“
An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.
”
”
Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)
“
I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything.
”
”
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
“
Chumps always make the best husbands. When you marry, Sally, grab a chump. Tap his head first, and if it rings solid, don't hesitate. All the unhappy marriages come from husbands having brains. What good are brains to a man? They only unsettle him.
”
”
P.G. Wodehouse (Doctor Sally)
“
What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.
”
”
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
“
They were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived—bound, in other words, for life.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
“
Right Jo better be happy old maids than unhappy wives or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands.
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women, #1))
“
My mother says that when Mrs. Rowley is mean, which is generally the case, it is really because she is just unhappy, and who could blame her with a husband like that . . . She says this is really the only reason people are ever mean--they have something hurting inside of them, a claw of unhappiness scratching at their hearts, and it hurts them so much that sometimes they have to push it right out of their mouths to scratch someone else, just to give themselves a rest, a moment of relief.
”
”
Laura Moriarty
“
Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,—the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,—that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,—he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow.
The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It was handed to him while he was in full tide of gay and successful conversation, in a whole room-full of company. He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite; and, a short time after, was missed from the circle. In his room,alone, he opened and read the letter, now worse than idle and useless to be read. It was from her, giving a long account of a persecution to which she had been exposed by her guardian's family, to lead her to unite herself with their son: and she related how, for a long time, his letters had ceased to arrive; how she had written time and again, till she became weary and doubtful; how her health had failed under her anxieties, and how, at last, she had discovered the whole fraud which had been practised on them both. The letter ended with expressions of hope and thankfulness, and professions of undying affection, which were more bitter than death to the unhappy young man. He wrote to her immediately:
I have received yours,—but too late. I believed all I heard. I was desperate. I am married, and all is over. Only forget,—it is all that remains for either of us."
And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,—the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,—exceedingly real.
Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.
”
”
Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
“
There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over a stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home. Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.
”
”
Josephine Hart
“
All your emotions were so intense—your anger like daggers, your unhappiness a poisoned well. Even your love had such sharp corners and dark alleys.
”
”
Sherry Thomas (Not Quite a Husband (The Marsdens, #2))
“
I've crossed paths since with men like him. I wish I could say differently. But I have. And what I have learned is that you dig a little and you find they're all the same, give or take. Some are more polished, granted. They may come with a little bit of charm-- Or a lot -- and that can fool you. But really they're all unhappy little boys sloshing around in their own rage. They feel wronged. They haven't been given their due. No one loved them enough. Of course they expect you to love them. They want to be held, rocked, reassured. But it's a mistake to give it to them. They can't accept it. They can't accept the very thing they're needing. They end up hating you for it. And it never ends because they can't hate you enough. It never ends-- the misery, the apologies, the promises, the reneging, the wretchedness of it all. My first husband was like that.
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (And the Mountains Echoed)
“
Some people each left their spouse or lover because he or she was no longer the primary source of their happiness; some, because their spouse or lover was, at that time, the primary source of their unhappiness.
”
”
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“
It’s loneliness. Even though I’m surrounded by loved ones who care about me and want only the best, it’s possible they try to help only because they feel the same thing—loneliness—and why, in a gesture of solidarity, you’ll find the phrase “I am useful, even if alone” carved in stone. Though the brain says all is well, the soul is lost, confused, doesn’t know why life is being unfair to it. But we still wake up in the morning and take care of our children, our husband, our lover, our boss, our employees, our students, those dozens of people who make an ordinary day come to life. And we often have a smile on our face and a word of encouragement, because no one can explain their loneliness to others, especially when we are always in good company. But this loneliness exists and eats away at the best parts of us because we must use all our energy to appear happy, even though we will never be able to deceive ourselves. But we insist, every morning, on showing only the rose that blooms, and keep the thorny stem that hurts us and makes us bleed hidden within. Even knowing that everyone, at some point, has felt completely and utterly alone, it is humiliating to say, “I’m lonely, I need company. I need to kill this monster that everyone thinks is as imaginary as a fairy-tale dragon, but isn’t.” But it isn’t. I wait for a pure and virtuous knight, in all his glory, to come defeat it and push it into the abyss for good, but that knight never comes. Yet we cannot lose hope. We start doing things we don’t usually do, daring to go beyond what is fair and necessary. The thorns inside us will grow larger and more overwhelming, yet we cannot give up halfway. Everyone is looking to see the final outcome, as though life were a huge game of chess. We pretend it doesn’t matter whether we win or lose, the important thing is to compete. We root for our true feelings to stay opaque and hidden, but then … … instead of looking for companionship, we isolate ourselves even more in order to lick our wounds in silence. Or we go out for dinner or lunch with people who have nothing to do with our lives and spend the whole time talking about things that are of no importance. We even manage to distract ourselves for a while with drink and celebration, but the dragon lives on until the people who are close to us see that something is wrong and begin to blame themselves for not making us happy. They ask what the problem is. We say that everything is fine, but it’s not … Everything is awful. Please, leave me alone, because I have no more tears to cry or heart left to suffer. All I have is insomnia, emptiness, and apathy, and, if you just ask yourselves, you’re feeling the same thing. But they insist that this is just a rough patch or depression because they are afraid to use the real and damning word: loneliness. Meanwhile, we continue to relentlessly pursue the only thing that would make us happy: the knight in shining armor who will slay the dragon, pick the rose, and clip the thorns. Many claim that life is unfair. Others are happy because they believe that this is exactly what we deserve: loneliness, unhappiness. Because we have everything and they don’t. But one day those who are blind begin to see. Those who are sad are comforted. Those who suffer are saved. The knight arrives to rescue us, and life is vindicated once again. Still, you have to lie and cheat, because this time the circumstances are different. Who hasn’t felt the urge to drop everything and go in search of their dream? A dream is always risky, for there is a price to pay. That price is death by stoning in some countries, and in others it could be social ostracism or indifference. But there is always a price to pay. You keep lying and people pretend they still believe, but secretly they are jealous, make comments behind your back, say you’re the very worst, most threatening thing there is. You are not an adulterous man, tolerated and often even admired, but an adulterous woman, one who is ...
”
”
Paulo Coelho (Adultery)
“
When my husband had an affair with someone else I watched his eyes glaze over when we ate dinner together and I heard him singing to himself without me, and when he tended the garden it was not for me.
He was courteous and polite; he enjoyed being at home, but in the fantasy of his home I was not the one who sat opposite him and laughed at his jokes. He didn't want to change anything; he liked his life. The only thing he wanted to change was me.
It would have been better if he had hated me, or if he had abused me, or if he had packed his new suitcases and left.
As it was he continued to put his arm round me and talk about being a new wall to replace the rotten fence that divided our garden from his vegetable patch. I knew he would never leave our house. He had worked for it.
Day by day I felt myself disappearing. For my husband I was no longer a reality, I was one of the things around him. I was the fence which needed to be replaced. I watched myself in the mirror and saw that I was mo longer vivid and exciting. I was worn and gray like an old sweater you can't throw out but won't put on.
He admitted he was in love with her, but he said he loved me.
Translated, that means, I want everything. Translated, that means, I don't want to hurt you yet. Translated, that means, I don't know what to do, give me time.
Why, why should I give you time? What time are you giving me? I am in a cell waiting to be called for execution.
I loved him and I was in love with him. I didn't use language to make a war-zone of my heart.
'You're so simple and good,' he said, brushing the hair from my face.
He meant, Your emotions are not complex like mine. My dilemma is poetic.
But there was no dilemma. He no longer wanted me, but he wanted our life
Eventually, when he had been away with her for a few days and returned restless and conciliatory, I decided not to wait in my cell any longer. I went to where he was sleeping in another room and I asked him to leave. Very patiently he asked me to remember that the house was his home, that he couldn't be expected to make himself homeless because he was in love.
'Medea did,' I said, 'and Romeo and Juliet and Cressida, and Ruth in the Bible.'
He asked me to shut up. He wasn't a hero.
'Then why should I be a heroine?'
He didn't answer, he plucked at the blanket.
I considered my choices.
I could stay and be unhappy and humiliated.
I could leave and be unhappy and dignified.
I could Beg him to touch me again.
I could live in hope and die of bitterness.
I took some things and left. It wasn't easy, it was my home too.
I hear he's replaced the back fence.
”
”
Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry)
“
If you are unhappy with anything - you mother, you father, your husband, your wife, your job, your boss, your car - whatever is being you down, get rid of it. Because you'll find when you're free, your true creativity, your true self comes out.
”
”
Tina Turner
“
London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognise them. They look so thoroughly unhappy.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)
“
If you have regard to your future happiness, any view of living comfortably with a husband, any hope of preserving your fortunes or restoring them after any disaster, never, ladies, marry a fool. Any husband rather than a fool. With some other husband you may be unhappy, but with a fool you will be miserable.
”
”
Daniel Defoe (Roxana)
“
Yes, I do love my husband. I didn't at first. I didn't at first for a long time. When I left Darlington Hall all those years ago, I never realized I was really, truly leaving. I believe I thought of it as simply another ruse, Mr. Stevens, to annoy you. It was a shock to come out here and find myself actually married. For a long time, I was very unhappy, very unhappy indeed.
”
”
Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day)
“
She used religion as a therapy for the ills of the world and herself, and she changed the religion to fit the ill. When she found that the theosophy she had developed for communication with a dead husband was not necessary, she cast about for some new unhappiness.
”
”
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
“
unhappy families – and within those families, in particular the unhappy husband and wife – can never get by on their own. The more validators the merrier. Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can’t stand silence – especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone.
”
”
Herman Koch (The Dinner)
“
Better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands. ~ Mr.s March
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women / Stage 3)
“
It wasn’t an unhappy marriage? Could a marriage be happy, standing on a shaky ground of adultery and a disregard for the wife’s feelings? He didn’t say anything; he listened to her quietly.
