Unfair Relationship Quotes

I will never deny that life isn't fair. It seems as though when a woman leaves a man she is strong and independent, but when a man leaves a woman he is a pig and a jerk.

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.

The abusive man’s high entitlement leads him to have unfair and unreasonable expectations, so that the relationship revolves around his demands. His attitude is: “You owe me.” For each ounce he gives, he wants a pound in return. He wants his partner to devote herself fully to catering to him, even if it means that her own needs—or her children’s—get neglected. You can pour all your energy into keeping your partner content, but if he has this mind-set, he’ll never be satisfied for long. And he will keep feeling that you are controlling him, because he doesn’t believe that you should set any limits on his conduct or insist that he meet his responsibilities.

You concede nothing to me and I have to concede everything to you.

Lack of communication has a way of clipping our wings, which keeps us from flying. When things are left unspoken, we forget that everyone is destined to share the sky together.

Jill had three basic statements about life, 1. It is your life, usually with some added social commentary. 2. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things. 3. No one ever said that life was fair.

In some rare cases, a friendship between two people benefits both of them, and what’s more, in some rarer cases, it benefits both of them equally.

That they were left with only this--this awkward, prearranged meet-up, this terrible silence--seemed almost more than she could bear, and the unfairness of it all welled up inside of her. It was his fault, all of it, and yet her hatred for him was the worst kind of love, a tortured longing, a misguided wish that made her heart hammer in her chest. She couldn't ignore the disjointed sensation that they were now two different pieces of two different puzzles, and nothing in the world could make them fit together again.

The central attitudes driving the Victim are: Everybody has done me wrong, especially the women I’ve been involved with. Poor me. When you accuse me of being abusive, you are joining the parade of people who have been cruel and unfair to me. It proves you’re just like the rest. It’s justifiable for me to do to you whatever I feel you are doing to me, and even to make it quite a bit worse to make sure you get the message. Women who complain of mistreatment by men, such as relationship abuse or sexual harassment, are anti-male and out for blood. I’ve had it so hard that I’m not responsible for my actions.

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn't see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal?

This isn't fair, he would think in those moments. This isn't friendship. It's something, but it's not friendship. He felt he had been hustled into a game of complicity, one he never intended to play.

If you have the tendency to repress your anger, you have lost touch with an important part of yourself. Getting angry is a way to gain back that part of yourself by asserting your rights, expressing your displeasure with a situation, and letting others know how you wish to be treated. It can motivate you to make needed changes in a relationship or other areas of your life. Finally it can let others know that you expect to be respected and treated fairly.

We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline.

She had accepted him as he was and had spared him a great deal of loneliness. He had been unfair: while his imagination and vanity had given her too much importance, his pride had given her too little. He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love - first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.

Naive people tend to generalize people as—-good, bad, kind, or evil based on their actions. However, even the smartest person in the world is not the wisest or the most spiritual, in all matters. We are all flawed. Maybe, you didn’t know a few of these things about Einstein, but it puts the notion of perfection to rest. Perfection doesn’t exist in anyone. Nor, does a person’s mistakes make them less valuable to the world. 1. He divorced the mother of his children, which caused Mileva, his wife, to have a break down and be hospitalized. 2.He was a ladies man and was known to have had several affairs; infidelity was listed as a reason for his divorce. 3.He married his cousin. 4.He had an estranged relationship with his son. 5. He had his first child out of wedlock. 6. He urged the FDR to build the Atom bomb, which killed thousands of people. 7. He was Jewish, yet he made many arguments for the possibility of God. Yet, hypocritically he did not believe in the Jewish God or Christianity. He stated, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.

feeling angry signals a problem, venting anger does not solve it. Venting anger may serve to maintain, and even rigidify, the old rules and patterns in a relationship, thus ensuring that change does not occur. When emotional intensity is high, many of us engage in nonproductive efforts to change the other person, and in so doing, fail to exercise our power to clarify and change our own selves. The old anger-in/anger-out theory, which states that letting it all hang out offers protection from the psychological hazards of keeping it all pent up, is simply not true. Feelings of depression, low self-esteem, self-betrayal, and even self-hatred are inevitable when we fight but continue to submit to unfair circumstances, when we complain but live in a way that betrays our hopes, values and potentials, or when we find ourselves fulfilling society’s stereotype of the bitchy, nagging, bitter, or destructive woman. Those of us who are locked into ineffective expressions of anger suffer as deeply as those of us who dare not get angry at all.

Expectations are nothing more than the rules we set, in order to maintain our ego and self esteem. What we seek from others is often that fulfillment of what we believe we require for happiness. However, many of us will raise the requirements so high that we can't even reach them or better yet, realize that we could find that expectation met by our own introspection and action.

We seem to be unable to resist overstating every aspect of ourselves: how long we are on the planet for, how much it matters what we achieve, how rare and unfair are our professional failures, how rife with misunderstandings are our relationships, how deep are our sorrows. Melodrama is individually always the order of the day.

That’s one of therapy’s cruel aspects: the therapist is unique to you, but not the other way around. How unfair. It’s the most unequal relationship you could imagine.

He unrequitedly loved Anna; Anna unrequitedly loved Marco; Marco probably unrequitedly loved some rando none of them had ever met. The world was pitiless. Nobody had any power over anyone else.

People often wanted my explanation of my relationship with James—which seemed inherently unfair, expecting one half of an equation to account for the whole—but no one has ever offered their own diagnosis.

A habit that forms from this is that I can ask Eric questions when he is asleep. Once I hear the first snore, I say, Why is your trajectory so straight? Why is your family so nice? It seems unfair how easy everything comes to you. In your last life you must have been a dung beetle. Or someone who gave up his life for someone else. Perhaps a pregnant woman crossing the street. Do you remember? Then I part his autumn hair and bring my voice down to a whisper. Please stop, just for a little while, and let me catch up. How do you expect me to marry you if you never let me catch up?

HUMAN BILL OF RIGHTS [GUIDELINES FOR FAIRNESS AND INTIMACY] I have the right to be treated with respect. I have the right to say no. I have the right to make mistakes. I have the right to reject unsolicited advice or feedback. I have the right to negotiate for change. I have the right to change my mind or my plans. I have a right to change my circumstances or course of action. I have the right to have my own feelings, beliefs, opinions, preferences, etc. I have the right to protest sarcasm, destructive criticism, or unfair treatment. I have a right to feel angry and to express it non-abusively. I have a right to refuse to take responsibility for anyone else’s problems. I have a right to refuse to take responsibility for anyone’s bad behavior. I have a right to feel ambivalent and to occasionally be inconsistent. I have a right to play, waste time and not always be productive. I have a right to occasionally be childlike and immature. I have a right to complain about life’s unfairness and injustices. I have a right to occasionally be irrational in safe ways. I have a right to seek healthy and mutually supportive relationships. I have a right to ask friends for a modicum of help and emotional support. I have a right to complain and verbally ventilate in moderation. I have a right to grow, evolve and prosper.

I have been completely unable to maintain any semblance of relationship on any level I have been a bastard to the people who have actively attempted to deliver me from peril I have been acutely undeserving of the ear that listen up and lip that kissed me on the temple I have been accustomed to a stubborn disposition that admits it wish it's history disassembled I have been a hypocrite in sermonizing tolerance while skimming for a ministry to pretzel I have been unfairly resentful of those I wish that acted different when the bidding was essential I have been a terrible communicator prone to isolation over sympathy for devils I have been my own worse enemy since the very genesis of rebels

I hate the world sometimes," Anthea said. "The unfairness of it. I won't force you to see me if you don't want to - but nobody can stop me loving you, and I'll wait for you all my life if I have to.

possible topics around which the currents of speech may flow: Death and the danger of death: violence, fighting, sickness, fear, dreams, premonitions and communication with the dead. Sex and relations between the sexes: dating, courtship, proposals, marriage, breaking off relationships, affairs, intermarriage. Moral indignation: assignment and rejection of blame, unfairness, injustice, gossip, violations of social norms.

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

My friend looked at me confused. He laughed a little, then sighed, then teared up. “It’s true you’re bad at relationships,” I said, “but it’s also true you are good at them. They’re both true, old friend.” I reminded him of all the people who love him and all the people he’s loved. I told him I thought it was unfair for a man to be judged by a moment, by a season. We are all more complicated than that.

It had always bothered Tom that women thought they could win an argument with a man simply by appealing to his baser instincts, by holding out the mere possibility of award-winning carnal knowledge. It was the gender equivalent of a preemptive nuclear strike. He thought it unfair and, quite frankly, disrespectful of the entire male population.

