression. It also lets people show love for a culture while still remaining prejudiced toward the people of the culture and lets privileged people profit from the labor of oppressed people. On top of that, it can perpetuate racist stereotypes.

Flirting with love can do that." Vega wasn't ready to admit to such a problematic emotion.

You are prickly and problematic person, but life is more interesting with you around.

It’s not for us to know. He’s different with her. How do you know? Because that’s how relationships work. If it’s a good one, you let loose. You show all sides of yourself.

You built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence,

He doesn't want to be in control of me, I don't think, just of himself.

Society often blurs the lines between drag queens and trans women. This is highly problematic, because many people believe that, like drag queens, trans women go home, take off their wigs and chest plates, and walk around as men. Trans womanhood is not a performance or costume. As Wendi likes to joke, “A drag queen is part-time for showtime, and a trans woman is all the time!

The society, at this point, still believes that the whiter or lighter it looks, the more marketable it becomes. Yes, the view is problematic, but it is also the reality that we're facing today.

setting an example for your niece about how she doesn’t need to turn herself inside out to be loved. How she doesn’t need to set herself on fire to keep someone else warm. Demanding to have your own needs met isn’t problematic—it’s heroic, and kids are watching. They’re always watching. If you set an example that tells her the only way she’s worthy of love is by giving everyone everything, she’ll internalize that message.

Feeling emotional pain and understanding how you maintain problematic patterns do not tell you how to be different or automatically establish healthier patterns. This has to develop over time with new experiences.

Men deft men mental men of loving men all men Vile men virtuous men same men from which men Sweet and men of mercy men such making men said Has each man that sees it Cry as men to the men sensate Conceptual recognition the men And their poverty speaking to the men Is about timeliness men is about Previous palpability from which The problematic politics adorable And humble especially Young men of sheepish privilege becoming Sweet new style

It’s awkward, too. People try to put forward their best traits, but a lot is at stake, and they are nervous, which is counterproductive. It’s the trial-run nature of it. Like there’s something to prove, a new level to graduate to. The need to discover whether a subeffective dose of someone you barely know might be compatible with your system, then slowly increase the intake, see if your organism tolerates it…it’s the kind of shit you do to get accustomed to poisons.

Question (The Great Problematic): Will the ultimate liberation of the erotic from its dialectical relationship with Christianity result in (a) The freeing of the erotic spirit so that man- and womankind will make love and not war? or (b) The trivialization of the erotic by its demotion to yet another technique and need-satisfaction of the organism, toward the end that the demoniac spirit of the autonomous self, disappointed in all other sectors of life and in ordinary intercourse with others, is now disappointed even in the erotic, its last and best hope, and so erupts in violence--and in that very violence which is commensurate with the orgastic violence in the best days of the old erotic age--i.e., war?

The relationships between Anxious-Preoccupied and Avoidant partners are especially problematic, because their mutually-reinforcing insecurities can lead to a stable but unhappy partnership that does little to help them grow more secure but can go on for years.

I kept moving the goalpost. I kept drawing new lines. And…you asked what changed between last night and this morning: you made me realize that some lines should be left where they’ve been drawn. And if we move past them…” His fingers curl around my cheek, thumb brushing back and forth. “Then so be it.

Some kisses pronounced themselvesthe judgment of conviction love,Some kisses are given with an eyeSome kisses are given with the memory.There are silent kisses, kisses noblesThere enigmatic kisses, sincereSome kisses are given only soulsThere forbidden kisses, true.Some kisses calcined and hurt,Some kisses captivate sensesThere mysterious kisses that have leftthousand wandering and lost dreams.There problematic kisses enclosinga key that no one has decipheredSome kisses engender tragedyfew have defoliated roses brooch.There perfumed kisses, warm kissesthrobbing in intimate longings,Some kisses on the lips leave tracesas a field of sun between two ice.Some kisses seem liliesby sublime, naive and pure,There treacherous and cowardly kisses,There cursed and perjured kisses.Judas kisses Jesus and leaves printin the face of God, felony,while Magdalena with kissesfortifies pious agony.From then kisses throbslove, betrayal and pain,in human weddings they seemthe breeze playing with flowers.There are kisses that produce ravingsloving hot and mad passion,you know them well are my kissesinvented by me, for your mouth.Flame kisses printed on trailThey take the grooves of a forbidden love,kisses storm, wild kissesour lips only been tested.Do you remember the first ...? Indefinable;Your face covered with blushes luridand in the throes of terrible emotion,Your eyes were filled with tears.Do you remember that one evening in excess crazyI saw you jealous imagining grievances,He flunked you in my arms ... a kiss vibrated,and then ... did you see? Blood on my lips.I taught you to kiss: cold kissesThey are impassive rock heart,I taught you how to kiss with my kissesinvented by me, for your mouth