”
”
Neena H. Brar (Tied to Deceit)
“
But the flames did die down, perhaps from lack, perhaps from excess of fuel. Little by little, love was quenched by absence, and longing smothered by routine; and that fiery glow which tinged her pale sky scarlet grew more clouded, then gradually faded away. Her benumbed consciousness even led her to mistake aversion toward her husband for desire for her loved, the searing touch of hatred for the rekindling of love; but, as the storm still raged on and her passion burnt itself to ashes, no help came and no sun rose, the darkness of night closed in on every side, and she was left to drift in a bitter icy void.
So the bad days of Tostes began again. She believed herself much more unhappy, now, because she had experienced sorrow, and knew for certain that ti would ever end.
”
”
Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)
“
When I was small, it was difficult for me to be around you,” Callista continued. “All your emotions were so intense—your anger like daggers, your unhappiness a poisoned well. Even your love had such sharp corners and dark alleys.
”
”
Sherry Thomas (Not Quite a Husband)
“
Right, Jo. Better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands.
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women, #1))
“
Right, Jo; better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands,” said Mrs. March decidedly.
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women, #1))
“
Better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands.
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women, #1))
“
I am your husband. When you feel lonely or afraid or unhappy, it is to me you must come. My arms are here for you, and my strength too for whatever it is worth. You will never be a burden to me.
”
”
Mary Balogh (Only a Promise (The Survivors' Club, #5))
“
Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism.
Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower than all that. He's not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief.
You know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience very long winter nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies requires whole spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and He is ready to come to us, if we'll open the door and let him.
”
”
Chieko N. Okazaki
“
But can you have the heart to kill your flesh and blood? MEDEA Yes, for this is the best way to wound my husband. CHORUS And you, too. Of women you will be most unhappy. MEDEA So it must be. No compromise is possible. (
”
”
Euripides (Medea)
“
The only person that should wear your ring is the one person that would never…
1. Ask you to remain silent and look the other way while they hurt another.
2. Jeopardize your future by taking risks that could potentially ruin your finances or reputation.
3. Teach your children that hurting others is okay because God loves them more. God didn’t ask you to keep your family together at the expense of doing evil to others.
4. Uses religious guilt to control you, while they are doing unreligious things.
5. Doesn't believe their actions have long lasting repercussions that could affect other people negatively.
6. Reminds you of your faults, but justifies their own.
7. Uses the kids to manipulate you into believing you are nothing. As if to suggest, you couldn’t leave the relationship and establish a better Christian marriage with someone that doesn’t do these things. Thus, making you believe God hates all the divorced people and will abandon you by not bringing someone better to your life, after you decide to leave. As if!
8. They humiliate you online and in their inner circle. They let their friends, family and world know your transgressions.
9. They tell you no marriage is perfect and you are not trying, yet they are the one that has stirred up more drama through their insecurities.
10. They say they are sorry, but they don’t show proof through restoring what they have done.
11. They don’t make you a better person because you are miserable. They have only made you a victim or a bitter survivor because of their need for control over you.
12. Their version of success comes at the cost of stepping on others.
13. They make your marriage a public event, in order for you to prove your love online for them.
14. They lie, but their lies are often justified.
15. You constantly have to start over and over and over with them, as if a connection could be grown and love restored through a honeymoon phase, or constant parental supervision of one another’s down falls.
16. They tell you that they don’t care about anyone other than who they love. However, their actions don’t show they love you, rather their love has become bitter insecurity disguised in statements such as, “Look what I did for us. This is how much I care.”
17. They tell you who you can interact with and who you can’t.
18. They believe the outside world is to blame for their unhappiness.
19. They brought you to a point of improvement, but no longer have your respect.
20. They don't make you feel anything, but regret. You know in your heart you settled.
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul: we search for its outlines all over our lives. Those who are lucky enough to find it ease like water over stone, onto its fluid contours, and are home.
Some find it in a place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. there are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.
For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.
We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved, or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock or recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.
”
”
Josephine Hart
“
She had been unhappy with her husband, but that wasn’t automatically a motive for murder. If it were, half the husbands in the world would be in danger sometimes.
”
”
Harriet Steel (Trouble in Nuala (The Inspector de Silva Mysteries #1))
“
Right, Jo. Better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands,
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women, #1))
“
I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.
It was years before I woke up without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there.
I never was so unhappy, never felt so great the sense of loneliness. No matter how many times I gave up mother, father, husband, brother, daughter, for His sake, I had to do it over again.
Tamar is partly responsible for the title of this book in that when I was beginning it she was writing me about how alone a mother of young children always is. I had also just heard from an old woman who lived a long and full life, and she too spoke of her loneliness
”
”
Dorothy Day (The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist – A Greenwich Village Journalist's Conversion and Commitment to Peace and Justice)
“
Children write essays in school about the unhappy, tragic, doomed life of Anna Karenina. But was Anna really unhappy? She chose passion and she paid for her passion—that's happiness! She was a free, proud human being. But what if during peacetime a lot of greatcoats and peaked caps burst into the house where you were born and live, and ordered the whole family to leave house and town in twenty-four hours, with only what your feeble hands can carry?... You open your doors, call in the passers-by from the streets and ask them to buy things from you, or to throw you a few pennies to buy bread with... With ribbon in her hair, your daughter sits down at the piano for the last time to play Mozart. But she bursts into tears and runs away. So why should I read Anna Karenina again? Maybe it's enough—what I've experienced. Where can people read about us? Us? Only in a hundred years?
"They deported all members of the nobility from Leningrad. (There were a hundred thousand of them, I suppose. But did we pay much attention? What kind of wretched little ex-nobles were they, the ones who remained? Old people and children, the helpless ones.) We knew this, we looked on and did nothing. You see, we weren't the victims."
"You bought their pianos?"
"We may even have bought their pianos. Yes, of course we bought them."
Oleg could now see that this woman was not yet even fifty. Yet anyone walking past her would have said she was an old woman. A lock of smooth old woman's hair, quite incurable, hung down from under her white head-scarf.
"But when you were deported, what was it for? What was the charge?"
"Why bother to think up a charge? 'Socially harmful' or 'socially dangerous element'—S.D.E.', they called it. Special decrees, just marked by letters of the alphabet. So it was quite easy. No trial necessary."
"And what about your husband? Who was he?"
"Nobody. He played the flute in the Leningrad Philharmonic. He liked to talk when he'd had a few drinks."
“…We knew one family with grown-up children, a son and a daughter, both Komsomol (Communist youth members). Suddenly the whole family was put down for deportation to Siberia. The children rushed to the Komsomol district office. 'Protect us!' they said. 'Certainly we'll protect you,' they were told. 'Just write on this piece of paper: As from today's date I ask not to be considered the son, or the daughter, of such-and-such parents. I renounce them as socially harmful elements and I promise in the future to have nothing whatever to do with them and to maintain no communication with them.
”
”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Cancer Ward)
“
According to Crittenden, young women today are deeply unhappy and confused because they ignored the siren song of the new momism and instead followed the really bad advice of their feminist mothers, who allegedly told their girls to forget marriage and motherhood. Instead, feminist mothers supposedly insisted that happiness only comes to those who climb the corporate ladder by impaling men's balls on their Ferragamo heels. (We are both card-carrying members of the feminist axis of evil, and we know of no mothers of twenty- and thirty-something daughters who have said, "Honey, I definitely do not want grandchildren. I want you to get that promotion and work seventy hours a week instead of sixty." Having heeded their feminist mothers' advice, these loser young women have "postponed marriage and childbirth to pursue their careers only to find themselves at thirty-five still single and baby-crazy, with no husband in sight." (No mention of the fact that once you remove the 10 percent of guys who are gay, and the other 30 percent who are snorting wasabi till they puke because they saw it on Jackass, the pickings can be slim.)
”
”
Susan J. Douglas (The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women)
“
I thought women enjoyed affairs. I thought they got sparks of pleasure at the buzz of their phone, thought they ran around with a glow, their world suddenly on fire with new love. I thought they were women with terrible husbands and unhappy lives, an affair the first step in an eventual ending of their marriage. I thought that they were horrible, selfish women. I never thought that I would be one of them. I never thought that I'd be so weak. It turned out being the perfect wife was only easy when there was no temptation, no mistake haunting and overshadowing your marriage.
”
”
Alessandra Torre (Moonshot)
“
Mme de Franval, indulgent and sweet-natured as ever, and always happy when anything brought her closer to a man who was dearer to her than her own life, went along with all the desires of that treacherous husband, anticipated them, served them, and shared them without exception, not daring to make the most of the moment, as she should have done, to persuade that barbarian to treat her better, and not plunge his unhappy wife every day into an abyss of pain and suffering.
”
”
Marquis de Sade (Incest)
“
She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk steadily to the place allotted her. A new searching light had fallen on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them seem an odious deceit. He had married her with that bad past life hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence of the worst that was imputed to him. Her honest ostentatious nature made the sharing of a merited dishonor as bitter as it could be to any mortal.
But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her. The man whose prosperity she had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly cherished her—now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible to her in any sense to forsake him. There is a forsaking which still sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity. She knew, when she locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will mourn and not reproach. But she needed time to gather up her strength; she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her life. When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation. She took off all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made her look suddenly like an early Methodist.
Bulstrode, who knew that his wife had been out and had come in saying that she was not well, had spent the time in an agitation equal to hers. He had looked forward to her learning the truth from others, and had acquiesced in that probability, as something easier to him than any confession. But now that he imagined the moment of her knowledge come, he awaited the result in anguish. His daughters had been obliged to consent to leave him, and though he had allowed some food to be brought to him, he had not touched it. He felt himself perishing slowly in unpitied misery. Perhaps he should never see his wife's face with affection in it again. And if he turned to God there seemed to be no answer but the pressure of retribution.
It was eight o'clock in the evening before the door opened and his wife entered. He dared not look up at her. He sat with his eyes bent down, and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller—he seemed so withered and shrunken. A movement of new compassion and old tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly—
"Look up, Nicholas."