Since males are expected to lead, this is what you must do to appear manly. Simply taking the initiative is not enough though; you must lead women all the way and keep leading them until the end. If you want a woman, it is up to you to go after her, not the other way around. Leadership in the relationship is the male’s role, like it or not — the same way giving birth is the female’s role. You can debate and argue all night that it is unfair, but it does not make any difference. You should never expect women to lead.

It’ll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You’ll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it’s my own. It’ll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don’t convey my commands at all. It’s so unfair: I’m going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn’t see this in the contract when I signed up.

The codependent’s unbalanced relationship patterns eventually lead to serious emotional issues, which they may continue to ignore until it becomes so serious that they begin to manifest symptoms of C-PTSD—hypervigilance, revenge fantasies, mood swings, and isolation. This severe discomfort may feel unfair and wrong, but it’s actually a blessing in disguise.

Because unfortunately, in all your worry and self-doubt about being unfair, you fail to see situations that are actually unfair—to you.

The following dynamics are typical of a relationship with Mr. Sensitive and may help explain your feeling that something has gone awry: You seem to be hurting his feelings constantly, though you aren't sure why, and he expects your attention to be focused endlessly on his emotional injuries. If you are in a bad mood one day and say something unfair or insensitive, it won't be enough for you to give him a sincere apology and accept responsibility. He'll go on and on about it, expecting you to grovel as if you had treated him with profound cruelty.

Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary. If nothing else, an examination of the past—and of the present, for that matter—can be instructive. It shows us that there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash, and sink into the stewpot of North America. With the rest of the bones. No matter how you frame Native history, the one inescapable constant is that Native people in North America have lost much. We’ve given away a great deal, we’ve had a great deal taken from us, and, if we are not careful, we will continue to lose parts of ourselves—as Indians, as Cree, as Blackfoot, as Navajo, as Inuit—with each generation. But this need not happen. Native cultures aren’t static. They’re dynamic, adaptive, and flexible, and for many of us, the modern variations of older tribal traditions continue to provide order, satisfaction, identity, and value in our lives. More than that, in the five hundred years of European occupation, Native cultures have already proven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient. Okay. That was heroic and uncomfortably inspirational, wasn’t it? Poignant, even. You can almost hear the trumpets and the violins. And that kind of romance is not what we need. It serves no one, and the cost to maintain it is too high. So, let’s agree that Indians are not special. We’re not … mystical. I’m fine with that. Yes, a great many Native people have a long-standing relationship with the natural world. But that relationship is equally available to non-Natives, should they choose to embrace it. The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms.

the life of average people, we find the other side of the glittering coin of gregariousness: the most painful events are also those that involve relationships. Unfair bosses and rude customers make us unhappy on the job. At home an uncaring spouse, an ungrateful child, and interfering in-laws are the prime sources of the blues. How is it possible to reconcile the fact that people cause both the best and the worst times?

I am releasing my own demons of times gone by and seizing the opportunity to find my own corner, my own fortress, my own calm and peace. Life is not unfair... Life is good. In the end, you only have yourself to search for and find…

Many people think less of a man if he cries because it supposedly shows a sign of weakness, but I beg to differ. A man that’s in touch with his feelings is absolutely beautiful! I admire, respect, and appreciate their braveness to be vulnerable. Crying is NOT a weakness. We cannot expect our men to be strong all of the time. That’s SO unfair! They have feelings, too. Don’t ever make a man feel less than just because he cries. Comfort, love, and support him. Show him that you genuinely care.

I tell the guys that I understand. It seems unfair of me to handle it any other way. I give them reasons that they cannot come up with themselves. “You are still emotionally tied up in your previous relationship,” I say. “We’re coworkers, after all,” I say.

It occurred to her that in every relationship in which she had participated, in every union older than a year that she’d observed, imbalance existed. Of a couple, one person invariably loved stronger than the other. It seemed a law of nature, a cruel law that led to tension and destruction. She was dismayed that a law so unfair, so miserable prevailed, but since it did, since imbalance seemed inevitable, it must be easier, healthier to be the lover who loved the least. She vowed that henceforth imbalance would work in her favor.

Tristán felt everything was a bit too raw to think about having sex so soon after their breakup, and he suspected Yolanda might want to get back together with him, because that had happened once before. That would be unfair to her since he was as lukewarm about their relationship as he had been

the relationship between strategic degrees of freedom and signal strength is practically inverse. In the unfair way in which life operates, the moment at which you have the richest, most trustworthy information is often the moment at which you have the least power to change the story told by that information.

We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline.

A man is NOT weak if he cries. A man is NOT a punk if he cries. A man is NOT acting like a little b*tch if he cries. He’s a Man! And he’s allowed to have and show his true feelings without feeling less than. Ladies, some of you need to do better. Learn to be compassionate, loving, supportive, and understanding. There’s NOTHING wrong with a man being vulnerable. I encourage you to be his joy, peace, and his safe place. Lift him up and be mindful NOT to tear him down. If you truly care for and love your man, do and say everything with love. Let him know that it’s okay to cry and that he doesn’t have to pretend to be okay when he’s not. Real men DO cry! They experience sadness, disappointments, pain, and many other feelings. A man shouldn’t have to suppress his emotions. That’s pure nonsense! A man that can cry, smile, and let his guards down is a keeper in my book. I couldn’t imagine acting hard all of the time. That’s so unfair! Ladies, strive to be a Queen of substance. PEACE.

James is a nice guy. But he tends to be needy in his relationships and has what we would call a high level of investment with any woman that he meets. Whenever he dates a woman, he will rearrange his entire schedule at her whim. He will buy her gifts and spend most of his paycheck on the nicest dinners for her. He’ll forgo plans with his guy friends and if the woman he dates gets angry, he’ll sit patiently and listen to her vent all of her frustrations to him, agreeing with her constantly in a futile desperation that she may feel better. Even when he feels that she’s being irrational or treating him unfairly, he won’t say anything because he doesn’t want her to be upset with him. As a result, despite caring for him, James’s girlfriends rarely respect him. And sooner or later — usually sooner — they dump him. When James gets dumped, he becomes distraught and depressed. He’s often inconsolable and drinks too much. Usually, he doesn’t feel better again until he meets another woman and the entire cycle repeats itself.

I would be unfair to myself if I said I did not try. I did, even if desultorily. But desire is a curious thing. If it does not exist it does not exist and there is nothing you can do to conjure it up. Worse still, as I discovered, when desire begins to sink, like a capsizing ship it takes down a lot with it.   In our case it took down the conversation, the laughter, the sharing, the concern, the dreams and nearly - the most important thing, the most important thing - and nearly the affection too. Soon my sinking desire had taken everything else down with it to the floor of the sea, and only affection remained like the bobbing hand of a drowning man, poised perilously between life and death.   More than once she tried to seize the moment and open up the issue. She did it with a hard face and a soft face; she did it when I was idling on the terrace and when I was in the thick of my works; first thing in the morning and last thing at night.   We need to talk. Yes. Do you want to talk? Sure. What's happening? I don't know. Is there someone else? No. Is it something I did? Oh no. Then what the hell's happening? I don't know. Is there anything you want to talk to me about? I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? I don't know. What do you mean you don't know? I don't know. That's what I mean - I don't know. Toc toc toc.   All the while I tried to save that bobbing hand - of affection - from vanishing. I felt somehow that if it drowned there would not be a single pointer on the wide stormy surface to show me where our great love had once stood. That bobbing hand of affection was a marker, a buoy, holding out the hope that one day we could salvage the sunken ship. If it drowned, our coordinates would be completely lost and we would not know where to even begin looking.   Even in my weird state, it was an image of such desolation that it made my heart lurch wildly.   ***   For a long time, with her immense pride in herself - in us - she did not turn to anyone for help. Not friends, not family. For simply too long she imagined this was a passing phase, but then, as the weeks rolled by, through slow accretion the awful truth began to settle on her. By then she had run through all the plays of a relationship: withdrawal, sulking, anger, seduction, inquisition, affection, threat.   Logic, love, lust. Now the epitaph was beginning to creep up on her. Acceptance. 

It is easy to see why so many people view empathy as a powerful force for goodness and moral change. It is easy to see why so many believe that the only problem with empathy is that too often we don’t have enough of it. I used to believe this as well. But now I don’t. Empathy has its merits. It can be a great source of pleasure, involved in art and fiction and sports, and it can be a valuable aspect of intimate relationships. And it can sometimes spark us to do good. But on the whole, it’s a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions, it can corrode certain important relationships, such as between a doctor and a patient, and make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives.