What has happened now is that I’ve fallen madly in love with a woman. And it seems to me so absolutely natural and genuine – there’s nothing problematic about it at all. I just feel proud and uncontrollably glad. These last weeks have been like one long dance of rich adventure, tenderness, intensity – an expedition into new domains of great simplicity and beauty.

-Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction--in short, belief--grows ever 'truer.' The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. -The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to 'landscape' the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) -Symmetry demands an actual + virtualfuture, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up--a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. -Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows--the actual past--from another such simulacrum--the actual future? -One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each 'shell' (the present) encased inside a nest of 'shells' (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of 'now' likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. -Proposition: I am in love with Luisa Ray.

Once, very long ago, Time fell in love with Fate. This, as you might imagine, proved problematic,” the voice continues. “Their romance disrupted the flow of time. It tangled the strings of fortune into knots. The stars watched from the heavens nervously, worrying what might occur. What might happen to the days and nights were Time to suffer a broken heart? What catastrophes might result if the same fate awaited Fate itself? The stars conspired and separated the two. For a while they breathed easier in the heavens. Time continued to flow as it always had, or perhaps imperceptibly slower. Fate wove together the paths that were meant to intertwine, though perhaps a string was missed here and there. But eventually,” the storyteller continues, “Fate and Time found each other again.

They may have supported a gentile mission but insisted that if pagan converts wanted to belong to the Messiah’s community, they must become full Jews. These Judeans regarded Paul’s mixed congregations of Jews and gentiles as seriously problematic: Could Jews really live, eat, and marry with gentiles without violating central precepts of the Torah and abandoning centuries of ancestral tradition?

More problematic was Stanley’s persistent interest in other women, which he saw no reason to hide. Dowson’s poem about a man who confesses infidelity even as he pines for his lost love—“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion!”—became their personal shorthand. (“My fashion has been acting up again,” Stanley would sometimes say, addressing Shirley as “Cynara,” after he had been out with another woman.)

Steve [sports psychiatrist] had already taught me to try and stop worrying so much about pleasing everyone. We knew that this was one of my most draining flaws and he again used three groups to clarify my thinking. There would always be some people, Steve said, who would care about me and love me. In contrast there would also be a select group of people who would never warm to me - no matter what I did. And in the middle came the overwhelming mass who were largely indifferent to any of my failures or triumphs. I needed to understand that most people didn't really care what I did or said. All my anguish about how they might perceive me was redundant. Steve helped me realize that I spent too much time trying to please those oblivious people in the middle or, more problematically, the small group who would never change their critical opinion of me. I should concentrate on the people who really did show concern for me.

I think about the men and women who built this theater. The Greeks who sailed all the way over here and found the place too beautiful to leave, the Romans who joined them, the Arabs and the Normans and the House of Bourbon. The world is so big, and we are just clumps of atoms. What’s a tiny little bit of heartbreak, when faced with the vastness of mankind? Does it matter that a love is unrequited, if the universe started with a hot fireball and will end the same way?

We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching, but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity -- and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments.

However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture’s wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self. You are to offer the stranger food and clothing, to guarantee the stranger justice, to treat the stranger like one of your own citizens, to welcome the stranger as Christ in disguise. This is God’s express will in both testaments of the Bible.

Isn’t that the whole concept behind having a destination wedding? You discharge your familial duty by inviting everyone you’ve ever met—including creepy, doll-collecting aunts and the third cousin who gives sweaty hugs—while fully expecting that ninety percent of your acquaintances will send their regrets and refuse to show up. For real, if people had thousands of dollars to blow on a vacation, they wouldn’t use it to go eat shitty fondant cake at a location picked by someone else.

The price of a successful relationship is devotion. Devotion is, essentially, commitment to something we value. What are we devoted to? Surely not what another person wants. I think most people would agree that being devoted to that would be problematic even with the best of people. So, what exactly are we devoted to? We are devoted to the well-being of another person. And we are devoted to the well-being of the relationship. We honour the other person’s value and the relationship’s worth.


