Rough Relationship Quotes

Patience gives your spouse permission to be human. It understands that everyone fails. When a mistake is made, it chooses to give them more time that they deserve to correct it. It gives you the ability to hold on during the rough times in your relationship rather than bailing out under the pressure.

I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.

Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.

The problem with thick skin is that it leaves you impervious to the sharpest of pins. Everything becomes dull. But without that sense of pain, there cannot be that sense of relief. Ultimately, the thickened skin leaves you numb, incapable of feeling the highs and lows of life. It leaves you rough like a rock and just as inanimate.

But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story - in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless plots and scenarios for this thing that never actually happened.

When you invite people to share in your miracle, you create future allies during rough weather.

When I am lonely for boys what I miss is their bodies. The smell of their skin, its saltiness. The rough whisper of stubble against my cheek. The strong firm hands, the way they rest on the curve of my back.

Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered if I’d seen it coming or not. Adrian was totally unsuitable for me, and it had nothing to do with his many vices or potential descent into insanity. Adrian was a vampire. True, he was a Moroi—one of the good, living vampires—but it made no difference. Humans and vampires couldn’t be together. This was one point the Moroi and Alchemists stood firmly together on. It was still amazing to me that Adrian had voiced those feelings to me. It was amazing that he could even have them or that he’d had the nerve to kiss me, even if it was a kiss that had left me dizzy and breathless. I’d had to reject him, of course. My training would allow nothing less. Our situation here in Palm Springs forced the two us to constantly be together in social situations, and it had been rough since his declaration. For me, it wasn’t just the awkwardness of our new relationship. I…well, I missed him. Before this debacle, he and I had been friends and spent a lot of time together. I’d gotten used to his smirky smile and the quick banter that always flowed between us. Until those things were gone, I hadn’t realized how much I relied on them. How much I needed them. I felt empty inside...which was ridiculous, of course. Why should I care so much about one vampire? Sometimes it made me angry. Why had he ruined such a good thing between us? Why had he made me miss him so much? And what had he expected me to do? He had to have known it was impossible for us to be together. I couldn’t have feelings for him. I couldn’t. If we’d lived among the Keepers—a group of uncivilized vampires, humans, and dhampirs—maybe he and I could have…no. Even if I had feelings for him—and I firmly told myself I didn’t—it was wrong for us to even consider such a relationship. Now, Adrian spoke to me as little as possible. And always, always, he watched me with a haunted look in his green eyes, one that made my heart ache and—

What all you young kids fail to remember is that the excitement and freshness of that new relationship doesn't last. Everyone-- every relationship--hits those rough patches when you argue and don't get along so well and it's so easy to be tempted to go for freshness again to feel appreciated and desired.If not ---Bam, you're miserable and getting your kicks elsewhere.But if you keep that freshness alive in your relationship you'll get through it. Mark my Words

You are gonna get it now sweetheart," he grunted, seizing her nipples and massaging them roughly. "Aw, what are you gonna do Max? Blow a load and get all sad about it afterwards?

There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old, sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific, writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, but regardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that's good, because it means he's capable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that's probably a bad sign, because it means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, any kind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he's stopped trusting humans altogether. In general, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work. Then there's stubble: stubble indicates a possible drinker, but if he's driving a van or a pickup truck, he hasn't hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboard while facing the ocean at 3:37 P.M. may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter begging someone for forgiveness. But if he's writing real words, not just a job estimate or something business-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which could mean he has a soul.

1 likes Like Yes, there will be rough times with your SoulMate, especially when you run up against your remaining ego barriers or trigger them in each other.

With rough hands and gentle heart, I'll seduce you. You will feel my power and surrender to desire.

Did I pick the right person? This question inverts the starting and ending points. We do not pick our perfect match because we ourselves are not perfect. The universe hands us a flawless diamond—in the rough. Only if we are willing to polish off every part of ourselves that cannot join do we end up with a soul mate.

...it is never safe to classify the souls of one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait -- a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the 'values,' with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candle-light, when all the house is still.

But you are the only person I can show myself to. You always made my rough edges feel real.

What we had wasn’t soft, emotional sex, at least not on the surface. But beneath the rough hands and filthy words, a storm of emotions had blown through and upended our entire relationship.

I'm very glad you asked me that, Mrs Rawlinson. The term `holistic' refers to my conviction that what we are concerned with here is the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. I do not concern myself with such petty things as fingerprint powder, telltale pieces of pocket fluff and inane footprints. I see the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole. The connections between causes and effects are often much more subtle and complex than we with our rough and ready understanding of the physical world might naturally suppose, Mrs Rawlinson. "Let me give you an example. If you go to an acupuncturist with toothache he sticks a needle instead into your thigh. Do you know why he does that, Mrs Rawlinson? No, neither do I, Mrs Rawlinson, but we intend to find out. A pleasure talking to you, Mrs Rawlinson. Goodbye.

Hermione,’ said Hagrid. ‘What about her?’ said Ron. ‘She’s in a righ’ state, that’s what. She’s bin comin’ down ter visit me a lot since Chris’mas. Bin feelin’ lonely. Firs’ yeh weren’ talking to her because o’ the Firebolt, now yer not talkin’ to her because her cat—’ ‘—ate Scabbers!’ Ron interjected angrily. ‘Because her cat acted like all cats do,’ Hagrid continued doggedly. ‘She’s cried a fair few times, yeh know. Goin’ through a rough time at the moment. Bitten off more’n she can chew, if yeh ask me, all the work she’s tryin’ ter do. Still found time ter help me with Buckbeak’s case, mind.… She’s found some really good stuff fer me…reckon he’ll stand a good chance now…’ ‘Hagrid, we should've helped as well—sorry—’ Harry began awkwardly. ‘I’m not blamin’ yeh!’ said Hagrid, waving Harry’s apology aside. ‘Gawd knows yeh’ve had enough ter be gettin’ on with. I’ve seen yeh practicin’ Quidditch ev’ry hour o’ the day an’ night—but I gotta tell yeh, I thought you two’d value yer friend more’n broomsticks or rats. Tha’s all.’ Harry and Ron exchanged uncomfortable looks. ‘Really upset, she was, when Black nearly stabbed yeh, Ron. She’s got her heart in the right place, Hermione has, an’ you two not talkin’ to her—

... I slipped our wicker bed and walked the sands where we were also roughly repeated: some young couple, "you did," "I didn't," "you sure the fuck did" – they hugged that bicker to their chests like blankets fighting cold.

Three things differentiate living from the soul versus living from ego only. They are: the ability to sense and learn new ways, the tenacity to ride a rough road, and the patience to deepen love over time. The ego, however, has a penchant and proclivity to avoid learning. Patience is not the ego's strong suit. Enduring in relationship is not Raven's forte. So it is not from the ever-changing ego that we love another, but rather from the wild soul.