Enough of trying to write this all down. It’s going nowhere. Say I write the word “coincidence”. What you read in the word “coincidence” could be utterly different—even opposite—from what the very same word means to me. This is unfair, if I may say so. Here I am stripped to my underpants while you’ve only undone three button of your blouse. An unfair turn of events if there ever was one. Hence I bought myself a cassette tape, having decided to directly record my letter to you.

It'll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself.

The overarching principle of a therapeutic relationship is that therapists should be ever mindful of a variant of the Hippocratic oath and, to the degree possible, strive to "do no more harm" (Courtois, 2010). Complex trauma clients have already experienced considerable harm, much of it at the hands of other human beings. As a result of the ubiquitous processes of transference, attachment styles, and IWM [Internal working models], these clients often view the therapist's behavior and their relationship through the lens of their trauma-related negative interpersonal expectancies and unhealed emotional wounds and injuries. Therapists should not be surprised to be "guilty until proven innocent", not because clients with complex trauma histories are "unfair" or "unreasonable" but precisely the opposite - because the most realistic self-protective stance for them (given the fact that betrayal and harm have been more the rule than the exception) is to "distrust first and verify" (or to be hypervigilant) rather than to start with an expectation of safety and trustworthiness.

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.

Empathy has its merits. It can be a great source of pleasure, involved in art and fiction and sports, and it can be a valuable aspect of intimate relationships. And it can sometimes spark us to do good. But on the whole, it’s a poor moral guide. It grounds foolish judgments and often motivates indifference and cruelty. It can lead to irrational and unfair political decisions, it can corrode certain important relationships, such as between a doctor and a patient, and make us worse at being friends, parents, husbands, and wives. I am against empathy, and one of the goals of this book is to persuade you to be against empathy too.

It's be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You'll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it's my own. It'll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don't convey my commands at all. It's so unfair: I'm going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn't see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal? And then there will be the times when I see you laughing. Like the time you'll be playing with the neighbor's puppy, poking your hands through the chain-link fence separating our back yards, and you'll be laughing so hard you'll start hiccuping. The puppy will run inside the neighbor's house, and your laughter will gradually subside, letting you catch your breath. Then the puppy will come back to the fence to lick your fingers again, and you'll shriek and start laughing again. it will be the most wonderful sound I could ever imagine, a sound that makes me feel like a fountain, or a wellspring. Now if only I can remember that sound the next time your blithe disregard for self-preservation gives me a heart attack.

Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.” ― Stephen Fry

Blameshifting is so easy; after all, it has such a long history—it goes back to the Garden. A person’s personal relationship to the counselee is discussed publicly without any knowledge of the fact on his part and without any opportunity for him to straighten out misunderstandings or balance off unfair judgments. His name and his actions are being discussed in an intimate way by a group of people who know nothing about him and have no right to know anything about him. Often the discussion is instigated by a bitter, resentful person who, according to Matthew 18, should have gone directly to the husband or parent or pastor to seek reconciliation if he felt that way.

Anti-Noble morality is the product of ressentiment. The Anti-Noble man feels trapped. He believes that his happiness and fulfillment have been thwarted by others. He resents them for having better opportunities, for having greater wealth, for having more power, for using that power to coerce or oppress him. The Noble man views people, actions and circumstances as either being positive or negative, “good” or “un-good” in relationship to his own interests, subjectively. Instead of recognizing the tragic and unfair nature of human existence, the Anti-Noble man constructs a system of morality that he convinces himself is objective, rather than subjective — as it truly is.

If it seemed like he was selling something it was because his enjoyment of that thing depended on a diversity of people participating. The number of available sexual partners for the Relationship Anarchist is probably limited, and assuming one of the draws of Relationship Anarchy is weird sex with a variety of people, that limitation may cripple the point. There are social obstacles to doing things differently: People get mad at you. They worry you’re judging them and suspect deep down you might be right; they become stubborn and defensive. You need backup, reassurance, affinity. You’d have to be a real believer to keep going, is what I’m saying, so I thought maybe my rush to characterize him as a charlatan was unfair. Though this is also the rationale of multilevel marketing schemes.

The firm did this at the local level, creating right-wing pages with vague names like Smith County Patriots or I Love My Country. Because of the way Facebook’s recommendation algorithm worked, these pages would pop up in the feeds of people who had already liked similar content. When users joined CA’s fake groups, it would post videos and articles that would further provoke and inflame them. Conversations would rage on the group page, with people commiserating about how terrible or unfair something was. CA broke down social barriers, cultivating relationships across groups. And all the while it was testing and refining messages, to achieve maximum engagement. Now CA had users who (1) self-identified as part of an extreme group, (2) were a captive audience, and (3) could be manipulated with data.

Sometimes,” she told me, “a girl will give a guy a blow job at the end of the night because she doesn’t want to have sex with him and he expects to be satisfied. So if I want him to leave and I don’t want anything to happen . . .” She trailed off, leaving me to imagine the rest. There was so much to unpack in that short statement: why a young man should expect to be sexually satisfied; why a girl not only isn’t outraged, but considers it her obligation to comply; why she doesn’t think a blow job constitutes “anything happening”; the pressure young women face in any personal relationship to put others’ needs before their own; the potential justification of assault with a chaser of self-blame. “It goes back to girls feeling guilty,” Anna said. “If you go to a guy’s room and are hooking up with him, you feel bad leaving him without pleasing him in some way. But, you know, it’s unfair. I don’t think he feels badly for you.” In their research on high school girls and oral sex, April Burns, a professor of psychology at City University of New York, and her colleagues found that girls thought of fellatio kind of like homework: a chore to get done, a skill to master, one on which they expected to be evaluated, possibly publicly. As with schoolwork, they worried about failing or performing poorly—earning the equivalent of low marks. Although they took satisfaction in a task well done, the pleasure they described was never physical, never located in their own bodies. They were both dispassionate and nonpassionate about oral sex—socialized, the researchers concluded, to see themselves as “learners” in their encounters rather than “yearners.” The concern with pleasing, as opposed to pleasure, was pervasive among the girls I met, especially among high schoolers, who were just starting sexual experimentation.

HAPPINESS: "Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming...Flourishing is rooted in action..."happiness is a kind of working of the soul in the way of perfect excellence"...a flourishing life is a life lived along lines of excellence...Flourishing is a condition that is created by the choices we make in the world we live in...Flourishing is not a virtue, but a condition; not a character trait, but a result. We need virtue to flourish, but virtue isn't enough. To create a flourishing life, we need both virtue and the conditions in which virtue can flourish...Resilience is a virtue required for flourishing, bur being resilient will not guarantee that we will flourish. Unfairness, injustice, and bad fortune will snuff our promising lives. Unasked-for pain will still come our way...We can build resilience and shape the world we live in. We can't rebuild the world...three primary kinds of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and happiness of excellence...people who are flourishing usually have all three kinds of happiness in their lives...Aristotle understood: pushing ourselves to grow, to get better, to dive deeper is at the heart of happiness...This is the happiness that goes hand in hand with excellence, with pursuing worthy goals, with growing mastery...It is about the exercise of powers. The most common mistake people make in thinking about the happiness of excellence is to focus on moments of achievement. They imagine the mountain climber on the summit. That's part of the happiness of excellence, and a very real part. What counts more, though, is not the happiness of being there, but the happiness of getting there. A mountain climber heads for the summit, and joy meets her along the way. You head for the bottom of the ocean, and joy meets you on the way down...you create joy along the way...the concept of flow, the kind of happiness that comes when we lose ourselves through complete absorption in a rewarding task...the idea of flow..."Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."...Joy, like sweat, is usually a byproduct of your activity, not your aim...A focus on happiness will not lead to excellence. A focus on excellence will, over time, lead to happiness. The pursuit of excellence leads to growth, mastery, and achievement. None of these are sufficient for happiness, yet all of them are necessary...the pull of purpose, the desire to feel "needed in this world" - however we fulfill that desire - is a very powerful force in a human life...recognize that the drive to live well and purposefully isn't some grim, ugly, teeth-gritting duty. On the contrary: "it's a very good feeling." It is really is happiness...Pleasures can never make up for an absence of purposeful work and meaningful relationships. Pleasures will never make you whole...Real happiness comes from working together, hurting together, fighting together, surviving together, mourning together. It is the essence of the happiness of excellence...The happiness of pleasure can't provide purpose; it can't substitute for the happiness of excellence. The challenge for the veteran - and for anyone suddenly deprived of purpose - is not simple to overcome trauma, but to rebuild meaning. The only way out is through suffering to strength. Through hardship to healing. And the longer we wait, the less life we have to live...We are meant to have worthy work to do. If we aren't allowed to struggle for something worthwhile, we'll never grow in resilience, and we'll never experience complete happiness.