I figured scraps were better than nothing at all. I failed to realize that the same thing that distinguishes addiction from passionate interest also divides unhealthy love from that which is the highest experience of humanity. That is, love is real when it expands and enhances your life—and troubling and problematic when it contracts or impairs it. Whether you love a person, a drug, or an intellectual interest, if it is spurring creativity, connection, and kindness, it’s not an addiction—but if it’s making you isolated, dull, and mean,

Dearest Eva, Something has happened to me that I realise I have to tell you about. I’m so happy, so elated and relieved. You know I feel like Atos’s wife, and I expect I always shall. But what has happened now is that I’ve fallen madly in love with a woman. And it seems to me so absolutely natural and genuine – there’s nothing problematic about it at all. I just feel proud and uncontrollably glad. These last weeks have been like one long dance of rich adventure, tenderness, intensity – an expedition into new realms of great simplicity and beauty.

I’ve always felt personally and emotionally closer to the searchers, rather than to the finders…to those who don’t get answers, as opposed to those who do. For me, the experience of epiclitus is closely related to the experience of the uncanny, but also to the experience of complex and problematic emotions, like yearning, and awe, and psychic unease, which are of particular interest to me. That precipice of endless uncertainty, of the impenetrable—those are the moments that I’ve always loved in literature, as well as the moments that have haunted me in life.

The most problematic depression episodes plunge me into a feeling of disconnection. I am no longer a part of the world. All the colours, meaning and richness become hidden or lost to me. There is a numbing absence of feeling that strips away any inspiration and creativity. I become dead to myself, a husk, a shell. The fall into this state can be violently fast, although the triggers have all been external. Life does not treat many of us kindly. Most of the time, I draw inspiration from the world around me. That sense of connection to all other living and perhaps-not-living things nourishes and sustains me. Being pushed out of that sense of belonging is brutal. I have self-esteem issues and, subjected as I was to barrages of abuse, bitter criticism, invasive scrutiny and some terrifying processes in my life, I’ve been crushed, repeatedly. I’ve come to places where I’ve felt so awful that the only imaginable way out, I thought, was to die. I’m still alive because of the love and dedication of my husband. I hold the hope that I won’t have to crawl through hell again anytime soon, that I can build internal reserves strong enough to resist external pressures.

This was the most disorienting and upsetting idea that emerged from my reading: the idea that C-PTSD was baked into my personality, that I didn’t know where my PTSD stopped and I began. If C-PTSD was a series of personality traits, then was everything about my personality toxic? Was everything about my history toxic? And would I have to throw it all away? My diagnosis called into question everything I loved—from ginseng abalone soup to talking a whole lot at parties to doodling during meetings. I couldn’t tell which parts were pathologically problematic and which were fine as they were.

have been supposing that God loves everyone and wants to show mercy on all. Indeed, I have hinted that I believe that if God did not love and try to save everyone, he would be less than perfect. Calvinists will not agree to this. God has to be just, they maintain, but he does not have to be merciful. He has to punish unforgiven sin, but he does not have to forgive sin. This is a common view among theologians, but it ought to be seen as problematic for a Christian view of God. To subordinate divine love to divine justice so that God has to be just but does not have to love is odd for a Christian who confesses that God is love.

Suppose Romeo and Juliet opened with Romeo having to decide with whom to fall in love. And suppose even after making a decision, Romeo could always retract and make a different choice instead. What kind of play would it have been? Well, that's the play technological progress is trying to produce for us. When our desires make us uncomfortable, technology promises to bail us out. When the nail on which the entire universe hangs is pegged in a problematic spot, technology will pull it out and stick it somewhere else. But where exactly? If I could peg that nail anywhere in the cosmos, where should I peg it, and why there of all places?