He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling about her mouth, all said, "I know;" and her hands and eyes rested gently on him. He burst out crying and they cried together, she sitting at his side. They could not yet speak to each other of the shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought it down on them. His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent. Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not say, "I am innocent.
”
”
George Eliot (Middlemarch)
“
Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived--bound, in other words, for life.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
“
Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived—bound, in other words, for life.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
“
I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.
So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
“
Did you know that your husband was rich?” “My husband wasn’t rich. He was too lonely and too unhappy. Luckily, at the end of his life, he lived with the right person.
”
”
Valérie Perrin (Fresh Water for Flowers)
“
He said, 'You don't have to make conversation with me.'
'My husband says that I am too silent.'
'Silence is not a bad thing.'
'It is when you are unhappy.
”
”
Graham Greene (A Burnt-Out Case)
“
Drunk, and kissing us, or passing out in chairs, they were bound for college, husbands, child-rearing, unhappiness only dimly perceived- bound, in other words, for life.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides
“
Better to be happy old maids than unhappy wives or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands.
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)
“
once there was a beautiful young panther who had a co-wife and a husband. Her name was Lara and she was unhappy because her husband and her co-wife were really in love; being nice to her was merely a duty panther society imposed on them. They had not even wanted to take her into their marriage as co-wife, since there were already perfectly happy. But she was an "extra" female in the group and that would not do. Her husband sometimes sniffed her breath and other emanations. He even, sometimes, made love to her. but whenever this happened, the co-wife, whose name was Lala, became upset. She and the husband, Baba, would argue, then fight, snarling and biting and whipping at each other's eyes with their tails. Pretty soon they'd become sick of this and would lie clutched in each other's paws, weeping.
I am supposed to make love to her, Baba would say to Lala, his heartchosen mate. She is my wife just as you are. I did not plan things this way. This is the arrangement that came down to me.
I know it, dearest, said Lala, through her tears. And this pain that I feel is what has come down to me. Surely it can't be right?
These two sat on a rock in the forest and were miserable enough. But Lara, the unwanted, pregnant by now and ill, was devastated. Everyone knew she was unloved, and no other female panther wanted to share her own husband with her. Days went by when the only voice she heard was her inner one.
Soon, she began to listen to it.
Lara, it said, sit here, where the sun may kiss you. And she did.
Lara, it said, lie here, where the moon can make love to you all night long. and she did.
Lara, it said, one bright morning when she knew herself to have been well kissed and well loved: sit here on this stone and look at your beautiful self in the still waters of this stream.
Calmed by the guidance offered by her inner voice, Lara sat down on the stone and leaned over the water. She took in her smooth, aubergine little snout, her delicate, pointed ears, her sleek, gleeming black fur. She was beautiful! And she was well kissed by the sun and well made love to by the moon.
For one whole day, Lara was content. When her co-wife asked her fearfully why she was smiling, Lara only opened her mouth wider, in a grin. The poor co-wife ran trembling off and found their husband, Baba, and dragged him back to look at Lara.
When Baba saw the smiling, well kissed, well made love to Lara, of course he could hardly wait to get his paws on her! He could tell she was in love with someone else, and this aroused all his passion.
While Lala wept, Baba possessed Lara, who was looking over his shoulder at the moon.
Each day it seemed to Lara that the Lara in the stream was the only Lara worth having - so beautiful, so well kissed, and so well made love to. And her inner voice assured her this was true.
So, one hot day when she could not tolerate the shrieks and groans of Baba and Lala as they tried to tear each other's ears off because of her, Lara, who by now was quite indifferent to them both, leaned over and kissed her own serene reflection in the water, and held the kiss all the way to the bottom of the stream.
”
”
Alice Walker
“
In fact i only contemplated one thing - a happy marriage. About that i had complete self-assurance - as all my friends did. We were conscious of all the happiness that awaited us. We looked forward to love, to being looked after, cherished and admired, and we intended to get our own way in the thiggs which mattered to us while at the same time putting our husband's life, career and success before all, as was our proud duty. we didn't need pep pills or sedatives; we had belief and joy in life. We had our own personal disappointments - moments of unhappiness - but on the whole life was fun.
”
”
Agatha Christie (Agatha Christie: An Autobiography)
“
Nuala, on the other hand, exerts influence over her husband and children primarily through a tendency to become irrationally anxious and ‘upset’. Much of the family life has therefore always been arranged around their collective efforts to prevent Nuala from becoming ‘upset’, which involves concealing from her, by almost any means necessary, the existence of any problems or potential conflicts within the family circle. Nuala lives, to some degree, in a fictitious world acted out for her by a special dramatic troupe consisting of her own children and husband, a world in which none of her loved ones have ever been unhappy, sick, depressed, disappointed, hurt, anxious or frightened. But this, in Anna’s view, has also had the perverse effect of making Nuala feel as if her own anxieties are in fact the only anxieties that anyone on earth has ever experienced, and that her suffering is something she alone, the only unhappy person in a world of thriving and self-confident individuals, can understand.
”
”
Sally Rooney (Intermezzo)
“
Daniel leans back in his chair. “Is a crummy husband better than no husband?” he asks me. “No,” I answer in a heartbeat—and the clarity of my answer surprises me. “The last three years have proven that. Life may have been harder without John, but I don’t miss living with someone who was growing unhappier and more anxious by the day. By the end he was one of those dads that makes you feel like you have one more child than you gave birth to.
”
”
Kelly Harms (The Overdue Life of Amy Byler)
“
Severin briefly drew away from Elle, only to step in front of her. “Just to iron out the details so I can be sure we both understand—we will be engaged and married. And while it is not likely we will be happy forever after—because I am a prince, and we will be forced to occasionally cavort with ‘polite society,’ which will probably make us both very unhappy—we will experience joy and pain and sadness together and live life as husband and wife?” “You
”
”
K.M. Shea (Beauty and the Beast (Timeless Fairy Tales, #1))
“
To escape, he’d married a woman who already counted her affections by the pfennig and dealt them out as a miser, as scant wages for those behaviors she wished to cultivate in husband and son. Even in the merriest circumstances, Felix’s wife could surrender herself to an unhappy mood. These attributes he recognized, too late, she shared with his mother. Not impossible was the idea that he was acclimatized to finding comfort in such familiar discomfort.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread)
“
I needed to be reminded, when I caught myself deep in a years-old argument with my husband, alone and furious on the mostly empty midday subway, that he had been real—that my unhappiness was not only some chemical dysfunction of mine.
”
”
Anthony Doerr (The Best American Short Stories 2019)
“
She had never been able to stand her husband, though not for one minute in their married life had she permitted this to make her unhappy. Only people who are fond of somebody can ever be unhappy, she had told her daughter before her wedding.
”
”
Anna Seghers (The Seventh Cross)
“
If you are unhappy with anything - your mother, your father, your husband, your wife, your job, your boss, your car - whatever is bringing you down, get rid of it. Because you'll find when you're free, your true creativity, your true self comes out.
”
”
Tina Turner
“
In particular, husbands and wives who do poorly at nonverbal communication tend to be dissatisfied with their marriages. Moreover, when such problems occur, it's usually the husband's fault .
In the first ingenious study of this sort, Patricia Noller (1980) found that
husbands in unhappy marriages sent more confusing messages and made more decoding errors than happy husbands did. There were no such differences among the wives, so the poorer communication Noller observed in the distressed marriages appeared to be the husbands' fault. Men in troubled marriages were misinterpreting communications from their wives that were clearly legible to total strangers.
Even worse, such husbands were completely clueless about their mistakes; they assumed that they were doing a fine job communicating with their wives, and were confident that they understood their wives and that their wives understood them. The men were doing a poor job communicating and didn't know it, and that's why they seemed to be at fault.
”
”
Rowland S. Miller (Intimate Relationships)
“
So, unaware that he has once more lapsed into the unwisdom of the very young—Roland cannot grasp that unhappiness and shame are often no match for desire—he has come here to speak to his mother, to beg her to come back to her husband before it’s too late.
”
”
Stephen King (Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4))
“
Women’s lives, their accomplishments, and their happiness, much more than men’s, are shaped by the person they marry. Among women in the longevity study who did marry, who the women married mattered a lot more for their happiness than who the men married. A husband’s well-being matters a lot more to both partners’ quality of life than a wife’s; that is, a difficult, unhappy husband is more likely to pass that misery onto his wife, to the point where it shortens her life expectancy. A difficult, unhappy wife doesn’t have the same impact on her husband.
”
”
Jill Filipovic (The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness)
“
Alcenith Crawford (a divorced ophthalmologist): "We women doctors have un-happy marriages because in our minds we are the superstars of our families. Having survived the hardship of medical school we expect to reap our rewards at home. We had to assert ourselves against all odds and when we finally graduate there are few shrinking violets amongst us. It takes a special man to be able to cope. Men like to feel important and be the undisputed head of the family. A man does not enjoy waiting for his wife while she performs life-saving operations. He expects her and their children to revolve around his needs, not the other way. But we have become accustomed to giving orders in hospitals and having them obeyed. Once home, it's difficult to adjust. Moreover, we often earn more than our husbands. It takes a generous and exceptional man to forgive all that.
”
”
Adeline Yen Mah (Falling Leaves)
“
He told me that people were saying my novel was feminist, and his advice to me—he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke—was that I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
“
Unfortunately, some men are a little hard-of-hearing. This is why about a quarter of them are completely surprised when their wives file for divorce.9 If you’re talking to your husband about your feelings, you may have to make it very, very plain how unhappy you are with the current arrangement.
”
”
Joshua Coleman (The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework)
“
Judge Joseph Sabbath of Chicago, who has reviewed 40,000 marital disputes and reconciled 2,000 couples, says: "Trivialities are at the bottom of most marital unhappiness. Such a simple thing as a wife's waving good-bye to her husband when he goes to work in the morning would avert a good many divorces.