As a parent, your counter-dependence can set you up to feel, on some level, deeply uncomfortable with the dependence that is naturally built into your relationship with your child. Your own needs were thwarted as a child, and now a small being has lots of needs that you are required to fulfill. You may feel, on some deep or even unconscious level, that this is an unfair bind to be placed in. And now that we’re talking about this openly, I want to assure you that your feeling makes a lot of sense and is valid. You are indeed in an unfair bind. On top of that, society tells you (by seldom airing any negative feelings about parenting) that your feeling of being in an unfair bind is not how a parent is supposed to feel. In addition to the bind, your fear of relying on others may make it difficult for you to ask for help and accept help. All parents get overwhelmed and exhausted at times, and need support and assistance. If relying on other caretakers makes you feel vulnerable or weak or selfish, you will find yourself running on empty.

I can’t be your king.” As reasons go, it’s a good one. But I know there’s more behind it, and that’s what I want. An actual explanation. “So, if I were just a simple girl, from a simple family, and not the princess…?” Rhys’s hand finds my waist, and he nudges me back until our faces are as close as they were before. “I wouldn’t be able to walk away from you.” He lets out a self-deprecating sort of laugh. “What am I saying? I know better, and I still haven’t been able to walk away.” My heart breaks a little. Why must life be so unfair? Why was Braeton taken from me; why was I sent in his place? I don’t want to be queen—I don’t want to choose our king. I just want Rhys. “Just for a few minutes, can’t we pretend there isn’t a title attached to my name?” I whisper, running my fingers through the damp hair at the nape of his neck. “Would that be so wrong?” “It would be,” Rhys answers, his voice full of conviction. Yet his hand tightens at my side, drawing me even closer, his physical response at odds with his answer. His eyes are on mine, the intimacy of it almost too much to bear. “But I don’t have the will to stop you right now. If I am what you want, then I give myself to you. However, please know these fleeting minutes are all we have.” I lick my lips, and his eyes follow the movement. My breaths are short and fast, and Rhys’s fingers press into my side in the most intoxicating way. Making a decision I’ll likely regret, I slowly pull back. Disappointment flashes in Rhys’s green eyes when I put space between us, but I stand strong. “If minutes are all you can give me, I won’t waste them now,” I tell him softly. “I’ll save them, hide them away. Outwardly, I will keep our relationship purely platonic, but sometime—when I need you the most—I’ll make my request.” “Amalia…” Rhys says, sounding pained. Unable to help myself, I lean in and press the briefest kiss to the very corner of his lips. For a moment, I wonder if the knight is going to lock his arms around me, hold me here, convince me to use those minutes now. But he doesn’t. “You can deduct a second from my total,” I tease softly when I pull back. I then climb out of the hot spring, dripping water along the stone.

When I Am Disappointed in Him He will fulfill the desire of those who fear Him; He also will hear their cry and save them. PSALM 145:19 WHEN YOUR HUSBAND has done something to hurt, embarrass, or betray you, you may be disappointed in him for a legitimate reason. But God is all about love and forgiveness. He gives you the responsibility of making certain that you forgive fully and retain your love and respect for your husband. That can be very hard to do—especially if the offense has been repeated again and again. Or if the offense is quite serious. The truth is, you cannot come up with the kind of forgiveness needed without the help of God. That means you must pray for it. First of all, go before the Lord and confess your disappointment and hurt to Him. Ask Him to heal your heart and work complete forgiveness in it for your husband. That is probably the last thing you feel like doing if the offense has been devastating, but for your own good and the good of your marriage, you must do it and quickly. Unforgiveness destroys you when you don’t act right away to get rid of it. Forgiving is God’s way, and His ways are for your benefit. Be honest with God and tell Him how you feel and why. He already knows, but He wants to hear it from you. Be perfectly honest with your husband too. He needs to understand how what he has done has affected you. Forgiving him is not letting him off the hook. It’s not saying that what he did is now fine with you. It’s releasing him to God and letting the Lord deal with what he has done. Ask God to work complete forgiveness in you and take away all disappointment so that none remains in your heart. That can sometimes take a miracle, but God is the expert in that. My Prayer to God LORD, I confess any disappointment I have in my heart for my husband. I bring all the hurt and unforgiveness I feel to You and ask You to wash me clean of it. Fill my heart with an abundance of Your love and forgiveness. Convict both me and my husband if we have strayed from Your ways in response to one another. Show us where we are wrong. If he has done wrong, convict his heart about it. If I have overreacted to him, show me that too. When he says or does anything that is hurtful to me—that I feel disrespects me—show him the truth and help him to see it. If I do anything that disappoints or disrespects him, open my eyes and heart to understand what I should do differently. I pray for an end to all hurtful words and actions between us. Teach me to respond the way You would have me to. Help me to speak only words to him that are pleasing to You. Heal my heart and his as well. Help us to overcome any and all disappointments successfully. Thank You that You hear my prayers and will fulfill my desire for a relationship with my husband that is free of personal disappointments and unfair judgments. Give us hearts of praise to You for all that we are grateful for in each other. In Jesus’ name I pray.

Responsibility;...the importance of habits,...- a willingness to fail, a willingness to begin again - that are essential to resilience...the single most important habit to build if you want to e resilient: the habit of taking responsibility for your life...The more responsibility people take, the more resilient they are likely to be. The less responsibility people take - for their actions, for their lives, for their happiness - the more likely it is that life will crush them. At the root of resilience is the willingness to take responsibility for results...Life is unfair. You are not responsible for everything that happens to you. You are responsible for how you react to everything that happens to you...The first word out of the mouth of the complainer is always "they"...as soon as we say "I am responsible for...", we take control of something...acceptance of responsibility is a powerful cure for pain. Even when seemingly powerless, the resilient person finds a way to grab hold of something - no matter how small at first - to be responsible for...If you take responsibility for anything in your life, know that you'll feel fear. That fear will manifest itself in many ways: fear of embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of hurt...Every worthy challenge will inspire some fear...Fear is a cor emotion. A life without fear is an unhealthy life...Proper fear is part of the package of responsible, adult living...Focus not on wiping out your anxiety, but on directing your anxiety to worthy ends. Focus not on reducing your fear, but on building your courage - because, as you take more and more responsibility for your life, you'll need more and more courage...Fear is a motivator. It can propel you...Fear works. Fear can make human beings do amazing things. Fear can help you to see your world clearly in a way that you never have before. Fear become destructive when it drives us to do things that are unwise or unhelpful. Fear becomes destructive when it begins to cloud our vision. But like most emotions, fear is destructive only when it runs wild. Embrace the fear that comes from accepting responsibility, and use it to propel yourself to become the person you choose to be...Excellence is difficult. An excuse is seductive. It promises to end hardship, failure, and embarrassment. Excellence requires pain. An excuse promises that you'll be pain-free...Excuses protect you, but they exact a heavy cost. You can't live a full life while you wear them...People who think you weak will offer you an excuse. People who respect you will offer you a challenge...All of these injuries have a hard truth in common. In the long term, the obstacle that stands between us and healing is often not the injury we have received, but ourselves: our decision to keep the injury alive and open long after it should have become a hard-won scar. It is not things which trouble us, but the judgments we bring to bear upon things...In truth, it's not the trauma that's most harmful. The harm comes when we make trauma an excuse to avoid the activities, the relationships, and the purpose that are its only lasting cure.

Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled. “Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France. “No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room. For six years, Obama had been working to build what would become the Paris agreement, piece by piece. Because Congress wouldn’t act, he had to promote clean energy, and regulate fuel efficiency and emissions through executive action. With dozens of other nations, he made climate change an issue in our bilateral relationship, helping design their commitments. At international conferences, U.S. diplomats filled in the details of a framework. Since the breakthrough with China, and throughout 2015, things had been falling into place. When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India. We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult. Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power. One guy from our climate team came over to me. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” he whispered. “These guys are impossible.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s an argument about science. He loves this.” Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out. For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.