It was spring, and the long months of desolation melted into running water, with streamlets pouring from every hill and miniature waterfalls leaping from stone to stone to stone. The air was filled with the racket of birds, a cacophony of melody that replaced the lonely calling of geese passing by far overhead. Birds go one by one in the winter, a single raven hunched brooding in a barren tree, an owl fluffed against the cold in the high, dark shadows of a barn. Or they go in flocks, a massed thunder of wings to bear them up and away, wheeling through the sky like handsful of pepper grains thrown aloft, calling their way in Vs of mournful courage toward the promise of a distant and problematic survival. In winter, the raptors draw apart unto themselves; the songbirds flee away, all the color of the feathered world reduced to the brutal simplification of predator and prey, gray shadows passing overhead, with no more than a small bright drop of blood fallen back to earth here and there to mark the passing of life, leaving a drift of scattered feathers, borne on the wind. But as spring blooms, the birds grow drunk with love and the bushes riot with their songs. Far, far into the night, darkness mutes but does not silence them, and small melodious conversations break out at all hours, invisible and strangely intimate in the dead of night, as though one overheard the lovemaking of strangers in the room next door.

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

Over the years there have been times when I’ve been mesmerized by a figure in my imagination that I mistook for someone real. A crush that could have crushed my partner’s feelings. At such a moment, while you may not be in control of who or what is beguiling or besotting you, you are in control of what you do about those feelings. The choices you make. Romantic love can enlarge a person or shrink them. Sometimes the most convincing act of love is to just let someone be who they are. Without you. As a songwriter I am attracted to any territory or subject that’s just out-of-bounds, a someone or something new who might take my imagination by surprise. As a man too. This can be problematic. I can have a crush on a person who doesn’t exist. Ali finds other obstacles in the way of her love. Were there days when both of us might resent the obligations our marriage makes of each other? Sure, but neither of us would want to live outside each other’s love as expressed through this old-fashioned but still functional construct called marriage.

It's work to be the only person of color in an organization, bearing the weight of all your white co-workers' questions about Blackness. It's work to always be hyper visible because your skin - easily identified as being present or absent - but for your needs to be completely invisible to those around you. It's work to do the emotional labor of pointing out problematic racist thinking, policies, actions, and statements while desperately trying to avoid bitterness and cynicism. It's work to stay open to an organization to learn new skills without drinking in the cultural expectations of body size, personality, interests, and talents most valued according to whiteness. Quite frankly, the work isn't just tedious. It can be dangerous for Black women to attempt to carve out space for themselves - their perspective, their gifts, their skills, their education, their experiences - in places that haven't examined the prevailing assumption of white culture. The danger of letting whiteness walk off with our joy, our peace, our sense of dignity and self-love, is ever present.

Because another thing we look away from, in the killing of animals, is just how much they are like us. One of the things the internet has done is circulate, on a vast scale, short films of animals being cute. A lot of the time this means: being like us. I watched, once, some YouTube footage of a pig who had been raised by a specific human and allowed to grow old. In the clip the pig sees this human again after several years of separation and rushes over to the edge of the pigsty, braying and trying to leap the fence with what seemed to my eyes like joy: like the joy of recognition – indeed, of love. If you post links to such films approvingly, cynics – men (always men) born with the knowledge that they know best – will tell you, with lordly condescension, that you are anthropomorphising. By which they mean projecting human emotions and responses onto animals. When they say this, they tend not “to consider the possibility that if this were not anthropomorphism – if the pig just, as the film clearly suggests, had empathy and memory and other-directedness, if it was really overjoyed to see the person who reared it again years later, if it was capable of love – if the pig were showing the big emotions which we humans think make us special, then complacently slaughtering and eating pigs might become a bit problematic.

Exposition: the workings of the actual past + the virtual past may be illustrated by an event well known to collective history, such as the sinking of the Titanic. The disaster as it actually occurred descends into obscurity as its eyewitnesses die off, documents perish + the wreck of the ship dissolves in its Atlantic grave. Yet a virtual sinking of the Titanic, created from reworked memories, papers, hearsay, fiction - in short, belief - grows ever “truer.” The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will. Power seeks + is the right to “landscape” the virtual past. (He who pays the historian calls the tune.) Symmetry demands an actual + virtual future, too. We imagine how next week, next year, or 2225 will shape up - a virtual future, constructed by wishes, prophecies + daydreams. This virtual future may influence the actual future, as in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but the actual future will eclipse our virtual one as surely as tomorrow eclipses today. Like Utopia, the actual future + the actual past exist only in the hazy distance, where they are no good to anyone. Q: Is there a meaningful distinction between one simulacrum of smoke, mirrors + shadows - the actual past - from another such simulacrum - the actual future? One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each “shell” (the present) encased inside a nest of “shells” (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual past. The doll of “now” likewise encases a nest of presents yet to be, which I call the actual future but which we perceive as the virtual future. Proposition: I have fallen in love with Luisa Rey.