”
”
Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People)
“
I began writing my nonfiction memoir to explain why women, "don't just leave."
My exciting, narrative-driven memoir aspires to to save others from needless unhappiness: surviving isn't enough.Trauma can be overcome and joy recaptured.The book is written in a fresh, lively voice with lots of humor. The chapters of me growing up in the 50's and 60's and my college years at Penn State provide an intimate, historical trip through some of the most fascinating times in modern history. This is also a family saga depicting mental illness and shows how this could have happened to me: My husband and I were the dance.
”
”
Cassi Janzek
“
It was hard to thank Mrs. Haykin and get away. It made you feel rather unhappy, too—and selfish, because Mrs. Haykin never had a holiday herself. She lived alone. Once, so neighbours said, she had had a husband, three sons and a daughter there, and somebody was always going in and out. But that was long ago—before the Stevens’ time.
”
”
R.C. Sherriff (The Fortnight in September)
“
Dimly Kev remembered one of the mythology stories the Hathaways were so fond of... the Greek one about Hades, the god of the underworld, kidnapping the maiden Persephone in a flowery field and dragging her down through an opening in the earth. Down to his dark, private world where he could possess her. Although the Hathaway daughters had all been indignant about Persephone's fate, Kev's sympathies had privately been on Hades' side. Romany culture tended to romanticize the idea of kidnapping a woman for one's bride, even mimicking it during their courtship rituals.
"I don't see why eating a mere half-dozen pomegranate seeds should have condemned Persephone to stay with Hades part of every year," Poppy had said in outrage. "No one told her the rules. It wasn't fair. I'm certain she would never have touched a thing, had she known what would happen."
"And it wasn't a very filling snack," Beatrix had added, perturbed. "If I'd been there, I would have asked for a pudding or a jam pastry, at least."
"Perhaps she wasn't altogether unhappy, having to stay," Win had suggested, her eyes twinkling. "After all, Hades did make her his queen. And the story says he possessed 'the riches of the earth.'"
"A rich husband," Amelia had said, "doesn't change the fact that Persephone's main residence is in an undesirable location with no view whatsoever. Just think of the difficulties in leasing it out during the off-months."
They had all agreed that Hades was a complete villain.
But Kev had understood exactly why the underworld god had stolen Persephone for his bride. He had wanted a little bit of sunshine, of warmth, for himself, down in the cheerless gloom of his dark palace.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
“
One day she split into two, grew restless, started going out to look for herself. She went to places where men and women met. Everyone said: fortunately she has woken up, life is short, one needs to make the most of it, she used to be lackluster, now she is somebody. No one knew she was being so unhappy that she needed to go looking for life. That was when she picked a man, loved him and love came to thicken her blood and the mystery. She gave birth to a son, her husband died after impregnating her. She carried on and developed very well. She gathered up all of her pieces and didn’t seek other people any more. Once more she found the window where she’d go sit in her own company. And now, more than ever, there had never been a happier or more complete thing or being.
”
”
Clarice Lispector (Near to the Wild Heart)
“
My father, you must know, who was originally a Turkey merchant, but had left off business for some years, in order to retire to, and die upon, his paternal estate in the county of ——, was, I believe, one of the most regular men in every thing he did, whether 'twas matter of business, or matter of amusement, that ever lived. As a small specimen of this extreme exactness of his, to which he was in truth a slave, he had made it a rule for many years of his life,—on the first Sunday-night of every month throughout the whole year,—as certain as ever the Sunday-night came,—to wind up a large house-clock, which we had standing on the back-stairs head, with his own hands:—And being somewhere between fifty and sixty years of age at the time I have been speaking of,—he had likewise gradually brought some other little family concernments to the same period, in order, as he would often say to my uncle Toby, to get them all out of the way at one time, and be no more plagued and pestered with them the rest of the month.
It was attended but with one misfortune, which, in a great measure, fell upon myself, and the effects of which I fear I shall carry with me to my grave; namely, that from an unhappy association of ideas, which have no connection in nature, it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up,—but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popped into her head.
”
”
Laurence Sterne
“
Mrs. Harold Smith, whatever may have been her faults, could boast of this virtue — that she loved her brother. He was probably the only human being that she did love. Children she had none; and as for her husband, it had never occurred to her to love him. She had married him for a position; and being a clever woman, with a good digestion and command of her temper, had managed to get through the world without much of that unhappiness which usually follows ill-assorted marriages.
”
”
Anthony Trollope (Complete Works of Anthony Trollope)
“
He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people?
”
”
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
“
Right, Jo. Better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands," said Mrs. March decidedly. "Don't be troubled, Meg, poverty seldom daunts a sincere lover. Some of the best and most honored women I know were poor girls, but so love-worthy that they were not allowed to be old maids. Leave these things to time. Make this home happy, so that you may be fit for homes of your own, if they are offered you, and contented here if they are not.
”
”
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women, #1))
“
There was a small public library on Ninety-third and Hooper. Mrs. Stella Keaton was the librarian. We’d known each other for years. She was a white lady from Wisconsin. Her husband had a fatal heart attack in ’34 and her two children died in a fire the year after that. Her only living relative had been an older brother who was stationed in San Diego with the navy for ten years. After his discharge he moved to L.A. When Mrs. Keaton had her tragedies he invited her to live with him. One year after that her brother, Horton, took ill, and after three months he died spitting up blood, in her arms. All Mrs. Keaton had was the Ninety-third Street branch. She treated the people who came in there like her siblings and she treated the children like her own. If you were a regular at the library she’d bake you a cake on your birthday and save the books you loved under the front desk. We were on a first-name basis, Stella and I, but I was unhappy that she held that job. I was unhappy because even though Stella was nice, she was still a white woman. A white woman from a place where there were only white Christians. To her Shakespeare was a god. I didn’t mind that, but what did she know about the folk tales and riddles and stories colored folks had been telling for centuries? What did she know about the language we spoke? I always heard her correcting children’s speech. “Not ‘I is,’ she’d say. “It’s ‘I am.’” And, of course, she was right. It’s just that little colored children listening to that proper white woman would never hear their own cadence in her words. They’d come to believe that they would have to abandon their own language and stories to become a part of her educated world. They would have to forfeit Waller for Mozart and Remus for Puck. They would enter a world where only white people spoke. And no matter how articulate Dickens and Voltaire were, those children wouldn’t have their own examples in the house of learning—the library.
”
”
Walter Mosley (White Butterfly (Easy Rawlins #3))
“
The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.
He should never run down other pretty women. That would show he had no taste, or make one suspect that he had too much. No; he should be nice about them all, but say that somehow they don't attract him.
If we ask him a question about anything, he should give us an answer all about ourselves. He should invariably praise us for whatever qualities he knows we haven't got. But he should be pitiless, quite pitiless, in reproaching us for the virtues that we have never dreamed of possessing. He should never believe that we know the use of useful things. That would be unforgiveable. But he should shower on us everything we don't want.
He should persistently compromise us in public, and treat us with absolute respect when we are alone. And yet he should be always ready to have a perfectly terrible scene, whenever we want one, and to become miserable, absolutely miserable, at a moment's notice, and to overwhelm us with just reproaches in less than twenty minutes, and to be positively violent at the end of half an hour, and to leave us for ever at a quarter to eight, when we have to go and dress for dinner. And when, after that, one has seen him for really the last time, and he has refused to take back the little things he has given one, and promised never to communicate with one again, or to write one any foolish letters, he should be perfectly broken-hearted, and telegraph to one all day long, and send one little notes every half-hour by a private hansom, and dine quite alone at the club, so that every one should know how unhappy he was. And after a whole dreadful week, during which one has gone about everywhere with one's husband, just to show how absolutely lonely one was, he may be given a third last parting, in the evening, and then, if his conduct has been quite irreproachable, and one has behaved really badly to him, he should be allowed to admit that he has been entirely in the wrong, and when he has admitted that, it becomes a woman's duty to forgive, and one can do it all over again from the beginning, with variations.
His reward? Oh, infinite expectation. That is quite enough for him.
”
”
Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)
“
And in the depths of the city, beyond an old zone of ruined buildings that looked like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by the name of Haroun, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifa, whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis, and whose never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales had earned him not one but two nicknames. To his admirers he was Rashid the Ocean of Notions, as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish; but to his jealous rivals he was the Shah of Blah. To his wife, Soraya, Rashid was for many years as loving a husband as anyone could wish for, and during these years Haroun grew up in a home in which, instead of misery and frowns, he had his father’s ready laughter and his mother’s sweet voice raised in song. Then something went wrong. (Maybe the sadness of the city finally crept in through their windows.) The day Soraya stopped singing, in the middle of a line, as if someone had thrown a switch, Haroun guessed there was trouble brewing. But he never suspected how much.
”
”
Salman Rushdie (Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Penguin Drop Caps))
“
In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry her friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance. Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth--a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband's character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot--the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend's moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.
”
”
George Eliot
“
Holiness doesn’t demand denial of happiness, only selfishness. Where unhappiness exists in a relationship, I would submit that such isn’t the price of holiness but a sign of sin. It is an indication that one or both partners is holding to the wrong value system, that of self-love.
When husbands and wives love each other with agape, they meet the deepest needs God designed to be met in the very manner He intended. The result is a joy that is complete and a relationship where happiness is the fruit of holiness and meaning is the consequence of a loving relationship.
”
”
—James Castleton, MD, Mending of a Broken Heart
“
Can any position be more wretched than that of the unhappy father who, when he clasps his child to his breast, is haunted by the suspicion that this is the child of another, the badge of his own dishonor, a thief who is robbing his own children of their inheritance. Under such circumstances the family is little more than a group of secret enemies, armed against each other by a guilty woman, who compels them to pretend to love one another.