Dear Jon, A real Dear Jon let­ter, how per­fect is that?! Who knew you’d get dumped twice in the same amount of months. See, I’m one para­graph in and I’ve al­ready fucked this. I’m writ­ing this be­cause I can’t say any of this to you face-to-face. I’ve spent the last few months ques­tion­ing a lot of my friend­ships and won­der­ing what their pur­pose is, if not to work through big emo­tional things to­gether. But I now re­al­ize: I don’t want that. And I know you’ve all been there for me in other ways. Maybe not in the lit­eral sense, but I know you all would have done any­thing to fix me other than lis­ten­ing to me talk and al­low­ing me to be sad with­out so­lu­tions. And now I am writ­ing this let­ter rather than pick­ing up the phone and talk­ing to you be­cause, de­spite every thing I know, I just don’t want to, and I don’t think you want me to ei­ther. I lost my mind when Jen broke up with me. I’m pretty sure it’s been the sub­ject of a few of your What­sApp con­ver­sa­tions and more power to you, be­cause I would need to vent about me if I’d been friends with me for the last six months. I don’t want it to have been in vain, and I wanted to tell you what I’ve learnt. If you do a high-fat, high-pro­tein, low-carb diet and join a gym, it will be a good dis­trac­tion for a while and you will lose fat and gain mus­cle, but you will run out of steam and eat nor­mally again and put all the weight back on. So maybe don’t bother. Drunk­en­ness is an­other idea. I was in black­out for most of the first two months and I think that’s fine, it got me through the evenings (and the oc­ca­sional af­ter­noon). You’ll have to do a lot of it on your own, though, be­cause no one is free to meet up any more. I think that’s fine for a bit. It was for me un­til some­one walked past me drink­ing from a whisky minia­ture while I waited for a night bus, put five quid in my hand and told me to keep warm. You’re the only per­son I’ve ever told this story. None of your mates will be ex­cited that you’re sin­gle again. I’m prob­a­bly your only sin­gle mate and even I’m not that ex­cited. Gen­er­ally the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing sin­gle at thirty-five will feel dif­fer­ent to any other time you’ve been sin­gle and that’s no bad thing. When your ex moves on, you might be­come ob­sessed with the bloke in a way that is al­most sex­ual. Don’t worry, you don’t want to fuck him, even though it will feel a bit like you do some­times. If you open up to me or one of the other boys, it will feel good in the mo­ment and then you’ll get an emo­tional hang­over the next day. You’ll wish you could take it all back. You may even feel like we’ve en­joyed see­ing you so low. Or that we feel smug be­cause we’re win­ning at some­thing and you’re los­ing. Re­member that none of us feel that. You may be­come ob­sessed with work­ing out why ex­actly she broke up with you and you are likely to go fully, fully nuts in your bid to find a sat­is­fy­ing an­swer. I can save you a lot of time by let­ting you know that you may well never work it out. And even if you did work it out, what’s the pur­pose of it? Soon enough, some girl is go­ing to be crazy about you for some un­de­fin­able rea­son and you’re not go­ing to be in­ter­ested in her for some un­de­fin­able rea­son. It’s all so ran­dom and un­fair – the peo­ple we want to be with don’t want to be with us and the peo­ple who want to be with us are not the peo­ple we want to be with. Re­ally, the thing that’s go­ing to hurt a lot is the fact that some­one doesn’t want to be with you any more. Feel­ing the ab­sence of some­one’s com­pany and the ab­sence of their love are two dif­fer­ent things. I wish I’d known that ear­lier. I wish I’d known that it isn’t any­body’s job to stay in a re­la­tion­ship they don’t want to be in just so some­one else doesn’t feel bad about them­selves. Any­way. That’s all. You’re go­ing to be okay, mate. Andy

Fair or unfair, however, globalization has not been kind to Confucius. The Western ideas that have seeped into East Asian society over the past two hundred years have caused many in the region to rethink the value of their Confucian heritage. Western political and social philosophies brought in very different concepts of family and gender relationships, systems of government and education, and methods of corporate governance. Democracy has taken hold, as have American notions of gender equality, personal freedoms, and the rule of law. East Asian nations are being profoundly altered by these new ideas. Democracy movements have toppled authoritarian regimes across East Asia. Women are increasingly fighting for their proper place in politics and the corporate world. For much of the past two centuries, East Asians have equated progress with westernization, striving to copy its economic, political, and social systems. Capitalism and industrialization became the tools to end poverty and gain clout on the world stage, electoral politics the ideal for choosing leaders and navigating divisions in society. The route to success no longer passed through Confucian academies, but through Harvard and Yale. Being westernized, in language, dress, and social life, has been the mark of being modern and competitive. Politicians and reformers across East Asia have sought to uproot Confucian influence, at times violently, in their quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Many East Asians no longer wished to be Confucius, as they had for centuries on end. They wished to forget him.

Learn That Your Feelings Are as Important as Theirs. Some of us can’t see our own feelings because we have learned somewhere along the way that other people’s feelings are more important than ours. For example, it was always assumed that your father would move in with your family when his health began to fail. But now that he has, his constant demands and crankiness are beginning to take a toll, especially on top of managing his medications and frequent doctor’s visits. You are exhausted and frustrated, and wonder why your brother isn’t willing to do his share. Yet you don’t raise it with parent or sibling. “It’s hard, but it’s not that hard,” you reason. “Besides, I don’t want to rock the boat.” Your girlfriend calls and says she can’t have dinner on Friday after all. She’s wondering whether Saturday is okay. She says a friend of hers is in town and wants to see a movie on Friday. You say, “Sure, if that’s better for you.” Although you said yes, Saturday is actually not as good for you, because you had planned to go to a baseball game. Still, you’d rather see your girlfriend, so you give your ticket away. In each of these situations, you’ve chosen to put someone else’s feelings ahead of your own. Does this make sense? Is your father’s frustration or your brother’s peace of mind more important than yours? Is your girlfriend’s desire to see a movie with her friend more important than your desire to see a baseball game? Why is it that they express their feelings and preferences, but you cope with yours privately? There are several reasons why you may choose to honor others’ feelings even when it means dishonoring your own. The implicit rule you are following is that you should put other people’s happiness before your own. If your friends or loved ones or colleagues don’t get their way, they’ll feel bad, and then you’ll have to deal with the consequences. That may be true, but it’s unfair to you. Their anger is no better or worse than yours. “Well, it’s just easier not to rock the boat,” you think. “I don’t like it when they’re mad at me.” If you’re thinking this, then you are undervaluing your own feelings and interests. Friends, neighbors, and bosses will recognize this and begin to see you as someone they can manipulate. When you are more concerned about others’ feelings than your own, you teach others to ignore your feelings too. And beware: one of the reasons you haven’t raised the issue is that you don’t want to jeopardize the relationship. Yet by not raising it, the resentment you feel will grow and slowly erode the relationship anyway.

Finally, the third reason for concern about inequality of outcome is that it directly affects equality of opportunity—for the next generation. Today’s ex-post outcomes shape tomorrow’s ex ante playing field: the beneficiaries of inequality of outcome today can transmit an unfair advantage to their children tomorrow. Concern about unequal opportunity, and about limited social mobility, has intensified as the distributions of income and wealth have become more unequal. This is because the impact of family background on outcome depends both on the strength of the relationship between background and outcome and on the extent of inequality among family backgrounds. Inequality of outcome among today’s generation is the source of the unfair advantage received by the next generation. If we are concerned about equality of opportunity tomorrow, we need to be concerned about inequality of outcome today.

-§ But just because we grew up in that kind of a culture does not mean we need to keep creating it in our present relationship. I recommend we ask different questions, like, “How could I make your life more wonderful?” and “Would you like to know how you could make my life more wonderful?” and “What are your needs right now?” and “Would you like to know what I need right now?” Now if none of this appeals to you because you prefer a relation-dinghy to a relationship, here are some suggestion to help you prevent your relation-dinghy from growing into a relationship: 1. Keep your attention focused at all times on who is right or wrong in a discussion, fair or unfair in a negotiation, selfish or unselfish in giving (it helps to keep a list of who has done what for whom), kind or cruel in their tone of voice, rude or polite in their mannerisms, sloppy or neat in their dress, and so on. Be careful not to realize that your attempt to be right is really an attempt to protect yourself from thinking you are wrong and then feeling shame. 2. If you need some support for this I recommend certain selfhelp groups who can give you the latest scoops on the most powerful, politically correct labels with which to overpower and confuse your partner. Members of these groups will collude with you in validating that your partner really is a man or woman who is commitment-phobic, emotionally unavailable, counterdependant, needy, spiritually unevolved, dysfunctional, immature, judgmental, sinful, bi-polar, OCD, clinically depressed, or adult-onset ADD. It is important to keep your consciousness filled with such terminology to prevent any fondness from developing. This also helps in keeping you caught in the “paralysis of analysis” and clueless about what you or your partner are needing from each other. 3. Adopt this test for love: If your partner really loves you, he or she will always know what you want even before you know—and then give it to you without your having to go through the humiliation of actually asking for it. And your partner will do this regardless of the sacrifice it requires. If your partner does not give you what you want, choose to believe it means he or she does not love you. 4. Ask for what you do not want instead of what you do want. I heard of a man who asked his wife to stop spending so much money shopping. She took up gambling on the internet. 5. In case your relationdinghy starts to grow, here are a few torpedoes guaranteed to sink it again: “It hurts me when you say that.” “I feel sad because you…fill in the blank (won’t say ‘I love you,’ or ‘I’m sorry,’ or won’t have sex, or won’t marry me, etc.)” If you really want to choke the life out of any relationship meditate on “I need you.” Then you will know how I felt for about thirtyfive years of my life. I felt like a drowning swimmer and I would grab hold of anyone who came near me and try to use them as a life raft. Now I want relationships to be flowers for my table instead of air for my lungs. When I Come Gently To You by Ruth Bebermeyer When I come gently to you I want you to see It’s not to get myself from you, it’s just to give you me. I know that you can’t give me me, no matter what you do. All I ever want from you is you. I know your fear of fences, your pain from prisons past. I’m not the first to sense it and I’m plainly not the last. The hawk within your heart’s not bound to earth by fence of mine, Unless you aren’t aware that you can fly. When I come gently to you I’d like you to know I come not to trespass your space, I want to touch and grow. When your space and my space meet, each is not less but more. We make our space that wasn’t space before. Chapter HEALING THE BLAME THAT BLINDS

20:13–15). Envy makes generosity sound unfair. It is the opposite of love, which “does not envy . . . but rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:4, 6).