It’s not like it was a relationship,” he says, and I frown, annoyed at his reaction. Perhaps he doesn’t know how it feels… to break in this particular way. Or perhaps it’s different for boys? But girls cling to their friends for dear life as they wade through the rough waters of learning who they are while everything around and inside them is changing minute by minute. And aren’t we all a little bit in love with our best friends?

But economics has roughly the same relationship with its founding texts as the world’s other great religions.

If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8-or roughly 150. "The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.

For human intercourse, as soon as we look at it for its own sake and not as a social adjunct, is seen to be haunted by a spectre. We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way; we cannot reveal ourselves, even when we want to; what we call intimacy is only a makeshift; perfect knowledge is an illusion.

Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism. The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to nature from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was born.

But I love YOU, Edweird. Sure, I'll probably hook up with Yakob in Eclipse. After all, you're going to leave me for roughly three hundred pages. But that's neither here nor there. You and I were meant to be together. I mean you, me and sometimes Yakob...and sometimes just Yakob and me, but mostly you and me. That's just the way I always dreamed it should be, you want to marry me. We'll marry." "Hmmm," said Edweird thoughtfully after a long pause. "You know, I'm actually getting kind of tired of Yakob, if you want to know the truth. I mean, seriously, going steady with the same guy for half a century can make a stale relationship. Maybe it's time we see other people. You really set me straight on this, Stella. I want to thank you for makin me see this whole vampire-werewolf relationship thing more clearly." Edweird then turned to Yakob, who had remained silent throughout. "It's over between us, toots.

The realms of dating, marriage, and sex are all marketplaces, and we are the products. Some may bristle at the idea of people as products on a marketplace, but this is an incredibly prevalent dynamic. Consider the labor marketplace, where people are also the product. Just as in the labor marketplace, one party makes an offer to another, and based on the terms of this offer, the other person can choose to accept it or walk. What makes the dating market so interesting is that the products we are marketing, selling, buying, and exchanging are essentially our identities and lives. As with all marketplaces, every item in stock has a value, and that value is determined by its desirability. However, the desirability of a product isn’t a fixed thing—the desirability of umbrellas increases in areas where it is currently raining while the desirability of a specific drug may increase to a specific individual if it can cure an illness their child has, even if its wider desirability on the market has not changed. In the world of dating, the two types of desirability we care about most are: - Aggregate Desirability: What the average demand within an open marketplace would be for a relationship with a particular person. - Individual Desirability: What the desirability of a relationship with an individual is from the perspective of a specific other individual. Imagine you are at a fish market and deciding whether or not to buy a specific fish: - Aggregate desirability = The fish’s market price that day - Individual desirability = What you are willing to pay for the fish Aggregate desirability is something our society enthusiastically emphasizes, with concepts like “leagues.” Whether these are revealed through crude statements like, “that guy's an 8,” or more politically correct comments such as, “I believe she may be out of your league,” there is a tacit acknowledgment by society that every individual has an aggregate value on the public dating market, and that value can be judged at a glance. When what we have to trade on the dating market is often ourselves, that means that on average, we are going to end up in relationships with people with an aggregate value roughly equal to our own (i.e., individuals “within our league”). Statistically speaking, leagues are a real phenomenon that affects dating patterns. Using data from dating websites, the University of Michigan found that when you sort online daters by desirability, they seem to know “their place.” People on online dating sites almost never send a message to someone less desirable than them, and on average they reach out to prospects only 25% more desirable than themselves. The great thing about these markets is how often the average desirability of a person to others is wildly different than their desirability to you. This gives you the opportunity to play arbitrage with traits that other people don’t like, but you either like or don’t mind. For example, while society may prefer women who are not overweight, a specific individual within the marketplace may prefer obese women, or even more interestingly may have no preference. If a guy doesn’t care whether his partner is slim or obese, then he should specifically target obese women, as obesity lowers desirability on the open marketplace, but not from his perspective, giving him access to women who are of higher value to him than those he could secure within an open market.

And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it, but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. To Sally and me, focused on each other and on the problems of getting on in a rough world, it happened unexpectedly; and in all our lives it has happened so thoroughly only once.

Holiness is found in how we treat others, not in how we contemplate the cosmos. As our experiences in marriages, families, and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us.

Falling for someone romantically is more complex. Many of the old classic languages refer to three different types of love or affection. Roughly translated, they include general, brotherly and sexual love. When all three are present, a relationship is indeed rich.

Love is a choice, not a feeling. Feelings come and go, and if we choose to base our most important relationships on how we feel at any particular moment, we are in for a rough and rocky journey. Love is a verb, not a noun. Love is something we do, not something that happens to us.

The more we commit to knowing and accepting ourselves, the more we are able to surrender to loving another person because we have nothing to hide and nothing to feel ashamed of. Our spiritual commitment to truth and integrity creates a safe harbor within us- a mooring, a home to return to when the journey gets rough, This is immensely important in the dating process because new love can resurrect our most primitive feelings of fear, dependency, and emptiness. If we know how to soothe our pain and relax into or emptiness, we won't be afraid to be open and honest, regardless of the outcome.

And now here was Arabella, making him feel worse. Maybe that was what she always did; maybe she always made him feel worse, and he'd never really noticed before. Maybe what seemed like the ordinary rough-and-tumble of marriage, combined with hard work and London, was something simpler: the fact that added to any equation, Arabella made it worse.

The sub has the upper hand in a true Master and sub relationship, Thomas. Always. I can possess you only as long as you want to belong to me.

It is not the rough times endured that define your relationship, it's how you deal with them and bounce back.

Finally, when your relationship with your boss has matured a bit (roughly the 90-day mark is a good rule of thumb), begin to discuss how you’re doing.

I have to know if you'll read this the same way that I wrote it, because if you can't, then you're nothing more than a rough draft that I don't care to edit.

Don’t run toward a relationship, but don’t run away from it either. If it’s right, it’ll just happen.

It was a strange thing about humans, she thought: first attractions were almost always based on physical appearances, which in time became the least important element of a relationship.

The repeated elections of Republican candidates, Reagan in 1980 and 1984, George Bush in 1988, were treated by the press with words like “landslide” and “overwhelming victory.” They were ignoring four facts: that roughly half the population, though eligible to vote, did not; that those who did vote were limited severely in their choices to the two parties that monopolized the money and the media; that as a result many of their votes were cast without enthusiasm; and that there was little relationship between voting for a candidate and voting for specific policies.

A midst deceit I found the truth; there in the rough I found a diamond. And from the moment we met, I think of no one else Today I choose to be, to live and breathe; to dream, to weep, and to sing in free verse. And you, the object of my delight: a like-minded opposite I am myself with, a mind-fuck times six, seven, eight thousand and three. I know that you love me with every inch of your deep.

Women are like cats: there's some you can't treat rough—and there's some you can't treat rough enough. ... You start in right now and show her who's master, and you'll have her eating out of your hand in a week.