Thus it is not enough that a wife should be faithful; her husband, along with his friends and neighbors, must believe in her fidelity; she must be modest, devoted, retiring; she should have the witness not only of a good conscience, but of a good reputation. In a word, if a father must love his children, he must be able to respect their mother. For these reasons it is not enough that the woman should be chaste, she must preserve her reputation and her good name. From these principles there arises not only a moral difference between the sexes, but also a fresh motive for duty and propriety, which prescribes to women in particular the most scrupulous attention to their conduct, their manners, their behavior.
”
”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Emile, or On Education)
“
If you have any regard to your future happiness, any view of living comfortably with a husband, any hope of preserving your fortunes, or restoring them after any disaster, never, ladies, marry a fool; any husband rather than a fool. With some other husbands you may be unhappy, but with a fool you will be miserable; with another husband you may, I say, be unhappy, but with a fool you must; nay, if he would, he cannot make you easy; everything he does is so awkward, everything he says is so empty, a woman of any sense cannot but be surfeited and sick of him twenty times a day.
”
”
Daniel Defoe (Delphi Complete Works of Daniel Defoe (Illustrated))
“
Zachary remained leaning over her, watching as she drifted to sleep. She was the best woman he had ever known. His entire being was consumed with one wish, that he could somehow protect her from ever knowing another moment of unhappiness. He fought against the feeling she roused in him, this awful tenderness, but it spread until it had infiltrated every part of him. The desire to go out and find solace in another woman's body had vanished completely. All he wanted was to stay here in this dark room, guarding the sleep of Lady Holland Taylor while she dreamed of her dead husband.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Where Dreams Begin)
“
Once the
exhilaration of their reunion wore off, once the newness of their lovemaking was no longer so
new, how would she see him? No matter how careful he was, invariably someday he would
do something to make her angry. What then? Would all the old unhappiness rush to the fore?
Would she remember that he had once betrayed her and regret that she’d ever given him a
second chance?
Or would she protect herself from the beginning by keeping a certain distance from him, so
that their closeness would always fall short of true communion, always denying him that final
forgiveness so that he could never hurt her again?
”
”
Sherry Thomas (Not Quite a Husband (The Marsdens, #2))
“
You're in love with him," Justin stated.
"Now who's prying?" Serena demanded.
"I was making an observation," he countered. "That's entirely different. Does he make you happy?" he asked, then tugged on his wife's hair. "That was prying," he pointed out.
Gennie laughed and stuck her pencil behind her ear. "Yes,he makes me happy-and he makes me unhappy. That's all part of it,isn't it?"
"Oh,yes." Serena leaned her head against her husband's shoulder. She spotted Grant as he came out the front door. "Gennie," she said, laying a hand on her arm. "If he's too slow, as some men are," she added with a meaningful glance at Justin, "I have a coin I'll lend you." At Gennie's baffled look, she chuckled. "Ask me about it sometime."
She hooked her arm through Justin's and wandered away,making the suggestion that they see if anyone was using the pool. Gennie heard him murmur something that had Serena giving a low, delicious laugh.
Family,she thought. It was wonderful to have stumbled on family this way. Her family,and Grant's. There was a bond here that might inch him closer to her. Happy,she ran across the grass to meet him.
He caught her when she breathlessly launched herself into his arms. "What's all this?"
"I love you!" she said on a laugh. "is there anything else?"
His arms tightened around her. "No.
”
”
Nora Roberts (The MacGregors: Alan & Grant (The MacGregors, #3-4))
“
Hallmarks of Wife Abandonment Syndrome 1 Prior to the separation, the husband had seemed to be an attentive, emotionally engaged spouse, looked upon by his wife as honest and trustworthy. 2 The husband had never said that he was unhappy or thinking of leaving the marriage, and the wife believed herself to be in a secure relationship. 3 The husband typically blurts out the news that the marriage is over out-of-the-blue in the middle of a mundane domestic conversation. 4 Reasons given for his decision are nonsensical, exaggerated, trivial or fraudulent. 5 By the time the husband reveals his intentions to his wife, the end of the marriage is already a fait accompli, and he often moves out quickly. 6 The husband’s behavior changes radically, so much so that it seems to his wife that he has become a cruel and vindictive stranger. 7 The husband shows no remorse; rather, he blames his wife and may describe himself as the victim. 8 In almost all cases, the husband had been having an affair. He typically moves in with his girlfriend. 9 The husband makes no attempt to help his wife, either financially or emotionally, as if all positive regard for her has been suddenly extinguished. 10 Systematically devaluing his wife and the marriage, the husband denies what he had previously described as positive aspects of the couple’s joint history.
”
”
Vikki Stark (Runaway Husbands: The Abandoned Wife's Guide to Recovery and Renewal)
“
If you want to raise your children successfully, you must combine love with discipline. The way to produce unhappy, frustrated children, on the other hand, is to spoil them—to give them all they ask for, to do everything they want, to succumb to every demand. Children raised in this way will, when they grow up, expect life to treat them the same way their parents did. But life does not play the game that way! Life is pretty tough—and getting tougher. I have observed the lives of people whose parents treated them with unscriptural indulgence and I would say that, in varying degrees, they have all had difficult lives. To spoil your children is not kindness. Often, in fact, it is the expression of laziness. It takes much less effort to spoil your children than to discipline
”
”
Derek Prince (Husbands and Fathers: Rediscover the Creator's Purpose for Men – Great for First Time Dads, Father's Day Gifts, and Dad to Be Gifts)
“
What will Helene’s fate be? My own, beyond doubt. How can a mother ensure that the man to whom she gives her daughter will be the husband of her heart? You pour scorn on the miserable creatures who sell themselves for a few coins to any passer-by, though want and hunger absolve the brief union; while another union, horrible for quite other reasons, is tolerated, nay encouraged, by society, and a young and innocent girl is married to a man whom she has only met occasionally during the previous three months. She is sold for her whole lifetime. It is true that the price is high! If you allow her no compensation for her sorrows, you might at least respect her; but no, the most virtuous of women cannot escape calumny. This is our fate in its double aspect. Open prostitution and shame; secret prostitution and unhappiness.
”
”
Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
“
How old am I? Over thirty, indeed? What cream do I use on my face? How many children do I have? Really—none? They offer condolences and smack their lips over my bad luck. My husband’s family must be very upset—I am married, of course? No? Again, they offer their regrets: a great shame that nobody wanted me. They understand—it is known to happen to some girls. Usually the very ugly or poor ones. Their concern extends to my parents: They must be unhappy, ashamed even, to have an old, unmarried daughter. And the relatives, horribly embarrassed, certainly?
By now, I try to insist it may not be a complete disaster to be unmarried, but Setareh feels the need to intervene and freestyle the translation a little. She explains to the girls that, in her personal view, it is indeed a little tragic for my family. That concession renders sympathetic faces all around.When Sakina steps out of the room, questions become juicier: In the West, do I walk around almost naked in the streets? And have I “had relations” with a thousand men?
”
”
Jenny Nordberg (The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan)
“
attention — my abused body, my lack of sleep, my mandatory marriage, and the terror of being unable to satisfy President Snow’s demands. By the time I reach lunch, where Effie, Cinna, Portia, Haymitch, and Peeta have started without me, I’m too weighed down to talk. They’re raving about the food and how well they sleep on trains. Everyone’s all full of excitement about the tour. Well, everyone but Haymitch. He’s nursing a hangover and picking at a muffin. I’m not really hungry, either, maybe because I loaded up on too much rich stuff this morning or maybe because I’m so unhappy. I play around with a bowl of broth, eating only a spoonful or two. I can’t even look at Peeta — my designated future husband — although I know none of this is his fault. People notice, try to bring me into the conversation, but I just brush them off. At some point, the train stops. Our server reports it will not just be for a fuel stop — some part has malfunctioned and must be replaced. It will require at least an hour. This sends Effie into a state. She pulls out her schedule and begins to work out how the delay will impact every event for the rest of our lives. Finally I just can’t stand to listen to her anymore. “No one cares, Effie!” I snap. Everyone
”
”
Suzanne Collins (Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2))
“
Lively as kittens,” West said as he and Devon walked to the library. “They’re quite wasted out here in the country. I’ll confess, I never knew that the company of innocent girls could be so amusing.”
“What if they were to take part in the London season?” Devon asked. It was one of approximately a thousand questions buzzing in his mind. “How would you rate their prospects?”
West looked bemused. “At catching husbands? Nonexistent.”
“Even Lady Helen?”
“Lady Helen is an angel. Lovely, quiet, accomplished…she should have her pick of suitors. But the men who would be appropriate for her will never come up to scratch. Nowadays no one can afford a girl who lacks a dowry.”
“There are men who could afford her,” Devon said absently.
“Who?”
“Some of the fellows we’re acquainted with…Severin, or Winterborne…”
“If they’re friends of ours, I wouldn’t pair Lady Helen with one of them. She was bred to marry a cultivated man of leisure, not a barbarian.”
“I would hardly call a department store owner a barbarian.”
“Rhys Winterborne is vulgar, ruthless, willing to compromise any principle for personal gain…qualities I admire, of course…but he would never do for Lady Helen. They would make each other exceedingly unhappy.”