The Way Forward If we’re to live frugally, if we’re to learn how to be more content with less, it seems to me that we have to first tackle these innermost fears and anxieties that compel us to indulge in reckless spending. One of the very first decisions we must each take in our journey to financial independence is to look at ourselves and say, ‘I’m okay.’ Saying it is not hard, but meaning it is. First of all, we must reject the financial script that the world insists on pushing on us. There is nothing noble or normal about working for forty years of your healthy life so that you can live independently in your final twenty. We must all believe that it is possible for us to retire early and enjoy more of life. Financial Independence, if you achieve it, will allow you to do so. Second, redefine success for yourself. Money and fame is the society’s definition of the word. What’s yours? A more loving relationship with your spouse? Bringing up your kids to be independent? Conquering your anger? Learning to dance? We all have passions that we have put on the back burner because of our careers, which we tell ourselves we will pursue ‘when we have time’. Write them down, and pursue them. Make time for them, the same way you make time for your work. Let’s face it; otherwise they just don’t get done. Third, accept that the world is inherently unequal and unfair. Your life is your own, and the only person you can – and should – compete with is yourself. Once we accept this, I think, we will find that envy touches us a lot less. We will welcome failure with good grace and success with humility. Most important of all, we will not run through life as though we’re in a race, and we will not feel the need, perhaps, to buy things in order to show people how successful we are.

Jaxton smiled and caught his hand, holding it tight in both of his. “Are you burnt out? Is it all too much?” he asked, getting straight to the root of the matter, in one go. “Yes,” he sighed, hating that it was true. “Then you'll stay home.” “You know I can't. It's impossible,” Roman complained about the unfairness of it all. He was due to return to the studio in two days times, to finalise the tracks he'd recorded yesterday. Then he had to sit down with Jalen next week, to pick out a new piece of his artwork for the next album cover. And two weeks after that, he had three interviews with three different music channels, to film. “Try telling that to Ben.” Jaxton winked at him, then ducked down to kiss him. ~ From the Heart

The analogy between infertile heterosexuals and same-sex couples misses the point. The extension of marriage to infertile heterosexual couples serves not to deprecate same-sex couples, but to preserve the equal status of women in marriage. A test for fertility would be unfair to women because all women spend most of their adult lives in a state of infertility. Fertile women are infertile most days of a month, and postmenopausal women are always infertile. A fertility requirement would also render women susceptible to enormous abuse by men, providing a ready excuse for men who would trade in older women for nubile brides. The status of women in marriage would be intolerably diminished through this practice. Infertility is less common among men, as they can sire children into old age. Moreover, men, like women, typically do not discover that they are infertile until they attempt to sire children, at which time they ought already to be married. A measure that serves primarily to protect women and to preserve their equal status within the institution of marriage is not a measure that is an appropriate basis by which to judge that the same should go for same-sex couples. One of the great challenges men and women face in marriage is in coming to terms with their differences while respecting the status of the other as an equal. Acceptance of infertility is a measure promoting this end. A measure to accommodate the reality of sex-based difference in marriage is no reason to extend marriage to same-sex couples. Moreover, accommodation for infertility in no way diminishes the reality that the inequality of the parent-child relationship is what differentiates marriage from other contractual relationships. It is the parent-child relation, as it emerges from sexual difference and procreation, which elevates marriage above a mere contract, and renders it a sacred duty.

The fact that I could (and often did) build a relationship with my customers was my unfair advantage over my biggest competitors.

number of US firms weed out job applicants with bad credit records, believing they would make risky employees. So past behaviour outside your work is used against you. Companies are doing this systematically, also drawing on social networking sites to assess character traits as well as past misdemeanours, relationships and so on. But this is unfair discrimination. There are many reasons for a spell of ‘bad credit’, including illness or a family tragedy. Secret screening by crude proxies for possible behaviour is unfair.

unfair—whether you live or die bears no relationship to what kind of person

I know I have to let him go, even though I don’t want to. Whatever weird-ass relationship we had is over, and this is the last time I’ll be with him. As the thought solidifies, it feels like I’ve been buried under an avalanche of stone. I can’t breathe. Tears prick the back of my eyes, but they don’t fall. I wish I was numb. I wish I could say yes to him. I wish I had a different life, because this one is so horrendously unfair.

I’m not sure of what all you’ve done,” I said to my friend. “And I know some people hate you. But I think you’re pretty good at relationships.” My friend looked at me confused. He laughed a little, then sighed, then teared up. “It’s true you’re bad at relationships,” I said, “but it’s also true you are good at them. They’re both true, old friend.” I reminded him of all the people who love him and all the people he’s loved. I told him I thought it was unfair for a man to be judged by a moment, by a season. We are all more complicated than that.

7 things every kid should master A noted Williams College psychologist argues standardized tests are useful, if they measure the abilities students really need. By Susan Engel | 2458 words In the past few years, parents, teachers, and policy makers have furiously debated whether standardized tests should be used to promote or hold back children, fire teachers, and withhold funds from schools. The debate has focused for the most part on whether the tests are being used in unfair ways. But almost no one has publicly questioned a fundamental assumption — that the tests measure something meaningful or predict something significant beyond themselves. I have reviewed more than 300 studies of K–12 academic tests. What I have discovered is startling. Most tests used to evaluate students, teachers, and school districts predict almost nothing except the likelihood of achieving similar scores on subsequent tests. I have found virtually no research demonstrating a relationship between those tests and measures of thinking or life outcomes. When you hear people debate the use of tests in schools, the talk usually assumes that the only alternative to the current approach is no testing at all. But nothing could be further from the truth. Ideally, everyone would benefit from objective measures of children’s learning in schools. The answer is not to abandon testing, but to measure the things we most value, and find good ways to do that. How silly to measure a child’s ability to parse a sentence or solve certain kinds of math problems if in fact those measures don’t predict anything important about the child or lead to better teaching practices. Why not test the things we value, and test them in a way that provides us with an accurate picture of what children really do, not what they can do under the most constrained circumstances after the most constrained test preparation? Nor should this be very difficult. After all, in the past 50 years economists and psychologists have found ways to measure things as subtle and dynamic as the mechanisms that explain when and why we give in to impulse, the forces that govern our moral choices, and the thought processes that underlie unconscious stereotyping.

Your relationship with Ben. It didn’t end by choice. It didn’t end because you fell out of love. It was taken. Unfairly, unjustly. It’s not how your story with Ben was supposed to end. You didn’t lose the love. You lost the man. Then to fall in love again,” she looks at me, and for the first time, I feel like someone else understands, “it must be very hard to balance those feelings. To once again have no control over a situation.

The Biggest Defeat *** Do not create things that make someone doubtful and show the wrong direction. No matter you are doing that in a good sense, but you are making yourself, suspicious person. Placing, or setting the seeds of doubts in the mind of your friends, your lover, or any person means you are pushing them away from your relationships. In this concept of action, one might consider you unfair, non-serious, and unfaithful. In this sense, it is your biggest defeat.

Telling the truth is not always easy, especially when you feel that the disclosure will hurt someone you love. But withholding information to protect someone is not only unfair to them, it is counterproductive to the relationship.