The global triumph of Western values means we, as a species, have wandered into a state of prolonged neurosis because of the absence of a connection to the unconscious. Gaining access to the unconscious through plant hallucinogen use reaffirms our original bond to the living planet. Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly two thousand years ago, during the shift from the Age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity. The psychological shift that ensued left European civilization staring into two millennia of religious mania and persecution, warfare, materialism, and rationalism. The monstrous forces of scientific industrialism and global politics that have been born into modern times were conceived at the time of the shattering of the symbiotic relationships with the plants that had bound us to nature from our dim beginnings. This left each human being frightened, guilt-burdened, and alone. Existential man was

Its going to be a rocky relationship you are going to have with your business, don’t marry it if you don’t love it! Its going to be rough sometimes, but navigating through the lows allows you to create something beautiful!

I think relationships are a lot like a champagne. This bottle here" - I lift it and por us each a little more - " it's crazy expensive. My dad got all of us Vooper kids a vintage from the year we were born for our twenty-first birthdays and told us to save it for the right time. We always interpreted that as save it for a special occasion. Engagements. Weddings. Celebrations. Baseball, if you're my brother." I hold the neck of the bottle, study the label. "But my dad didn't say save it for a special occasion. He said save it for the right time. It's a crucial differenc? Here? With me? he asks, his voice rough. "Apparently. And that's sort of my point." I set the bottle down and look at him. " I don't think you can plan for the right time. Or the right woman. As far as timing's concerned, maybe sometimes you've got to make it the right time and simply trust it's the right woman.

Our relationship is not simple or straightforward. It’s not perfect the way young couples dream about. It’s rough and flawed, but it’s ours. And sometimes, if you get really lucky, something truly beautiful can come from the imperfections.

I could imagine his sorrow. My father had a sensual relationship with his books. He loved feeling them, stroking them, sniffing them. He took a physical pleasure in books: he could not stop himself, he had to reach out and touch them, even other people's books. And books then really were sexier than books today: they were good to sniff and stroke and fondle. There were books with gold writing on fragrant, slightly rough leather bindings, that gave you gooseflesh when you touched them, as though you were groping something private and inaccessible, something that seemed to tremble at your touch. And there were other books that were bound in cloth-covered cardboard, stuck with a glue that had a wonderful smell. Every book had its own private, provocative scent. Sometimes the cloth came away from the cardboard, like a saucy skirt, and it was hard to resist the temptation to peep into the dark space between body and clothing and sniff those dizzying smells. Father would generally return

Hardy would never be the easiest man to have a relationship with. He was complex and strong-willed and rough-edged. But I loved those qualities about him. I was more than willing to take him exactly as he was. And it didn’t hurt that he seemed equally game to take me on my own terms.

If you establish a relationship with it then you have relationship with mankind. You are responsible then for that tree and for the trees of the world. But if you have no relationship with the living things on this earth you may lose whatever relationship you have with humanity, with human beings. We never look deeply into the quality of a tree; we never really touch it, feel its solidity, its rough bark, and hear the sound that is part of the tree. Not the sound of wind through the leaves, not the breeze of a morning that flutters the leaves, but its own sound, the sound of the trunk and the silent sound of the roots. You must be extraordinarily sensitive to hear the sound. This sound is not the noise of the world, not the noise of the chattering of the mind, not the vulgarity of human quarrels and human warfare but sound as part of the universe.

Wanting All Husband, it's fine the way your mind performs Like a circus, sharp As a sword somebody has To swallow, rough as a bear, Complicated as a family of jugglers, Brave as a sequined trapeze Artist, the only boy I ever met Who could beat me in argument Was why I married you, isn't it, And you have beaten me, I've beaten you, We are old polished hands. Or was it your body, I forget, maybe I foresaw the thousands on thousands Of times we have made love Together, mostly meat And potatoes love, but sometimes Higher than wine, Better than medicine. How lately you bite, you baby, How angels record and number Each gesture, and sketch Our spinal columns like professionals. Husband, it's fine how we cook Dinners together while drinking, How we get drunk, how We gossip, work at our desks, dig in the garden, Go to the movies, tell The children to clear the bloody table, How we fit like puzzle pieces. The mind and body satisfy Like windows and furniture in a house. The windows are large, the furniture solid. What more do I want then, why Do I prowl the basement, why Do I reach for your inside Self as you shut it Like a trunkful of treasures? Wait, I cry, as the lid slams on my fingers.

We don’t know for certain that it’s as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it’s changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated.50 Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible?

Top Ten Sexual Problems from Using Porn 1. Avoiding or lacking interest in sex with a real partner 2. Experiencing difficulty becoming sexually aroused with a real partner 3. Experiencing difficulty getting or maintaining erections with a real partner 4. Having trouble reaching orgasm with a real partner 5. Experiencing intrusive thoughts and images of porn during sex 6. Being demanding or rough with a sexual partner 7. Feeling emotionally distant and not present during sex 8. Feeling dissatisfied following an encounter with a real partner 9. Having difficulty establishing or maintaining an intimate relationship 10. Engaging in out-of-control or risky sexual behaviors

Have you been listening to a word I’ve been saying? I don’t do games. I don’t do one-night stands. I don’t do affairs. Usually, when I meet a woman and take interest in her, I will be loyal to her, and only her. I expect the same. I don’t share well. I’m all for exclusiveness in everything I do, and own. I’m not afraid of commitment or hard work. You’re right; I’m not new to this. I’ve been in many relationships. This is good news, Sophie. It means I won’t waste your time. Rest assured, if I’m with you it’s because that’s exactly where I want to be. If ever I want out of a relationship, I leave. My commitment ends there. It’s simple enough and this is the only thing that makes sense to me.

Even in the arena of peer-to-peer relationships, men need an encourager. We need that guy who won’t let us give up, quit, or bail. This man knows the true meaning of perseverance and the results of it: Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. Romans 5:3-4

You're not going to marry Eris,' he said roughly. 'No,' she breathed. His eyes blazed. 'There will be no one else. For either of us.' 'Yes,' she whispered. 'Ever,' he promised. Nesta laid a hand on his muscled chest, letting the thunderous beating of the heart beneath echo into her palm. Let it travel down her arm, into her own chest, her own heart. 'Ever,' she swore.

There was also a “perverse inverse relationship” between fame and accuracy. The more likely an expert was to have his or her predictions featured on op-ed pages and television, the more likely they were always wrong. Or, not always wrong. Rather, as Tetlock and his coauthor succinctly put it in their book Superforecasting, “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.

Then she found him. - And maybe he'd invented her, too, a little bit, invented someone worth rushing out of one's old life to love. - Nothing so remarkable in that. Happens often enough; and the two inventors go on, rubbing the rough edges off one another, adjusting their inventions, moulding imagination to actuality, learning how to be together; or not. It works out or it doesn't.