“Of course they would. It’s marriage.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
public, and treat us with absolute respect when we are alone. And yet he should be always ready to have a perfectly terrible scene, whenever we want one, and to become miserable, absolutely miserable, at a moment's notice, and to overwhelm us with just reproaches in less than twenty minutes, and to be positively violent at the end of half an hour, and to leave us for ever at a quarter to eight, when we have to go and dress for dinner. And when, after that, one has seen him for really the last time, and he has refused to take back the little things he has given one, and promised never to communicate with one again, or to write one any foolish letters, he should be perfectly broken-hearted, and telegraph to one all day long, and send one little notes every half-hour by a private hansom, and dine quite alone at the club, so that every one should know how unhappy he was. And after a whole dreadful week, during which one has gone about everywhere with one's husband, just to show how absolutely lonely one was, he may be given a third last parting, in the evening, and then, if his conduct has been quite irreproachable, and one has behaved really badly to him, he should be allowed to admit that he has been entirely in the wrong, and when he has admitted that, it becomes a woman's duty to forgive, and one can do it all over again from the beginning, with variations. LADY
”
”
Oscar Wilde (A Woman of No Importance)
“
And white-armed Andromache led the lament among them, holding in her arms the head of horse-breaking Hector: "My husband, you were lost from life while young, and are leaving me a widow in your halls; and the child is still just a baby, whom we bore, you and I, ill-fated both, nor do I think he will reach young manhood; before that this city will be wholly ravaged; for you its watchman have perished, who used to guard it, who protected its devoted wives and tender children. They soon will be carried away in the hollow ships, and I with them; and you then, my child, either you will follow with me, and there do work unworthy of you toiling for a harsh master-or some Achaean man seizing you by the arm will hurl you from the ramparts, unhappy death, in his anger, one whose brother, perhaps, Hector slew, or his father or even his son, since so many of the Achaeans gripped the broad earth in their teeth at Hector's hands. For your father was no gentle man in sad battle; therefore the people mourn him through the city, and cursed is the grief and lamentation you have laid upon your parents, Hector. And to me beyond all others will be left painful sorrow; for you did not reach out your hands to me from your bed as you were dying, nor did you speak some close word to me, which I might always remember through the nights and days as I shed my tears." So she spoke, crying, and the women in response mourned.
”
”
Caroline Alexander (The Iliad)
“
What you don't ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day - because how could you? - is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever changing a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. Nor is it possible to foresee the desperation and depression, that sense that your life is over, the occasional urge to hit your whining child, even though hitting them is something you knew for a fact you would never ever do. And of course you don't think about having affairs, and when you get to that stage in life when you do (and everyone gets there sooner or later), you don't think of the sick feeling you get in your stomach when you're conducting them, their inherent unhappiness. And nor do you think about your husband waking up in the morning being someone you don't recognize. If anyone thought about any of these things, then no one would ever get married, of course they wouldn't; in fact, the impulse to marry would come from the same place as the same impulse to drink a bottle of bleach, and those are the kinds of impulses we try to ignore, rather than celebrate. So we can't afford to think of these things because getting married - or finding a partner whom we will want to spend our lives with and have children by - is on our agenda. It's something we know we will do one day, and if you take that away from us then we are left with promotions at work and the possibility of a winning lottery ticket, and it's not enough, so we kid ourselves that it is possible to enter these partnerships and be faced only with the problems of mud removal, and then we become unhappy and take Prozac and then we get divorced and die alone.
”
”
Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)
“
It wasn't only my friends who suffered from female rivalry. I remember when I was just sixteen years old, during spring vacation, being whisked off to an early lunch by my best friend's brother, only to discover, to my astonishment and hurt, that she was expecting some college boys to drop by and didn't want me there to compete with her. When I started college at Sarah Lawrence, I soon noticed that while some of my classmates were indeed true friends, others seemed to resent that I had a boyfriend. It didn't help that Sarah Lawrence, a former girls' school, included very few straight men among its student body--an early lesson in how competing for items in short supply often brings out the worst in women.
In graduate school, the stakes got higher, and the competition got stiffer, a trend that continued when I went on to vie for a limited number of academic jobs. I always had friends and colleagues with whom I could have trusted my life--but I also found women who seemed to view not only me but all other female academics as their rivals.
This sense of rivalry became more painful when I divorced my first husband. Many of my friends I depended on for comfort and support suddenly began to view me as a threat. Some took me out to lunch to get the dirt, then dropped me soon after. I think they found it disturbing that I left my unhappy marriage while they were still committed to theirs. For other women, the threat seemed more immediate--twice I was told in no uncertain terms that I had better stay away from someone's husband, despite my protests that I would no more go after a friend's husband than I would stay friends with a woman who went after mine.
Thankfully, I also had some true friends who remained loyal and supportive during one of the most difficult times of my life. To this day I trust them implicitly, with the kind of faith you reserve for people who have proved themselves under fire. But I've also never forgotten the shock and disappointment of discovering how quickly those other friendships turned to rivalries.
”
”
Susan Shapiro Barash (Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth About Women and Rivalry)
“
A woman paralyzed by her own selfishness and triviality, a woman who knew she should love her life more than she did but couldn’t seem to love her life beyond a few odd inconsequential incidents.
It is, in fact, time to start dating again. But Dan has no idea what that means for a gay man well into his thirties who has neither money nor abs.
- if you’re delivering a song, there are instances when the veil of the ordinary falls away and you are, fleetingly, a supernatural being, with music rampaging through you and soaring out into a crowd. You connect, you’re giving it, you’re the living sweat-slicked manifestation of music itself, the crowd feels it as piercingly as you do. Always, almost always, you “spot a girl. She doesn’t need to be pretty. She’s the love of somebody’s life (you hope she is), and for those few seconds she’s the love of yours, you’re singing to her and she’s singing back to you, by raising her arms over her head and swinging her hips, adoring you or, rather, adoring some being who is you and the song combined, able to touch her everywhere. It’s the briefest of love affairs. -
Isabel is embarrassed about her sadness. She’s embarrassed about being embarrassed about her sadness, she who has love and money. She tries looking discreetly into her bag for a Kleenex, without anything that could be called frantic rummaging. She ponders the prospect that decadent unhappiness might, in its way, be worse than genuine, legitimate despair. Which is, as she knows, a decadent question to pose at all.
- members of a biological aristocracy -
Dan is taken by a tremor of scorn twisted up with painful affection, as if they were two names for the same emotion
- but that’s my narcissism speaking ive been working on the idea that there are other people in the world -
Beyond lust there’s a purity, you know?
Does it ever get to be too late? If neither of you abuses the dog (should they finally get a dog?) or leaves the children in the car on a hot day. Does it ever become irreparable? If so, when? How do you, how does any“one, know when they cross over from working through this to it’s too late? Is there (she suspects there must be) an interlude during which you’re so bored or disappointed or ambushed by regret that it is, truly, too late? Or, more to the point, do we arrive at it’s too late over and over again, only to return to working through this before it’s too late arrives, yet again?
Do you think we ever really survive our childhoods?
Most mothers think their children are amazing and singular people. Most mothers are wrong about that.
You’re beautiful in your own skin. You brought with you into the world some kind of human amazingness, and you can depend on it, always. Please try not to ever let anybody talk you out of that.
She says, “You’re not in love with me.”
“Trust me. I’ve had a lot of experience at not being in love with people. I’ve been not in love with pretty much everybody, all my life.”
She wonders how many women think more kindly and, all right, more lustfully toward their husbands after they’ve left them. Maybe someone’s done a study.
“If you’re determined to be insulted.
”
”
Michael Cunningham (Day)
“
THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAHHOTEP
Part III
Report your commission without faltering,
Give your advice in your master’s council.
If he is fluent in his speech,
It will not be hard for the envoy to report,
Nor will he be answered, "Who is he to know it ?”
As to the master, his affairs will fail
If he plans to punish him for it.
He should be silent upon (hearing): "I have told.”
If you are a man who leads.
Whose authority reaches wide,
You should do outstanding things,
Remember the day that comes after.
No strife will occur in the midst of honors,
But where the crocodile enters hatred arises.
If you are a man who leads.
Listen calmly to the speech of one who pleads;
Don’t stop him from purging his body
Of that which he planned to tell.
A man in distress wants to pour out his heart
More than that his case be won.
About him who stops a plea
One says: “Why does he reject it ?”
Not all one pleads for can be granted,
But a good hearing soothes the heart.
If you want friendship to endure
In the house you enter
As master, brother, or friend,
In whatever place you enter,
Beware of approaching the women!
Unhappy is the place where it is done.
Unwelcome is he who intrudes on them.
A thousand men are turned away from their good:
A short moment like a dream,
Then death comes for having known them.
Poor advice is “shoot the opponent,”
When one goes to do it the heart rejects it.
He who fails through lust of them,
No affair of his can prosper.
If you want a perfect conduct,
To be free from every evil,
Guard against the vice of greed:
A grievous sickness without cure,
There is no treatment for it.
It embroils fathers, mothers,
And the brothers of the mother,
It parts wife from husband;
It is a compound of all evils,
A bundle of all hateful things.
That man endures whose rule is rightness,
Who walks a straight line;
He will make a will by it,
The greedy has no tomb.
Do not be greedy in the division.
Do not covet more than your share;
Do not be greedy toward your kin.
The mild has a greater claim than the harsh.
Poor is he who shuns his kin,
He is deprived of 'interchange'
Even a little of what is craved
Turns a quarreler into an amiable man.
When you prosper and found your house,
And love your wife with ardor,
Fill her belly, clothe her back,
Ointment soothes her body.
Gladden her heart as long as you live,
She is a fertile held for her lord.
Do not contend with her in court,
Keep her from power, restrain her —
Her eye is her storm when she gazes —
Thus will you make her stay in your house.
Sustain your friends with what you have,
You have it by the grace of god;
Of him who fails to sustain his friends
One says, “a selfish ka".
One plans the morrow but knows not what will be,
The ( right) ka is the ka by which one is sustained.
If praiseworthy deeds are done,
Friends will say, “welcome!”
One does not bring supplies to town,
One brings friends when there is need.
Do not repeat calumny.
Nor should you listen to it,
It is the spouting of the hot-bellied.
Report a thing observed, not heard,
If it is negligible, don’t say anything.
He who is before you recognizes worth.
lf a seizure is ordered and carried out,
Hatred will arise against him who seizes;
Calumny is like a dream against which one covers the face.
If you are a man of worth,
Who sits in his master’s council.
Concentrate on excellence,
Your silence is better than chatter.
Speak when you know you have a solution,
It is the skilled who should speak in council;
Speaking is harder than all other work.
He who understands it makes it serve.
”
”
Miriam Lichtheim (Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms)
“
I couldn’t go back to Maa and Pitaji.” She knew as well as I did that, once married, a woman was her husband’s property. Unhappy wives couldn’t just go back home to their parents, expecting sympathy. Some families even changed their daughter-in-law’s first name as soon as she came to their household, as if her previous self had never existed.