[Love Wasn’t as They Said] Love wasn’t as they said… It didn’t last forever as they claimed… It is fleeting moments only recognized By those with sight and insight… And perhaps only captured By those patiently waiting as if to see a lightning in the sky… And, like lightning perhaps, we never know Where love goes after it strikes… And perhaps the only love that lasts Is one that know when to stay and when to walk away… ** Love wasn’t synonymous with honor As they defined honor... It is often the awareness that falls upon us After betraying or letting down the loved ones… Love wasn’t holding hands forever, It is boring afternoons spent together With no words And no activities… It wasn’t lifetime sexual attraction As many claimed… It is the companionship that remains After the hormonal fires are put out, When the noises of immaturity go silent, And after the childish quarrels and squabbles stop… It is the home that remains erected Long after getting erectile dysfunction… It that appetite for life after the last egg from the last period… It is that strange feeling of elation That may come after what is mistakenly called a “midlife crisis”, To fill that frightening gap between hope and reality… ** Love a widow brushing her hair, On a bus or in a public place, Unbothered by onlookers or passersby, As she opens her shabby handbag And takes out an apple to bite on With the teeth she has left… Love is an eye surrounded with wrinkles But is finally able to see the world Sensitively, insightfully, and more realistically, Without exaggerated embellishment or distortion… ** Love is shreds of joy Interspersed with long intervals Of boredom, exhaustion, reproach, and disappointment… It’s not measured with red flowers, bears, and expensive gifts in shiny wraps, It is who remains when the glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol numbers are high… It’s those who stay after the heart catheterization and knee replacement surgeries… Love gets stronger after getting osteoporosis And may move mountains despite the rheumatism… ** Love is the few seconds when our eyes cross with strangers Who awaken in us feelings we hadn’t experienced with those living with us in years… Or perhaps it’s rubbing arms and shoulders with a passenger On a bus, in a train, or on a plane… It is that fleeting look from a passerby in the street Convey to us that they, too, have understood the game, But there’s not much they can do about it… ** Love wasn’t as they said It wasn’t as they said… It is not 1+1=2… It is sometimes three or more… At other times, it grows at point zero or lower, In solitude, in loneliness, and in seclusion… Isn’t it time, I wonder, to demolish everything falsely, unfairly, and misleadingly attributed to love? Or is it that love burns and dies Precisely when we try to capture it in our hands? [Original poem published in Arabic on October 27, 2022 at ahewar.org]

[Love Wasn’t as They Said] Love wasn’t as they said… It didn’t last forever as they claimed… It is fleeting moments only recognized By those with sight and insight… And perhaps only captured By those patiently waiting as if to see a lightning in the sky… And, like lightning perhaps, we never know Where love goes after it strikes… And perhaps the only love that lasts Is one that know when to stay and when to walk away… ** Love wasn’t synonymous with honor As they defined honor... It is often the awareness that falls upon us After betraying or letting down the loved ones… Love wasn’t holding hands forever, It is boring afternoons spent together With no words And no activities… It wasn’t lifetime sexual attraction As many claimed… It is the companionship that remains After the hormonal fires are put out, When the noises of immaturity go silent, And after the childish quarrels and squabbles stop… It is the home that remains erected Long after getting erectile dysfunction… It that appetite for life after the last egg from the last period… It is that strange feeling of elation That may come after what is mistakenly called a “midlife crisis”, To fill that frightening gap between hope and reality… ** Love is a widow brushing her hair, On a bus or in a public place, Unbothered by onlookers or passersby, As she opens her shabby handbag And takes out an apple to bite on With the teeth she has left… Love is an eye surrounded with wrinkles But is finally able to see the world Sensitively, insightfully, and more realistically, Without exaggerated embellishment or distortion… ** Love is shreds of joy Interspersed with long intervals Of boredom, exhaustion, reproach, and disappointment… It’s not measured with red flowers, bears, and expensive gifts in shiny wraps, It is who remains when the glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol numbers are high… It’s those who stay after the heart catheterization and knee replacement surgeries… Love gets stronger after getting osteoporosis And may move mountains despite the rheumatism… ** Love is the few seconds when our eyes cross with strangers Who awaken in us feelings we hadn’t experienced with those living with us in years… Or perhaps it’s rubbing arms and shoulders with a passenger On a bus, in a train, or on a plane… It is that fleeting look from a passerby in the street Convey to us that they, too, have understood the game, But there’s not much they can do about it… ** Love wasn’t as they said It wasn’t as they said… It is not 1+1=2… It is sometimes three or more… At other times, it grows at point zero or lower, In solitude, in loneliness, and in seclusion… Isn’t it time, I wonder, to demolish everything falsely, unfairly, and misleadingly attributed to love? Or is it that love burns and dies Precisely when we try to capture it in our hands? [Original poem published in Arabic on October 27, 2022 at ahewar.org]

So do you think they're doomed?" Sam asked. An unfair question. I wasn't going to be the asshole who actually said that I thought my brother's relationship was doomed. Inasmuch as I thought all human connection was a setup for disappointment, sure, I guessed I had a hard time seeing two people able to stay together for the long haul.

When a toxic person can no longer control you, they will try to control how others see you. The misinformation will feel unfair, but stay above it, trusting that other people will eventually see the truth just like you did. –Jill Blakeway

But it almost doesn't matter whether you are an ex-felon or not when dealing with the child support system; oftentimes black men who are unemployed or underemployed get hit with unfair stipulations and conditions that eventually lead to all kinds of punitive restrictions being placed on their lives, as well as incarceration. There are probably several hundreds of thousands of black men in America who have had extremely negative experiences with the child support system, for one reason or another, and who will tell you that the system has a way of turning a potentially amicable family situation into something bad or making an already bad family situation, worse.

Do not create things that make someone doubtful and show the wrong direction. No matter you are doing that in a good sense, but you are making yourself, suspicious person. Placing or setting the seeds of doubts in the mind of your friends, your lover, or any person means you are pushing them away from your relationships. In this concept of action, one might consider you as unfair, non-serious, and unfaithful. In this sense, it is your open defeat.

The cruelty of unrequited love isn’t really that we haven’t been loved back, rather that our hopes have been aroused by someone who can never disappoint us, someone whom we will have to keep believing in because we lack the knowledge that would set us free. In a position of longing for a new person when we are constrained within an existing relationship, we must beware too of the ‘incumbent problem’: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing – or, as we put it, incumbent – ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home and our committed workplace and can inspire us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations and resignations. When we spot apparent perfection, we tend to blame our spectacular bad luck for the mediocrity of our lives, without realizing that we are mistaking an asymmetry of knowledge for an asymmetry of quality: we are failing to see that our partner, home and job are not especially awful, but rather that we know them especially well. The corrective to insufficient knowledge is experience. We need to mine the secret reality of other people and places and so learn that, beneath their charms, they will almost invariably be essentially ‘normal’ in nature: that is, no worse yet no better than the incumbents we already understand.

As the symbol for this sign suggests, Libras are all about balance, and need it more in their lives than any other sign. They like to find that balance between work, social, recreational and family lives and are quite capable of doing so. Eventually, that is. Because they need to take their time to come to the right decision, Libras can seem wishy washy to those around them. In the end, however, whatever choice they make is almost always a win/win for everyone involved. Libras are air elementals ruled by Venus. They are diplomatic, gracious, cooperative, social and most of all, fair-minded. They like harmony, sharing, the outdoors and are generally very gentle. This sign finds happiness when others are happy, and when the world around them is balanced and harmonious. They are charming, and that charm is what draws people to them. They enjoy just about any form of meditation, because it helps them find balance on the inside that they so desperately need. On the upside, Libras are fair and just. They become upset if this is not the case. They like to discuss their favorite topics at great length, and the decisions a Libra make will benefit the greatest number of people. They are self-sacrificing for the greater good of their family or teammates. On the downside, because they take so long to make a decision, it may appear to others that they are lazy or absent-minded. Libras don’t like to be in charge, but they will make it a point to be heard. If they perceive a situation to be unfair or unjust, they will become argumentative. This sign is most compatible with Gemini, Sagittarius, Leo and Aquarius. Gemini: In this relationship, the

Because the word justice is so abused in our day, I need to say something brief about the civil magistrate’s duty to enforce justice. Injustice is not the violation of autonomous human rights, however those rights may be defined. Injustice is the violation of God-given rights. God gave us all the right to a fair trial if we are accused of some crime. And so, if we get an unfair trial, the kind that Jesus got, this is an injustice. But God did not give us the “right” to fifteen dollars an hour. For if He did, that means that somebody else has the obligation to pay you that amount. And when the state steps in to enforce that kind of obligation, the result is always tyrannical. So what is the relationship of these three governments? In God’s order, not one of the three is permitted to domineer over the others. Each has its assigned task, and each one needs to tend to its own knitting. The Church does not declare war, or collect the trash. The family does not administer the sacraments. The state does not review cases of church discipline. And not one of these spheres is dependent on any of the others for its existence.