Over the past ten years, we’ve gone from $300 million in funds under management and a three-person team to managing more than $7 billion in funds and roughly 150 employees. Most of our employees focus on that “something more,” spending their days building relationships with people and institutions that can help improve the likelihood of our founder CEOs building enduring and valuable companies.

Sometimes difficulty clarifies things. And sometimes realizing that the road you’ve chosen is a demanding one gives you the courage to stay on that road. It reveals the nature of our relationship with God. It sounds cute and comforting to say “God is in control,” and people who say that may imagine sitting on their daddy’s lap behind the wheel of the family car, going “Vroom vroomy vroom!” while Daddy does the steering. In reality, when God is in control, it feels more like one of those movies where some amateur has to step up and land the airplane or steer the ship to safety through a crashing storm, with an expert giving them instructions remotely through a headset. In theory, following the expert’s instructions will help us get in safely; but our fear, panic, self-doubt, and lack of skill are not exactly comforting. Yes, God is in control, but we’re the ones who are in for a rough ride.

Hobbes took the madness of his age, considered it “normal,” and projected it back into prehistoric epochs of which he knew next to nothing. What Hobbes called “human nature” was a projection of seventeenth-century Europe, where life for most was rough, to put it mildly. Though it has persisted for centuries, Hobbes’s dark fantasy of prehistoric human life is as valid as grand conclusions about Siberian wolves based on observations of stray dogs in Tijuana.

As the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik and her colleagues have observed, general intelligence, behavioral flexibility, ability to solve novel problems, and a reliance on learning from others tends to roughly correlate with an extended period of helpless immaturity.13 This relationship is found across a broad range of animals, including birds and mammals, suggesting that it tracks a fundamental evolutionary trade-off between narrow competence and creative flexibility.

Value" has no meaning other than in relation to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human - "market value" is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible ... This very personal relationship, "value," has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him ... and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts "the best things in life are free." Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiements failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted ... and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

I spent ten miserable fucking years in the closet; wearing lipstick, and having these insecure, transient relationships, where we never said I love you, and we never did normal shit, and it was all behind closed doors… And you know what? No, Irina. I’m not fucking doing it. I’m not going back. Not for you, and not for anyone.’ And I was just like… Whatever. And she went off on one at me about my nasty streak. I’m rough, and I’m judgemental, and I’m self-involved and cruel. And I ask her if I’m so awful, why’s she still fucking me, then?

Look ahead It’s tempting to go through life looking in the rearview mirror. When you are always looking back, you become focused on what didn’t work out, on who hurt you, and on the mistakes you’ve made, such as: “If only I would have finished college.” “If only I’d spent more time with my children.” “If only I’d been raised in a better environment.” As long as you’re living in regret, focused on the negative things of the past, you won’t move ahead to the bright future God has in store. You need to let go of what didn’t work out. Let go of your hurts and pains. Let go of your mistakes and failures. You can’t do anything about the past, but you can do something about right now. Whether it happened twenty minutes ago or twenty years ago, let go of the hurts and failures and move forward. If you keep bringing the negative baggage from yesterday into today, your future will be poisoned. You can’t change what’s happened to you. You may have had an unfair past, but you don’t have to have an unfair future. You may have had a rough start, but it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish. Don’t let a hurtful relationship sour your life. Don’t let a bad break, a betrayal, a divorce, or a bad childhood cause you to settle for less in life. Move forward and God will pay you back. Move forward and God will vindicate you. Move forward and you’ll come into a new beginning. Nothing that’s happened to you is a surprise to God. The loss of a loved one didn’t catch God off guard. God’s plan for your life did not end just because your business didn’t make it, or a relationship failed, or you had a difficult child. Here’s the question: Will you become stuck and bitter, fall into self-pity, blame others, and let the past poison your future? Or will you shake it off and move forward, knowing your best days are still ahead? The next time you are in your car, notice that there’s a big windshield in the front and a very small rearview mirror. The reason the front windshield is so big and the rearview mirror is so small is that what’s happened in the past is not nearly as important as what is in your future. Where you’re going is a lot more important than where you’ve been.

it became clear to us that the great majority of Native Americans, from populations in northern North America down to southern South America, can be broadly described as branches of one tree, forming a sharp contrast to patterns of population relationships in Eurasia. Most populations branched cleanly off the central trunk with little subsequent mixture. The splits proceeded roughly in a north-to-south direction, consistent with the idea that as populations traveled south, groups peeled off and settled, remaining in approximately the same place ever since.

Human beings are roughly constructed entities full of indeterminacies and vaguenesses and empty spaces. Driven along by their own private needs they latch blindly on to each other, then pull away, then clutch again. Their little sadisms and their little masochisms are surface phenomena. Anyone will do to play the roles. They never really see each other at all. There is no relationship, dear Morgan, which cannot quite easily be broken and there is none the breaking of which is a matter of any genuine seriousness. Human beings are essentially finders of substitutes.

But for now, I would be the happiest of men if I could just swallow the overflow of saliva that endlessly floods my mouth. Even before first light, I am already practicing sliding my tongue toward the rear of my palate in order to provoke a swallowing reaction. What is more, I have dedicated to my larynx the little packets of incense hanging on the wall, amulets brought back from Japan by pious globe-trotting friends. Just one of the stones in the thanksgiving monument erected by my circle of friends during their wanderings. In every corner of the world, the most diverse deities have been solicited in my name. I try to organize all this spiritual energy. If they tell me that candles have been burned for my sake in a Breton chapel, or that a mantra has been chanted in a Nepalese temple, I at once give each of the spirits invoked a precise task. A woman I know enlisted a Cameroon holy man to procure me the goodwill of Africa's gods: I have assigned him my right eye. For my hearing problems I rely on the relationship between my devout mother-in-law and the monks of a Bordeaux brotherhood. They regularly dedicate their prayers to me, and I occasionally steal into their abbey to hear their chants fly heavenward. So far the results have been unremarkable. But when seven brothers of the same order had their throats cut by Islamic fanatics, my ears hurt for several days. Yet all these lofty protections are merely clay ramparts, walls of sand, Maginot lines, compared to the small prayer my daughter, Céleste, sends up to her Lord every evening before she closes her eyes. Since we fall asleep at roughly the same hour, I set out for the kingdom of slumber with this wonderful talisman, which shields me from all harm.

When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen. Others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah's Witness or an encyclopedia peddler. Kind to you in person, what they say to others makes its way back to you: We don't know for certain that it's as bad as she says. The woman from the Dream House seems perfectly fine, even nice. Maybe things were bad, but it's changed? Relationships are like that, right? Love is complicated. Maybe it was rough, but was it really abusive? What does that mean, anyway? Is that even possible?