”
”
Alka Joshi (The Henna Artist (The Jaipur Trilogy, #1))
“
Tonight, Mom painted a portrait of our family, and through her eyes I saw people I’d never imagined—a drunken, unfaithful husband and a depressed, overwhelmingly unhappy wife. How is it that I saw none of this? Are children so sublimely oblivious to their own world? She was right to hide this truth from me. Even now, I wish I didn’t know it. Sometimes, knowing where we come from hurts more than we can stand.
”
”
Kristin Hannah (Summer Island)
“
She watched her husband's jaw flex and knew he was unhappy with how she had answered. But what was she supposed to say? 'I was up all night worrying about the fact that I can never be good enough for you?' She hated herself. She hated herself for doubting. She hated herself because she knew she was hurting him.
”
”
Catherine Brusk (What Strength Washed Up (Finding Faith Book 3))
“
Conflict was not allowed between us, let alone fury; everything had to go unspoken, while the surface remained passive. In this way, I’d found myself returned to a boundless loneliness that, while unhappy, was at least not foreign to me. “I am essentially a buoyant person,” my husband once told me, “while you are a person who ponders everything.” But over time the conditions both within and without had proved too much for his buoyancy, and he, too, was sinking in his separate sea. In our own ways, we had each come to understand that we had lost faith in our marriage. And yet we didn’t know how to act on this understanding, as one does not know how to act on the understanding, for example, that the afterlife does not exist.
”
”
Nicole Krauss (Forest Dark)
“
happiness needs nothing but itself; it doesn’t have to be validated. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” is the opening sentence of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. All I could hope to add to that is that unhappy families—and within those families, in particular the unhappy husband and wife—can never get by on their own. The more validators, the merrier. Unhappiness loves company. Unhappiness can’t stand silence—especially not the uneasy silence that settles in when it is all alone.
”
”
Herman Koch (The Dinner)
“
Richard was to think he could pass off her child as his and not have it rain unhappiness later. If it was a girl, they might make it work, but if Fleur had a boy . . . Clearly they needed to find that girl a husband. Iris still didn’t understand why no one else seemed to see this. Fleur flat out
”
”
Julia Quinn (The Secrets of Sir Richard Kenworthy (Smythe-Smith Quartet, #4))
“
that is in my control is how I live now. I could fill the days with fears—there are plenty of those—or I could fill them with the best joys I can cobble together. My husband wrote, in his book Four Trials—in part, I admit, on my recommendation, “I have learned two great lessons—that there will always be heartache and struggle, and that people of strong will can make a difference. One is a sad lesson, the other is inspiring. I choose to be inspired.” There is enough unhappiness and pain to fill my days, but I choose to be happy.
”
”
Elizabeth Edwards (Resilience: The New Afterword)
“
suggested that the “Enfeebling Liquor” robbed men of their sexual energies, making them “as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.” The unsubtle subtitle of the pamphlet—“Humble Petition and Address of Several Thousands of Buxome Good Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want”—did not mince words: men were spending so much time in coffeehouses, and drinking so much coffee, that they arrived home with “nothing stiffe but their joints.” The men replied with their own pamphlet, claiming that the “Harmless and healing liquor . . . makes the erection more Vigorous, the Ejaculation more full, [and] adds a spiritualescency to the Sperme.” Any problem in this department the pamphleteers wrote off to the “Husband’s natural infirmity” or possibly “your own perpetual Pumping him, not drinking coffee.
”
”
Michael Pollan (This Is Your Mind on Plants)
“
Her husband of 18 years was suddenly done with her, telling her how happy he was without her, blaming her for all kinds of things. He told her how unhappy he had been the whole time they were married and listed all the ways it was her fault.
”
”
Debbie Mirza (The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Recognizing the Traits and Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse (The Narcissism Series Book 1))
“
I felt uneasy sitting with such an honest disclosure of her husband’s unhappiness. Later in my training I would know how to sit with the tension of misery, but I didn’t yet. Miranda stepped in to attempt a redirection.
”
”
Adam Stern (Committed: Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training)
“
No one’s happy here. It’s not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don’t mean you, but grown-ups like you—what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children’s school-admissions, husbands’ beatings, wives’ cheating, Hindu-Muslim riots Indo-Pak war—outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.
”
”
Arundhati Roy
“
It is also true that, whatever class of mankind we examine, we find many distinct troubles attached to it, exclusively of such kind of unhappiness as does not relate to any peculiar mode of life, or what may affect particular individuals; life itself beginning and ending in suffering, and, as it seems, generally continuing during its course also with a balance of suffering, caused the different difficulties, disappointments, and other evils to which it is subject, where he is continually exchanging some perfections in his body, for an infirmity; and losing the possession of his friends or of other things essential to his happiness; with the constant anxiety of an eternal futurity presented to his sight, and being entirely ignorant of what may be his fate in it. Some being doomed to practise a variety of hazardous employments; others to over exertion of their strength: Some to irksome sedentary occupations, or to constant and difficult manual operations and straining of attention: many allotted to spend their lives underground in mines, to breathe foul air: and numbers being compelled to follow trades which expose them to all inclemencies of weather, and to other circumstances that lay foundations for the most inveterate diseases. Among the most common evils are the ill treatment met with by apprentices from their masters, and women from their husbands, who frequently from neglect of education, and favoured by the laws of their own sex, exercise their authority as they think suitable to the dignity of themselves; and mistake their think suitable to the dignity of themselves; and mistake their superiority of strength, which was given to them partly for the purpose of defending their wives and labouring for them - for a privilege from God to exercise their tyranny towards them. It is known that generally the less society is civilized, the worse is the treatment of women. But it is strange in such a country as England, that women should still be degraded and ill treated, and confined to lower occupations than men are; that they should meet with less lenity in courts of justice, as well as more illiberality in private life; that the law should ever have subjected women to commit the crime of murder on their husbands to be burned alive for it, while men for a similar crime were only sentenced to be executed in the common way. But men made the laws; and as they thought
”
”
Lewis Gompertz (Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes)
“
And then, for someone who’d initially said she wasn’t going to talk about it, it seemed all Pearl could do was talk about it. She told Joe that everything bad in her life that happened after that came about as a result of that evening. “My unhappy marriage, my husband’s drinking, my son cutting me out of his life—it all followed.” Her finger traced the edge of the table. “One thing leading to another. A chain linked by shame and unhappiness.
”
”
Karen McQuestion (Dovetail)
“
felt uneasy sitting with such an honest disclosure of her husband’s unhappiness. Later in my training I would know how to sit with the tension of misery, but I didn’t yet.
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Adam Stern (Committed: Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training)
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The feminist classics talk a lot about women like this. There were millions of women saying things just like it. And the women meant what they said. They were sincere. Yet now, if we could go back in a time machine and talk to these women, what we’d say is: You had everything a woman could possibly want by the standards of the culture. You had nothing to be unhappy about by the standards of the culture. But we now know that the standards of the culture were wrong. Women need more than a house and a car and a husband and kids. They need equality, and meaningful work, and autonomy.
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Johann Hari (Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions)
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The meanness that first bothered me, though, when I encountered it a decade ago, long before I was married, was in a short story in Pigeon Feathers in which a young husband returns with hamburgers and eats them happily with his family in front of the fire, and thinks lovingly of his wife’s Joyceanly “smackwarm” thighs, and then, in the next paragraph, says as narrator (the “you” directed at the narrator’s wife), “In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly.… The skin between your breasts is a sad yellow.” And a little later, “Seven years have worn this woman.” This hit me as inexcusably brutal when I read it. I couldn’t imagine Updike’s real, nonfictional wife reading that paragraph and not being made very unhappy. You never know, though; the internal mechanics of marriages are shielded from us, and maybe in the months after that story came out the two of them enjoyed a wry private joke whenever they went to a party and she wore a dress with a high neckline and they noticed some interlocutor’s gaze drop to her breasts and they saw together the little knowing look cross his unpleasantly salacious features as he thought to himself, Ho ho: high neckline to cover up all that canary-yellow, eh? Updike knows that people are going to assume that the fictional wife of an Updike-like male character corresponds closely with Updike’s own real-life wife — after all, Updike himself angered Nabokov by suggesting that Ada was Vera. How can Updike have the whatever, the disempathy, I used frequently to ask myself, and ask myself right now, to put in print that his wife appeared ugly to him that morning, especially in so vivid a way? It just oughtn’t to be done! It makes us readers imagine her speculating as she read it: “Which morning was he thinking that? He sat at the kitchen table eating breakfast and thinking I was ugly and worn! And I had no idea.
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Nicholson Baker (U and I)
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I must be honest with you too, Husband.” “I would prefer it.” “I am not in a position to consummate our vows tonight.” He felt surprise and disappointment, and for an instant considered that for all her affection and pragmatism, all her passion on his hearth rug several nights past, Louisa was consigning them to a white marriage. Except… her passion had been honest. Her rejoicing in his coming through the duel unscathed had been honest. The smiles she’d sent him across the hordes of wedding guests in the Moreland ballroom had been blazingly honest. “Why can’t you consummate our vows, Louisa?” Now she withdrew her hands from his leg, his no-longer-throbbing leg. The horses slowed to a walk. “Louisa?” She mashed her face against his throat, and against his skin, her cheek felt unnaturally hot. “…Dratted… Blighted… female… Next week.” Joseph blinked in the darkness. He had been married before. For several long, unhappy years, in fact, but in that odd moment with Louisa tucked close to him in the darkness, those years of marriage enabled him to decipher her meaning and her problem. He gathered her close and kissed her cheek, when what he wanted to do was laugh—at fate, at his worst imaginings, even a little at his wife’s muttered indignation over nature’s timing. “Next week is not so very far away, Louisa Carrington, and I promise to make the wait worth your while.” She lifted her head, a challenge glinting in her green eyes. “And yours too, Sir Joseph. I promise you that.” And then they did laugh—together. ***
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Grace Burrowes (Lady Louisa's Christmas Knight (The Duke's Daughters, #3; Windham, #6))
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Keep the right perspective
Some people would love to have your problems. They would gladly trade places with you. They would love to have the job that frustrates you. They would love to sit in traffic in that car you don’t like. They would love to have your husband, who gets on your nerves. They would love to live in the house you think is too small.