More families should watch the Olympics together. To me, those are core American family values: Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it—what’s more American than that?

Thus, the collapse of religion is problematic for all intelligent societies, but especially for European ones, because they have followed this ‘genius strategy.’ When religiousness declines, God - who for so long has protected the society from the negative consequences of having high intelligence – is dead. Accordingly, the society’s intelligence leads to its own destruction. Most importantly, intelligence predicts being trusting. There is a naivety to being intelligent. High in trust, highly intelligent people will let foreigners into the society and assume that they are ultimately honest and good and everything will be okay in the end. Low in self-esteem, they will perceive their own culture as worthless and backward and not worth preserving. They are likely to believe that their culture will be improved by being ‘enriched’ by somehow superior elements of the cultures whose adherents are entering their country. Registering high in Openness, those of high intelligence will be excited and fascinated by the immigrants and they will be prone to try to look for the positive in them. Being high in empathy, if the immigrants, or potential immigrants, are from poorer societies then the intelligent will be strongly inclined to help them. Being trusting, they will assume that this will be reciprocated; that the invaders will be extremely grateful. Denuded of their religion, the highly intelligent are woefully naïve. They are decadent and they are invaded by the Enemy at the Gate.

[T]he word 'tolerance', which is commonly used as a positive word when it comes to 'tolerating' difference, is extremely problematic if we think about it. If you simply Google the linguistic meaning of the word, the first definition you will get is (tolerance: noun): 'to allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference.' In this sense, using this word is disturbing because it suggests two things: first, the person who is doing the tolerating has the upper hand in everything, and therefore, they are kind enough to 'tolerate' others. Second, it gives those doing to 'tolerating' the right to change their mind and stop 'tolerating' others any time they please, which could perhaps lead them to commit violence against the 'intolerable'. I never understand how any native English speaker could thoughtlessly use 'tolerate' as a positive word in such situations. How could they use the same word to tell us that they 'tolerate a medication' and they 'tolerate an immigrant or another religion.' We need a culture that teaches us to appreciate, to love, and to affirm others not to 'tolerate' them.

What makes people good communicators is, in essence, an ability not to be fazed by the more problematic or offbeat aspects of their own characters. They can contemplate their anger, their sexuality and their unpopular, awkward or unfashionable opinions without losing confidence or collapsing into self-disgust. They can speak clearly because they have managed to develop a priceless sense of their own acceptability. They like themselves well enough to believe that they are worthy of and can win the goodwill of others, if only they have the wherewithal to present themselves with the right degree of patience and imagination. As children, these good communicatiors must have been blessed with caregivers who knew to love their charges without demanding that every last thing about them be agreeable and perfect. Such parents would have been able to live with the idea that their offsping might sometimes - for a while, at least - be odd, violent, angry, mean, peculiar or sad, and yet still deserve a place within the circle of familial love. The parents would thus have created an invaluable wellspring of courage from which those children would eventually be able to draw to sustain the confessions and direct conversations of adult life.

Why is my pussy being problematic?

Same-sex love has often been relegated to the margins of art as problematic (and preferably tragic).

Same-sex love has often been relegated to the margins of art as problematic (and preferably tragic).

I mean…not really, but like, do I have a crush on my future ex-husband? Yeah, I think I do, with my whole french-fry-loving heart. Eww. Why is my pussy being problematic? Vegas is for catching cock, not crushes.

How she doesn’t need to set herself on fire to keep someone else warm. Demanding to have your own needs met isn’t problematic—it’s heroic, and kids are watching. They’re always watching. If you set an example that tells her the only way she’s worthy of love is by giving everyone everything, she’ll internalize

We start off in childhood believing parents might have access to a superior kind of knowledge and experience. They look, for a while, astonishingly competent. Our exaggerated esteem is touching but also intensely problematic, for it sets them up as the ultimate objects of blame when we gradually discover that they are flawed, sometimes unkind, in areas ignorant and utterly unable to save us from certain troubles. It can take a while, until the fourth decade or the final hospital scenes, for a more forgiving stance to emerge. Their new condition, frail and frightened, reveals in a compellingly physical way something which has always been true psychologically: that they are uncertain vulnerable creatures motivated more by anxiety, fear, a clumsy love, and unconscious compulsions than by godlike wisdom and moral clarity—and cannot, therefore, forever be held responsible for either their own shortcomings or our many disappointments.