After God, who is the central core pillar to any Christian marriage, there are four important marital relationship foundations. These are: * Self-Esteem - if you don't love yourself you will find it almost impossible to accept love from others. * Friendship - a strong friendship will sustain your marriage even when feelings of love are harder to find. * Laughter - it will improve your quality of life, your health and your relationships * Romance - feeling close to your partner can be the glue which holds your relationship together through the rough patches, but the absence of romance causes a void that problems will easily fill.

On one side of the world were people whose relationship with the living world was shaped by Skywoman, who created a garden for the well-being of all. On the other side was another woman with a garden and a tree. But for tasting its fruit, she was banished from the garden and the gates clanged shut behind her. That mother of men was made to wander in the wilderness and earn her bread by the sweat of her brow, not by filling her mouth with the sweet juicy fruit that bent the branches low. In order to ear, she was instructed to subdue the wilderness into which she was cast. Same species, same earth, different stories. Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven. And then they met—the offspring of Skywoman and the children of Eve- and the land around us bears the scars of that meeting, the echoes of our stories.

right now everyone is on their phones. Everyone has that ‘me, me, me instant gratification’ shit going on and so when the going gets rough in a relationship, as it always does, they bail. They bail because they have a million other people on their phone, on those fucking apps, all waiting for a hook-up or a date. A million people around the corner, with their perfect filtered photos uploaded, their bios updated and edited so they all represent the perfect fake versions of themselves. So even when you’re on a date with one person, you can look at your phone and go to the next person, have your fun, then go to the next. It’s not fucking dating man, it’s shopping.

Henry drew a shaky breath. “Do me a favor, Meg.” “Anything,” I whispered. “Don’t fall for Quinn O’Neill. If you’re going to do this thing with him…go to this dance, don’t fall for him.” “Never,” I said. “I promise.” “Because I’m all filled up on sad right now.” He sniffed again and I could tell he was more in control. “And you can’t ask me to sit by and watch you get all caught up in this guy. I can’t handle that—thinking he swept you off your feet because he bathed in body spray and dressed up.” His voice sounded rough. “I know you think I’m being funny right now, but I’m completely serious. Don’t make me watch that happen.” “You know my heart,” I said. “It’s yours.

It’s that right now everyone is on their phones. Everyone has that ‘me, me, me instant gratification’ shit going on and so when the going gets rough in a relationship, as it always does, they bail. They bail because they have a million other people on their phone, on those fucking apps, all waiting for a hook-up or a date. A million people around the corner, with their perfect filtered photos uploaded, their bios updated and edited so they all represent the perfect fake versions of themselves. So even when you’re on a date with one person, you can look at your phone and go to the next person, have your fun, then go to the next. It’s not fucking dating man, it’s shopping.

When we surveyed roughly three hundred people about how they would feel if their primary backup mate had sex with someone else, on a scale from “happy” (+3) to “upset” (–3), men more than women said that they would be upset, but only by a small margin. But when we asked how upset they would be if their backup fell in love with someone else, women were roughly twice as upset as men, with the average upset being –2.5. Similarly, women were more upset than men—extremely upset—if their backup entered into a long-term relationship with someone else. Olivia’s loss of Noah as her backup explained what otherwise seemed like a hypocritical double standard—one standard for herself and a different one for Noah—and perplexing rage.

Genesis 2 is not out of synch with Genesis 1. Nor is the Bible's opening chapter a rough draft that God tosses out to start over with a scaled-down vision when he sculpts the first woman into being. The larger vision he is casting in the beginning remains firmly in place. Genesis 1 draws our attention vertically to the foundational and utterly vital bond between women and God by revealing our image-bearer calling. Everything about us depends on a solid link with God. For both men and women, this relationship alone completes us, defines our identity, and gives our whole lives meaning and purpose. Genesis 2 focuses us horizontally on the second most foundational relationship in all creation--the relationship between male and female.

In a sky swarming with uncountable stars, clouds endlessly flowing, and planets wandering, always and forever there has been just one moon and one sun. To our ancestors, these two mysterious bodies reflected the female and the male essences. From Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, people attributed the Sun’s constancy and power to his masculinity; the Moon’s changeability, unspeakable beauty, and monthly cycles were signs of her femininity. To human eyes turned toward the sky 100,000 years ago, they appeared identical in size, as they do to our eyes today. In a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon fits so precisely over that of the sun that the naked eye can see solar flares leaping into space from behind. But while they appear precisely the same size to terrestrial observers, scientists long ago determined that the true diameter of the sun is about four hundred times that of the moon. Yet incredibly, the sun’s distance from Earth is roughly four hundred times that of the moon’s, thus bringing them into unlikely balance when viewed from the only planet with anyone around to notice.22 Some will say, “Interesting coincidence.” Others will wonder whether there isn’t an extraordinary message contained in this celestial convergence of difference and similarity, intimacy and distance, rhythmic constancy and cyclical change. Like our distant ancestors, we watch the eternal dance of our sun and our moon, looking for clues to the nature of man and woman, masculine and feminine here at home.

In a couple allowing each other aloneness is part of allowing each other to explore, have interests, and play. One puts oneself in the other's place through sympathetic imagination. Each person recognizes that "my partner has to do this to be who (s)he is". Each can tolerate the idea "you will forget about me, will forget I'm alive" for some stretch of time, and each accepts, supports, and respects that. At the same time, they share an understanding: "I need you to come back and remember I'm alive and that I need things from you". In a good relationship we are constantly calibrating and adjusting the elastic band of distance and closeness. Sometimes it's pulled tighter and sometimes it's more slack. But the security built over time allows for solitude and immersive experience.

Look, all your reasons are really stupid,” I say. “People in relationships need each other like I need you. I know it’s exhausting taking care of me, and I’m sorry. I can try to give you a break, and we can use this summer to get back on track. I really think this is just a rough patch.” Jamie shakes his head. I finally turn and look at him. He’s looking at his hands again. “So that’s it? You’re not even going to try? After all this time together?” “I can’t do it anymore, Autumn.” “You said you would love me forever.” I’m not going to let him off easy. “I do love you, just not that way anymore,” Jamie says. “You still love me,” I say. “You just can’t feel it right now. Sometimes that happens to me, and I just wait and it always comes back. I don’t break up with you. I just give it time.