Morgan and Simone are a younger couple. Morgan, an albino with long, silver hair, is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He's always joking around, and is very dramatic. He has been an actor and an artist's model. His husband, Simone, is very quiet. He's from Mexico, and is very artistic. We've spent countless hours together drawing, painting, and working with clay...Daddy Matt joined us one time, and sculpted a gift for Father Timothy. Father took one look at it, turned scarlet with embarrassment, and promptly hid it in their nightstand. I felt rather sorry for Dad, because he had worked so hard on it, and Father didn't proudly display it in the front room as he did with my work... I don't know why. It looked like a perfectly good hot dog to me. I told Father so, and he promptly sent me to my room, which was completely unfair, as I was only asking a question.

Here are some tips on finding a mentor: 1. Identify who could be a good mentor for you. Remember, you don’t need to aim too high; somebody simply a couple of years ahead of you on their journey might be enough. 2. Get their attention ‒ break through the noise. These people receive huge numbers of messages asking for help and advice, and offers to meet for lunch or coffee so that their brains can be picked. Naturally, they put most of these long emails (they’re often really long) straight in the junk folder to protect the most valuable thing for them ‒ their time. Bear that in mind. To break through the noise, you need to be straight to the point and you need to do Step 3… 3. Seek to add value. Just because potential mentors are successful or higher status, this doesn’t mean you can’t add value to them. Have faith that you have some way of helping them. Study what they’re doing. Are they involved in any philanthropy or social impact causes? How can you help? That’s a great way to get their attention. 4. Act normal. This applies wherever there’s an imbalance of status. For example, when you meet somebody that you’re interested in romantically, and you feel as if they’re probably ‘out of your league, you have to not let that make you behave strangely. If you are too deferential, too reverent, and basically tripping over yourself to do stuff for them because you perceive them to be on another level, then they are unlikely to feel attracted to you. And conversely, sometimes acting ‘not normal’ means you go the other way, and behave like a schoolboy pulling the pigtails of the girl he fancies, going too far in overcompensating. Again, that is not good. Be pleasant to be around. 5. Apply what your mentor advises you to do as quickly as possible, then immediately feedback to them on the outcome of the action. This feedback loop will generate and strengthen the mentor-mentee relationship in the fastest possible way, because entrepreneurial mentors love coachable people who take action. And they feel more and more responsibility when they’re the ones directing your action and you’re coming back to them to report what happened. It’s like an interesting and fun game for them, and they want to know that they’re helping you in a tangible way. Be coachable.

Adults with ADHD as a group have often experienced more than their fair share of disappointments and frustrations associated with the symptoms of ADHD, in many cases not realizing the impact of ADHD has had on them. When you reflect on a history of low grades, forgetting or not keeping promises made to others, repeated exhortations from others about your unfulfilled potential and the need to work harder, you may be left with a self-view that “I’m not good enough,” “I’m lazy,” or “I cannot expect much from myself and neither can anyone else.” The end result of these repeated frustrations can be the erosion of your sense of self, what is often called low self-esteem. These deep-seated, enduring self-views, or “core beliefs” about who you are can be thought of as a lens through which you see yourself, the world, and your place in the world. Adverse developmental experiences associated with ADHD may unfairly color your lens and result in a skewed pessimistic view of yourself, at least in some situations. When facing situations in the here-and-now that activate these negative beliefs, you experience strong emotions, negative thoughts, and a propensity to fall into self-defeating behaviors, most often resignation and escape. These core beliefs might only be activated in limited, specific situations for some people with ADHD; in other cases, these beliefs color one’s perception in most situations. It should be noted that many adults with ADHD, despite feeling flummoxed by their symptoms in many situations, possess a healthy self-view, though there may be many situations that briefly shake their confidence. These core beliefs or “schema” develop over the course of time from childhood through adulthood and reflect our efforts to figure out the “rules for life” (Beck, 1976; Young & Klosko, 1994). They can be thought of as mental categories that let us impose order on the world and make sense of it. Thus, as we grow up and face different situations, people, and challenges, we make sense of our situations and relationships and learn the rubrics for how the world works. The capacity to form schemas and to organize experience in this way is very adaptive. For the most part, these processes help us figure out, adapt to, and navigate through different situations encountered in life. In some cases, people develop beliefs and strategies that help them get through unusually difficult life circumstances, what are sometimes called survival strategies. These old strategies may be left behind as people settle into new, healthier settings and adopt and rely on “healthy rules.” In other cases, however, maladaptive beliefs persist, are not adjusted by later experiences (or difficult circumstances persist), and these schema interfere with efforts to thrive in adulthood. In our work with ADHD adults, particularly for those who were undiagnosed in childhood, we have heard accounts of negative labels or hurtful attributions affixed to past problems that become internalized, toughened, and have had a lasting impact. In many cases, however, many ADHD adults report that they arrived at negative conclusions about themselves based on their experiences (e.g., “None of my friends had to go to summer school.”). Negative schema may lay dormant, akin to a hibernating bear, but are easily reactivated in adulthood when facing similar gaffes or difficulties, including when there is even a hint of possible disappointment or failure. The function of these beliefs is self-protective—shock me once, shame on you; shock me twice, shame on me. However, these maladaptive beliefs insidiously trigger self-defeating behaviors that represent an attempt to cope with situations, but that end up worsening the problem and thereby strengthening the negative belief in a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle. Returning to the invisible fences metaphor, these beliefs keep you stuck in a yard that is too confining in order to avoid possible “shocks.

Though it's often considered insulting to note, women in the aggregate have different preferences: we tend to put "people jobs" over "things jobs", as someone once put it to me. This has caused feminists a great deal of consternation. Pricked by the embarassment of natural differences between men and women, they blame society and insist women need to be taught to adopt different preferences. But behind this insistence lies the idea that women's preferences are inferior. Young girls are left to conclude that they must strive to be more like men- they must close the novel they were enjoying and take up coding. They must want things men want because men want them. The talking point about the dearth of women CEOs is a classic. The fact of this disparity might just as easily be understood differently: CEOs lead fairly unbalanced lives. They make a lot of money and have very little time. Their relationships suffer. They have high rates of divorce. Women might recognize this difference and assume that men are the ones to be pitied. We might just as easily say: Women are so much better adjusted, so much wiser for preferring relationships to dollars. We might as easily say: Of course women prefer literature to software engineering! It's far more interesting. It has the power to transport, to move hearts and minds. Literature is the story one generaton tells to the next. So many women study, teach and produce great literature. Who is the wiser sex? Instead we presume that if men dominate the STEM departments, they must be occupying the university's Arcadia. If CEOs are overwhelmingly male, then women are being unfairly excluded- by men who outfox them, a system that diminishes them, preferences that lead them astray. We want to have it both ways: acknowledging sotto voce that Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, and Jeff Bezos have not enjoyed enviable personal lives, while insisting every woman should or would stand in their shoes, given half a chance. [...] We must stop. It's a dumb habit, thoughtless and base. It reflects an unflattering insecurity we shouldn't indulge. The jealousy at its heart suggests that either we believe women aren't truly capable, or they have somehow be duped, made victims by a "system" that, generation after generation, locks us out and shuts us in with so many glass ceilings and walls. It's an exhausting set of untruths. Worst of all, girls are listening.

Frankly, if the nature of your relationship with your child during his or her childhood was genuinely abusive, then perhaps your child is distancing himself or herself as a means of protection, and it is not fair to label him or her as “unfairly difficult.

We stunt the growth of our relationships, usually, before they have even began and, as with everything else in life, time and growth (the natural evolution process that cannot be stopped) will push them beyond the set idea of what they were supposed to be for us. These imposed changes will feel as forced onto our relationships. They might feel harsh, ruthless, unfortunate, or unfair. They weren’t in our plans.

Keep your love life to yourself," she told me. "Keep some of you for you." One of her greatest mistakes, she said, had been allowing her own relationship to become fodder for relentless tabloid coverage. "That kind of media attention is unfair to anyone who hasn't committed to life in the public eye," she said. Also, she'd interviewed one too many women who'd swooned about being in love, only to be left looking fickle and foolish when the romance was over a few months later. Best to hold your tongue from the beginning. Best to hold tight to Oprah's wisdom.

Even though they may feel satisfied momentarily when their manipulation achieves its desired goal, people who habitually use manipulation seldom feel good about themselves. They realize how destructive their methods are to relationships, and can’t respect themselves because their methods, though successful, are unhealthy and unfair. In their more honest moments they feel guilty for the hardship their self-centeredness causes others. Unfortunately, manipulative people seldom admit any of the above problems. Like aggressive people, they usually cover over any feelings of sadness with brusqueness, irritability, and an air of self-righteousness.