The price of a successful relationship is devotion. Devotion is, essentially, commitment to something we value. What are we devoted to? Surely not what another person wants. I think most people would agree that being devoted to that would be problematic even with the best of people. So, what exactly are we devoted to? We are devoted to the well-being of another person. And we are devoted to the wellbeing of the relationship. We honour the value of the other person and we honour the worth of the relationship.

So is setting an example for your niece about how she doesn’t need to turn herself inside out to be loved. How she doesn’t need to set herself on fire to keep someone else warm. Demanding to have your own needs met isn’t problematic—it’s heroic, and kids are watching.

[...] the relationship between the couple does have a logical structure. It begins at the beginning: with the initial excitement, the initial attraction. When an attempt is made to realize the desire, it encounters a problematic reality. This love still needs to mature; it needs to undergo a process until it is realized. The first attempt by the woman to establish a rendezvous is actually the first dialogue between the man and the woman, and therefore this courtship does not succeed. The relationship between the man and the woman will have to begin with a real dialogue between them [...].

Often called ‘seers’, individuals with actively open third eye chakras have access to a list of skills that help make navigating life, relationships, and emotions far less problematic and taxing. An opened third eye may also improve our perception of the spiritual realm that exists within our world - a skill that many individuals who have mourned the loss of a loved one seek from the practice of third eye opening.

Whether Homer was a feminist, a male chauvinist or a woman himself (herself?), he (she?) has all the qualities found in recent male poets, who are notoriously antigovernment, antiwar, antiauthority and fond of women, children, nature and sexuality. Obviously, he was in Freudian terms an oral personality. In any case, his values (and those of later poets like Euripides, Sophocles, the anonymous authors of the Greek Anthology, etc.) were always compatible with sexual love, however much the relationship between men and women had been rendered problematical by the patriarchal system, which had reduced women to second-class citizens.

I had taken to dubbing them “man-boys,” which was not nice, I know, but it was true for these people who felt half-formed and opaque to me with no discernible edge or interesting bits. Worst of all, they were different in ways that made no difference. They’d insist that they wanted to “change the world” and “it was all about the journey” and “money was not the goal.” Those were all lies, of course, made more problematic by the fact that these men were lying to themselves most of all.

Demanding to have your own needs met isn’t problematic—it’s heroic, and kids are watching. They’re always watching. If you set an example that tells her the only way she’s worthy of love is by giving everyone everything, she’ll internalize that message.” I dropped my forehead to the table with a groan. “There’s a difference between taking care of someone because you love them and taking care of someone because you want them to love you,” she continued.

If we imagine creation to be something as simplistic as a utopian happy-go-lucky place where nothing ever will go wrong, we disparage the beauty and harmony illustrated in the Genesis stories. God’s goodness is not that shallow and neither is God’s creation. I wonder if there is not something immature about our desire for the garden to be perfect. Perfection is, in a sense, very naïve. It’s almost as naïve and problematic as believing that one action in Genesis 3 is supposed to upend God’s entire created order. These assumptions seem to reject the very sovereignty of God the book of Genesis is trying to show us. In contrast to the other Mesopotamian gods, the God of the Israelites is loving and good and intentional. All of creation finds its meaning within its relation to God.

Relationships are pretty simple: what you see is what you get. What you see in your dating relationship likely is the best that person has to offer. It’s problematic when we live for what we hope for in a relationship rather than for what the relationship actually is. If you can’t see it, hear it, or feel it, then it probably isn’t there. Get

Understanding what it means to die, to sever oneself of the foolish hope for immortality, is what allows human beings the capability to appreciate simple pleasures and endure whatever hardships living a full life requires. Eternity is beautiful whereas time is unredeemable and problematic. Our faith, our hopes, and our love exist only in points of time. We discover eternity by avoiding the snares of prejudice and mental delusion, using the memory of whole civilizations to understand the past, and employing human consciousness to transcend fluctuations in time.

Increasing tolerance for our differences does not mean passive acceptance of a problematic or passionless relationship. Instead, this healthy adaptation is based on real insight that helps us to understand our partners better and respond in ways that are more loving and will inspire the best in them.