Caleb told me that our mother said there was evil in everyone, and the first step to loving someone else is to recognize that evil in ourselves, so we can forgive them. So how can I hold Tobias’s desperation against him, like I’m better than him, like I’ve never let my own brokenness blind me? “Hey,” I say, crushing Caleb’s directions into my back pocket. He turns, and his expression is stern, familiar. It looks the way it did the first few weeks I knew him, like a sentry guarding his innermost thoughts. “Listen,” I say. “I thought I was supposed to figure out if I could forgive you or not, but now I’m thinking you didn’t do anything to me that I need to forgive, except maybe accusing me of being jealous of Nita…” He opens his mouth to interject, but I hold up a hand to stop him. “If we stay together, I’ll have to forgive you over and over again, and if you’re still in this, you’ll have to forgive me over and over again too,” I say. “So forgiveness isn’t the point. What I really should have been trying to figure out is whether we were still good for each other or not.” All the way home I thought about what Amar said, about every relationship having its problems. I thought about my parents, who argued more often than any other Abnegation parents I knew, who nonetheless went through each day together until they died. Then I thought of how strong I have become, how secure I feel with the person I now am, and how all along the way he has told me that I am brave, I am respected, I am loved and worth loving. “And?” he says, his voice and his eyes and his hands a little unsteady. “And,” I say, “I think you’re still the only person sharp enough to sharpen someone like me.” “I am,” he says roughly. And I kiss him. His arms slip around me and hold me tight, lifting me onto the tips of my toes. I bury my face in his shoulder and close my eyes, just breathing in the clean smell of him, the smell of wind. I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed, and they had no choice in the matter afterward. And maybe that’s true of beginnings, but it’s not true of this, now. I fell in love with him. But I don’t just stay with him by default as if there’s no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.

At least initially, the relationship took on a nineteenth-century epistolatory quality. The only way they could stay in touch was by letter. In 1991, while South Korea was becoming the world's largest exporter of mobile telephones, few North Koreans had ever used a telephone. You had to go to a post office to make a phone call. But even writing a letter was not a simple undertaking. Writing paper was scarce. People would write in the margins of newspapers. The paper in the state stores was made of corn husk and would crumble easily if you scratched too hard. Mi-ran had to beg her mother for the money to buy a few sheets of imported paper. Rough drafts were out of the question; paper was too precious. The distance from Pyongyang to Chongjin was only 250 miles, but letters took up to a month to be delivered.

In the West we are brainwashed into thinking that clinging to our personal rights and freedoms, while striving after things, is our ticket to happiness. In reality, it’s making us miserable. Several studies have revealed that, statistically speaking, America has one of the highest rates of depression (and other mental health disorders) in the world. On the other hand, these mental health studies suggest that Nigeria has one of the lowest rates of depression. Despite the fact that the average standard of living in America is roughly four times that of Nigeria, and despite the fact that Nigeria is a country with a multitude of social problems—including dehumanizing poverty, a serious AIDS epidemic, and ongoing civil strife—Nigeria has far less depression, per capita, than America. What do Nigerians have that Americans lack? Judging from the Nigerians I know, I’m convinced the main thing is a sense of community. Nigerians generally know they need one another. They don’t have the luxury of trying to do life solo, even if they had the inclination to do so. Consequently, Nigerians tend to have a sense of belonging that most Americans lack, and this provides them with a sense of general satisfaction in life, despite the hardships they endure. Many studies have shown that personal happiness is more closely associated with one’s depth of relationships and the amount one invests in others than it is with the comforts one “enjoys.” And this is exactly what we’d expect given that we’re created in the image of a God whose very nature is communal. It’s against our nature to be isolated. It makes us miserable, dehumanizes us, and ultimately destroys us.

Prabhakar was waiting for me at the bus station, smiling happily through the rain. He led me through the people gathered at the bus station, past shops selling cheap household items and eating places where pakoras were being fried in bubbling oil. The brands and consumerism of urban India had disappeared, and although I felt an acute sense of displacement, I was oddly comforted by the rough utilitarianism of the place, which reminded me of the India I had grown up in. There were no cafes where I could hide my loneliness behind a cup of coffee and an open laptop, no shopping aisles where I could wander, picking out items that momentarily created an image of a better life. There was no escape here except through human relationships, and for that I was utterly dependent on Prabhakar speeding through the rain on his motorcycle.

Sshhhhh from rain, pitpitpit from hemlock, bloink from maple, and lastly popp of falling alder water. Alder drops make a slow music. It takes time for fine rain to traverse the scabrous rough surface of an alder leaf. The drops aren't as big as maple drops, not enough to splash, but the popp ripples the surface and sends out concentric rings. I close my eyes and listen to the voices of the rain. The reflecting surface of the pool is textured with their signatures, each one different in pace and resonance. Every drip it seems is changed by its relationship with life, whether it encounters moss or maple or fir bark or my hair. And we think of it as simply rain, as if it were one thing, as if we understood it. I think that moss knows rain better than we do, and so do maples. Maybe there is no such thing as rain; there are only raindrops, each with its own story.

Leo continued to kiss her long after he should have stopped, not only for the sheer pleasure of it, but also because he was reluctant to face what would happen afterward. Their cantankerous relationship could not resume as usual after something like this. It had been set on a new track with an unknown destination, and Leo was certain that neither of them were going to like where it led. Finding that he couldn’t release her all at once, he did it by degrees, letting his mouth nuzzle the edge of her jaw, following to the vulnerable hollow behind her ear. Her pulse was swift and vibrant against his lips. “Marks,” he said on a rough breath, “I was afraid of this. Somehow I knew…” Breaking off, he lifted his head and looked down at her. She squinted through the mist that had accumulated on her lenses. “My spectacles … I’ve lost them again.” “No, you haven’t. There’s steam on the lenses.

But the relationship between the between the two cultural paradigms has always been a dialectical, not cyclical. The romantics were not repeating their ancestors. On the contrary, they brought about a cultural revolution comparable in its radicalism and effects with the roughly contemporary American, French, and Industrial Revolutions. By destroying natural law and by reorienting concern from the work to the artist they tore up the old regime's aesthetic rule book just as thoroughly as any Jacobin [a 18th century political French club] tore down social institutions. In the words of Ernst Troeltsch: "Romanticism too is a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal equalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal Humanity." [Unquote Troeltsch] As will be argued in the subsequent chapters, it was Hegel who captured the essence of this revolution in his pithy definition of romanticism as "absolute inwardness" [absloute Innerlichkeit - in German - אינערליכקייט]. It will also be argued that its prophet was Jean-Jacques Rousseau: if not the most consistent, then certainly the most influential of all the eighteenth-century thinkers. Writing in 1907, Lytton Strachey caught Rousseau's special quality very well: "Among those quick, strong, fiery people of the eighteenth century, he belonged to another world -- to the new world of self-consciousness, and doubt, and hesitation, of mysterious melancholy and quiet intimate delights, of long reflexions amid the solitudes of Nature, of infinite introspections amid the solitudes of the heart." Percy Bysshe Shelley, who derided the philosophes as "mere reasoners," regarded Rousseau as "a great poet.

There are numerous brain rhythms, from approximately 0.02 to 600 cycles per second (Hz), covering more than four order of temporal magnitude. Many of these discrete brain rhythms have been known for decades, but it was only recently recognized that these oscillation bands form a geometric progression on a linear frequency scale or a linear progression on a natural logarithmic scale. leading to a natural separation of at least ten frequency bands. The neighbouring bands have a roughly constant ratio of e = 2,718 - the base for the natural logarithm. Because of this non-integer relationship among the various brain rhythms, the different frequencies can never perfectly entrain each other. Instead, the interference they produce gives rise to metastability, a perpetual fluctuation between unstable and transiently stable states, like waves in the ocean. The constantly interfering network rhythms can never settle to a stable attractor, using the parlance of nonlinear dynamics. This explains the ever-changing landscape of the EEG.

In one sense we are all unique, absolutely one-of-a-kind individual creations; but in a much more profound way, each of us has come about as the result of a "long choosing." This is a phrase from writer Wendell Berry, whose book Remembering describes the main character, Andy Catlett’s, struggle with a sudden bout of amnesia. To those acquainted with Berry’s stories about Port William, Kentucky, Andy is a familiar figure, having grown up in the town’s rich web of family and neighborhood relationships. His disorientation begins during a cross-country plane trip to a scientific conference, where he is caught up in the security lines and body searches now a familiar part of the post-9/11 reality. In this world every stranger in an airport terminal is a potential enemy, someone to be kept at a safe distance. Somehow Andy makes it back to his home in rural Kentucky, but he is rough shape. He has literally forgotten who he is, and wanders about town looking for clues. His memories—and his sense of self—return only when in a confused dream state he sees his ancestors, walking together in an endless line. To Andy they are a "long dance of men and women behind, most of whom he never knew, . . . who, choosing one another, chose him.” In other words Andy Catlett is not a self-made man living in an isolated blip of a town, but he and his home are the sum of hundreds of courtships and conceptions, choices and chances, errors and hopes. We like to imagine that we are unique, absolutely unprecedented. But here is the truth: not just the tilt of our noses or the color of our bodies, but far more intimate characteristics–the shape of our feet or an inner tendency towards joy or sadness–have belonged to other people before we came along to inherit them. We came about because they decided to marry one person and not the other, to have six children instead of three, to move to a city instead of staying on the farm. It is remarkable to think of someone walking down the streets of sixteenth-century Amsterdam with my fingers and kneecaps, my tendency toward melancholy and my aptitude for music. We live within a web of holy obligation. We are connected to people of the world today, and to other invisible people: the unknown number of generations yet to be born. One of the most important things we can do, in the way we care for the earth and in the way we care for our local church life, is to recognize their potential presence. (pp.117-118)

Fall down seven times, get up eight,” Manjiro said. “So my mother used to say.” 22 THE RACE here were no earthquakes. There were no broken legs. There were no emergencies of any kind. The day of the race arrived, as days generally did on the farm, with the barnyard rooster incessantly announcing its arrival. Manjiro climbed out of bed like an old man. Today was the day of his humiliation. Captain Whitfield squinted up at him from his coffee when he came into the dining room. “Rough night?” he asked. Manjiro shook his head, trying not to let his gloom show. He had taken great pains to keep this contest secret from Captain Whitfield. He poured himself a cup of coffee, muttering to himself, “I’m not going to let the cat jump in the bag now.” “Pardon me?” the captain said. Manjiro shook his head and sipped his coffee, the bitterness of it like a rebuke. His relationship with Captain Whitfield had been changing. Now that Manjiro was growing up—he was seventeen now—he regarded the captain more as a friend than a father. There were times, though, like now, when the feeling of being the naughty child of a possibly disapproving father was overwhelming. He should have confided in Captain Whitfield; the captain might have been able to help him out of his predicament. Well, it was too late now. He

Missy I was sixteen and Jason (known on TV as Jase) was eighteen when we started dating. One of my friends--we’ll call her Christy--was actually interested in him, and the two of them had started seeing each other. Jase did not know Christy was already dating someone else and had been for quite some time. He found this out at her house one Sunday afternoon when she ran down the stairs telling him he had to leave immediately. About that time, he heard the screeching of tires from the front of her house. Her boyfriend had arrived. The boyfriend (we’ll call him Greg) was obviously not happy with the current arrangement and was there to set things straight with Jason. He told Jason eh wanted to talk inside his truck. Jase ended up getting into Greg’s vehicle, which he quickly regretted, and Greg proceeded to drive to an undisclosed location to fight it out. Quickly, Jase realized the situation and told Greg that if all of this was over Christy, he could have her. She was not worth it to him. Since Greg did not seem to respond to this direction in the conversation, Jase switched gears and started preaching to him. He proceeded to tell Greg that Jesus died for him and for all the rotten things he had done in his life. He told him God would forgive him if he would turn his life over to Jesus, be baptized for his sins, and start living a life that reflected Jesus’ love for him. Since Greg did not seem to respond to this dialogue either, Jase told him simply, “Just don’t hit me in the face.” Greg stopped the truck, dragged Jase out, roughed him up a bit, and left him at the end of a dead-end road. Jason never threw one punch. Obviously, the relationship between Jason and Christy was officially over.

No one acts in a void. We all take cues from cultural norms, shaped by the law. For the law affects our ideas of what is reasonable and appropriate. It does so by what it prohibits--you might think less of drinking if it were banned, or more of marijuana use if it were allowed--but also by what it approves. . . . Revisionists agree that it matters what California or the United States calls a marriage, because this affects how Californians or Americans come to think of marriage. Prominent Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, no friend of the conjugal view, agrees: "[O]ne thing can be said with certainty [about recent changes in marriage law]. They will not be confined to adding new options to the familiar heterosexual monogamous family. They will change the character of that family. If these changes take root in our culture then the familiar marriage relations will disappear. They will not disappear suddenly. Rather they will be transformed into a somewhat different social form, which responds to the fact that it is one of several forms of bonding, and that bonding itself is much more easily and commonly dissoluble. All these factors are already working their way into the constitutive conventions which determine what is appropriate and expected within a conventional marriage and transforming its significance." Redefining civil marriage would change its meaning for everyone. Legally wedded opposite-sex unions would increasingly be defined by what they had in common with same-sex relationships. This wouldn't just shift opinion polls and tax burdens. Marriage, the human good, would be harder to achieve. For you can realize marriage only by choosing it, for which you need at least a rough, intuitive idea of what it really is. By warping people's view of marriage, revisionist policy would make them less able to realize this basic way of thriving--much as a man confused about what friendship requires will have trouble being a friend. . . . Redefining marriage will also harm the material interests of couples and children. As more people absorb the new law's lesson that marriage is fundamentally about emotions, marriages will increasingly take on emotion's tyrannical inconstancy. Because there is no reason that emotional unions--any more than the emotions that define them, or friendships generally--should be permanent or limited to two, these norms of marriage would make less sense. People would thus feel less bound to live by them whenever they simply preferred to live otherwise. . . . As we document below, even leading revisionists now argue that if sexual complementarity is optional, so are permanence and exclusivity. This is not because the slope from same-sex unions to expressly temporary and polyamorous ones is slippery, but because most revisionist arguments level the ground between them: If marriage is primarily about emotional union, why privilege two-person unions, or permanently committed ones? What is it about emotional union, valuable as it can be, that requires these limits? As these norms weaken, so will the emotional and material security that marriage gives spouses. Because children fare best on most indicators of health and well-being when reared by their wedded biological parents, the same erosion of marital norms would adversely affect children's health, education, and general formation. The poorest and most vulnerable among us would likely be hit the hardest. And the state would balloon: to adjudicate breakup and custody issues, to meet the needs of spouses and children affected by divorce, and to contain and feebly correct the challenges these children face.

As the subject watches the movies, the MRI machine creates a 3-D image of the blood flow within the brain. The MRI image looks like a vast collection of thirty thousand dots, or voxels. Each voxel represents a pinpoint of neural energy, and the color of the dot corresponds to the intensity of the signal and blood flow. Red dots represent points of large neural activity, while blue dots represent points of less activity. (The final image looks very much like thousands of Christmas lights in the shape of the brain. Immediately you can see that the brain is concentrating most of its mental energy in the visual cortex, which is located at the back of the brain, while watching these videos.) Gallant’s MRI machine is so powerful it can identify two to three hundred distinct regions of the brain and, on average, can take snapshots that have one hundred dots per region of the brain. (One goal for future generations of MRI technology is to provide an even sharper resolution by increasing the number of dots per region of the brain.) At first, this 3-D collection of colored dots looks like gibberish. But after years of research, Dr. Gallant and his colleagues have developed a mathematical formula that begins to find relationships between certain features of a picture (edges, textures, intensity, etc.) and the MRI voxels. For example, if you look at a boundary, you’ll notice it’s a region separating lighter and darker areas, and hence the edge generates a certain pattern of voxels. By having subject after subject view such a large library of movie clips, this mathematical formula is refined, allowing the computer to analyze how all sorts of images are converted into MRI voxels. Eventually the scientists were able to ascertain a direct correlation between certain MRI patterns of voxels and features within each picture. At this point, the subject is then shown another movie trailer. The computer analyzes the voxels generated during this viewing and re-creates a rough approximation of the original image. (The computer selects images from one hundred movie clips that most closely resemble the one that the subject just saw and then merges images to create a close approximation.) In this way, the computer is able to create a fuzzy video of the visual imagery going through your mind. Dr. Gallant’s mathematical formula is so versatile that it can take a collection of MRI voxels and convert it into a picture, or it can do the reverse, taking a picture and then converting it to MRI voxels. I had a chance to view the video created by Dr. Gallant’s group, and it was very impressive. Watching it was like viewing a movie with faces, animals, street scenes, and buildings through dark glasses. Although you could not see the details within each face or animal, you could clearly identify the kind of object you were seeing. Not only can this program decode what you are looking at, it can also decode imaginary images circulating in your head.

I take in his smooth cheeks, his rough chin and jaw, the developing wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. 'We fall in love with somebody who maybe seems like a bad match,' Tully says, 'and our friends run around saying 'What does he see in her?' What he sees in her is what's hidden from everyone else. He's fallen in love with something invisible.' 'Or possibly he's made a common mistake,' I say, gazing at Tully. 'He was needy. He fell for outward appearances. He projected onto this person whatever it was he'd always longed for in a relationship, whatever he hungered for in life. He fell in love with the idea of love.' 'That's a pretty cynical point of view,' Tully says.

babe, we're going to ride to my compound, I'm going to take you to my room and you're not gonna want to leave. You'll have to leave, because, darling, this ain’t the start of a relationship. I already got an old lady, but I'll show you how a real

compound, I'm going to take you to my room and you're not gonna want to leave. You'll have to leave, because, darling, this ain’t the start of a relationship. I already got an old lady, but I'll show you how a real

We had a rough month. If no one was around trying to kill us we might as well spend the rest of our lives driving each other insane. It would pass the time.

It’s important to keep in mind that when viewed against the full scale of our species’ existence, ten thousand years is but a brief moment. Even if we ignore the roughly two million years since the emergence of our Homo lineage, in which our direct ancestors lived in small foraging social groups, anatomically modern humans are estimated to have existed as long as 200,000 years.* With the earliest evidence of agriculture dating to about 8000 BCE, the amount of time our species has spent living in settled agricultural societies represents just 5 percent of our collective experience, at most. As recently as a few hundred years ago, most of the planet was still occupied by foragers.

As our relationships in marriages, families, and friendship teach us, it takes relationships to provide the friction that wears down our rough edges and sanctifies us. And then, and only then, those relationships become the environment in which those perfected virtues are best enjoyed.

roughly divided in half between a column of vertebral bodies and a column of arches.Functionally, this arrangement very clearly evolved to contend with the dual requirements of stability and plasticity. The anterior column of vertebral bodies deals with weight-bearing, compressive forces, whereas the posterior column of arches deals with the tensile forces generated by movement. Within each column, in the dynamic relationship of bone to soft tissue, there is a balance of sthira and sukha. The vertebral bodies transmit compressive forces to the discs, which resist compression by pushing back. The column of arches transmits tension forces to all the Figure 2.7 Viewed from the side, attached ligaments (figure 2.8), which resist stretching the spine divided into an anterior by pulling back. In short, the structural elements column of vertebral bodies and of the spinal column are involved in an intricate dance discs, and a posterior column of arches and processes. that protects the central nervous system by neutralizing the forces of tension and compression. Discs and Ligaments If you look deeper, you can also see how sthira and sukha are revealed in the components of an intervertebral disc: The tough, fibrous layers

If you place two living heart cells from different people in a Petrie dish, they will in time find and maintain a third and common beat. —MOLLY VASS This biological fact holds the secret of all relationship. It is cellular proof that beneath any resistance we might pose and beyond all our attempts that fall short, there is in the very nature of life itself some essential joining force. This inborn ability to find and enliven a common beat is the miracle of love. This force is what makes compassion possible, even probable. For if two cells can find the common pulse beneath everything, how much more can full hearts feel when all excuses fall away? This drive toward a common beat is the force beneath curiosity and passion. It is what makes strangers talk to strangers, despite the discomfort. It is how we risk new knowledge. For being still enough, long enough, next to anything living, we find a way to sing the one voiceless song. Yet we often tire ourselves by fighting how our hearts want to join, seldom realizing that both strength and peace come from our hearts beating in unison with all that is alive. It feels incredibly uplifting that without even knowing each other, there exists a common beat between all hearts, just waiting to be felt. It brings to mind the time that the great poet Pablo Neruda, near the end of his life, stopped while traveling at the Lota coal mine in rural Chile. He stood there stunned, as a miner, rough and blackened by his work inside the earth, strode straight for Neruda, embraced him, and said, “I have known you a long time, my brother.” Perhaps this is the secret—that every time we dare to voice what beats within, we invite some other cell of heart to find what lives between us and sing.