You may be thinking, “As soon as I get out of this neighborhood, then I’m going to be happy.” Instead, why don’t you choose to be happy right where you are? Choose to have a good attitude without thinking about what you have or don’t have.
Your happiness is all about your approach to life. One man gets up and says, “Good morning, Lord.” Another man gets up and says, “Oh Lord, it’s morning.” Which person are you?
You control what kind of day you’re having. You’re as happy as you want to be. It’s not your circumstances that keep you unhappy. It’s how you respond to them.
A lot of times we’re making ourselves unhappy. You can’t change the traffic, the weather, or how others treat you. If your happiness is based on everything going your way and everybody treating you right, you will be frustrated.
Before you leave the house, you need to make up your mind to stay positive and enjoy the day no matter what comes your way. You have to decide ahead of time.
That’s what it says in Colossians 3:2, “Set your mind on the higher things and keep it set.” The higher things are the positive things. When you get out of bed in the morning, you need to set your mind for victory. Set your mind for success. Have the attitude: “This is going to be a great day. God’s favor is on my life. I’m excited about my future.”
When your mind is set as positive, hopeful, and expecting good things, that’s when you’ll go places you’ve never dreamed. New doors will open. New opportunities, and the right people will come across your path.
But if you don’t set your mind, negative thoughts will set it for you. You can’t start the day in neutral. If you’re passive, lying in bed, negative thoughts like these will come: “You’ll never accomplish your dreams. You’ll never get married. You’re too old. You’ll never get well. Nothing good ever happens to you. You’ll never get out of debt.
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Joel Osteen (You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner)
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Leo had dinner with us before we got married. He told me I’d be just like his mom, unhappy with a cheating husband.
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A.R. Winters (Innocent in Las Vegas (Tiffany Black Mysteries, #1))
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Her happiness didn’t rely on her husband’s actions. And just because she didn’t walk around being ecstatic, it didn’t mean she was unhappy. He didn’t seem to understand that a person can function in the space between happy and unhappy. That space offered a level of calm and balance. It held an evenness, a place of moderation that allowed her to do her job and go home to forget some of the horrors she’d experienced that day.
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Kendra Elliot (Alone (Bone Secrets, #4))
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Whenever I feel unhappy about the state of the world,' the Prime Minister thought to himself, 'I think about the Arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport, where happy, smiling passengers greet their friends and relatives. It seems to me that love is everywhere. It isn't big news - but it's always there. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and strangers. When the planes hit New York, people's last phone calls weren't messages of hate. They were messages of love. If you look for it, you'll find - I think - that love actually is all around us ...
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Anonymous
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In families in which parents are overbearing, rigid, and strict, children grow up with fear and anxiety. The threat of guilt, punishment, the withdrawal of love and approval, and, in some cases, abandonment, force children to suppress their own needs to try things out and to make their own mistakes. Instead, they are left with constant doubts about themselves, insecurities, and unwillingness to trust their own feelings. They feel they have no choice and as we have shown, for many, they incorporate the standards and values of their parents and become little parental copies. They follow the prescribed behavior suppressing their individuality and their own creative potentials. After all, criticism is the enemy of creativity. It is a long, hard road away from such repressive and repetitive behavior. The problem is that many of us obtain more gains out of main- taining the status quo than out of changing. We know, we feel, we want to change. We don’t like the way things are, but the prospect of upsetting the stable and the familiar is too frightening. We ob- tain “secondary gains” to our pain and we cannot risk giving them up. I am reminded of a conference I attended on hypnosis. An el- derly couple was presented. The woman walked with a walker and her husband of many years held her arm as she walked. There was nothing physically wrong with her legs or her body to explain her in- ability to walk. The teacher, an experienced expert in psychiatry and hypnosis, attempted to hypnotize her. She entered a trance state and he offered his suggestions that she would be able to walk. But to no avail. When she emerged from the trance, she still could not, would not, walk. The explanation was that there were too many gains to be had by having her husband cater to her, take care of her, do her bidding. Many people use infirmities to perpetuate relationships even at the expense of freedom and autonomy. Satisfactions are derived by being limited and crippled physically or psychologically. This is often one of the greatest deterrents to progress in psychotherapy. It is unconscious, but more gratification is derived by perpetuating this state of affairs than by giving them up. Beatrice, for all of her unhappiness, was fearful of relinquishing her place in the family. She felt needed, and she felt threatened by the thought of achieving anything 30 The Self-Sabotage Cycle that would have contributed to a greater sense of independence and self. The risks were too great, the loss of the known and familiar was too frightening. Residing in all of us is a child who wants to experiment with the new and the different, a child who has a healthy curiosity about the world around him, who wants to learn and to create. In all of us are needs for security, certainty, and stability. Ideally, there develops a balance between the two types of needs. The base of security is present and serves as a foundation which allows the exploration of new ideas and new learning and experimenting. But all too often, the security and dependency needs outweigh the freedom to explore and we stifle, even snuff out, the creative urges, the fantasy, the child in us. We seek the sources that fill our dependency and security needs at the expense of the curious, imaginative child. There are those who take too many risks, who take too many chances and lose, to the detriment of all concerned. But there are others who are risk-averse and do little with their talents and abilities for fear of having to change their view of themselves as being the child, the dependent one, the protected one. Autonomy, independence, success are scary because they mean we can no longer justify our needs to be protected. Success to these people does not breed success. Suc- cess breeds more work, more dependence, more reason to give up the rationales for moving on, away from, and exploring the new and the different.
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Anonymous
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If all my husband sees is my constant unhappiness, contempt, criticism, or condemnation, he loses his motivation to even try to delight me. He may feel totally defeated.
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April Cassidy (The Peaceful Wife: Living in Submission to Christ as Lord)
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She wanted to give her husband the desires of his heart, but not when it came to her being miserable and unhappy. The
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Nako (The Connect's Wife 7)
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Upon a moment’s reflection, this becomes obvious. We owe it to our husband or wife, our fellow workers, our children, our friends, indeed to everyone who comes into our lives, to be as happy as we can be. This does not mean acting unreal, and it certainly does not mean refraining from honest and intimate expressions of our feelings to those closest to us. But it does mean that we owe it to others to work on our happiness. We do not enjoy being around others who are usually unhappy. Those who enter our lives feel the same way. Ask a child what it was like to grow up with an unhappy parent, or ask parents what pain they suffer if they have an unhappy child (of any age). There is a second reason why happiness is a moral obligation. In general, people act more decently when they are happy. The chapter on seeking goodness explains the connection between goodness and happiness at length. It will suffice here to answer this: Do you feel more positively disposed toward other people and do you want to treat other people better when you are happy or when you are unhappy?
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Dennis Prager (Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual)
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The mere fact therefore that the erring spouse is moody, whimsical, mean, stingy, selfish, boorish, irritable. Inconsiderate, etc., will not be sufficient to amount to cruelly. Similarly, merely neglect or want of affection, expression of hatred will not be a conduct constituting cruelty. The idiosyncracies of the wife some time may not amount to cruelty, even though they make the husband unhappy. There may be occasions where the conduct of wife may lead to unpleasantness but such unpleasantness alone will not amount to cruelty and this may reasonably fall within the ambit of ordinary wear and tear of matrimonial life which is not sufficient for establishing cruelty as envisaged under the Act.
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Vivek Deveshwar (Guide for Men on Divorce, Cruelty, Desertion, Annulment)
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A film called Jai Santoshi Ma about a goddess nobody had heard of till the film came out created a new cult. The film told the story of an unhappy woman who was tortured and starved by her husband’s family while he was away working in some distant city. What keeps her alive in the film is her enduring faith in the goddess Santoshi, for whom she fasts every Friday and practises other austerities. The film became a runaway hit but nobody noticed that this was a new goddess invented in Bollywood.
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Tavleen Singh (Durbar)
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That's what I mean by routine. You think that you exist because you're unhappy. Other people exist merely as a function of their problems and spend all their time talking compulsively about their children, their husband, school, work, friends. They never stop to think: I'm here. I am the result of everything that happened and will happen, but I'm here. If I did something wrong, I can put it right or at least ask forgiveness, If I did something right, that leaves me happier and more connected with the now.
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Paulo Coelho (Aleph)
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Turning to Patrick and Caroline, Diana asked if I had trouble getting them to do their homework. They both replied, “No, we just sit down and do it.” I know I embarrassed Patrick when I told Diana what a good student he was turning out to be. With a grin, Diana confessed, “I have to bribe my boys to do their homework.” The bribes were only little treats, like a piece of candy.
Diana was determined to teach her sons about the real world and how people live. She was trying to give Prince William, at ten, and Prince Harry, soon to turn eight, as “normal an upbringing as possible,” given their station in life. With regard to this aim, she observed, “My husband thinks I’m overdoing it.” This was her only reference to Prince Charles that afternoon. For instance, so that the boys would learn to handle money, Diana gave them pocket money to buy candy and other small treats in the local shops in Tetbury, the market town near Highgrove, the royal couple’s country estate.
It had been difficult to send William to boarding school at eight, but it was not as harsh as it sounded, Diana assured me. Parents could visit on weekends and come to watch sports matches, as she and Harry had done that morning. Also, the boys were allowed to come home for a weekend about once a month. Harry would be joining his big brother at Ludgrove in September.
“After prep school,” I asked, “where will you send Prince William? Not to Gordonstoun, I hope.” Gordonstoun was the boarding school in northern Scotland where Prince Charles had been unhappy as a teenager.
“Oh, no,” Diana answered. “I’d like William to go to Eton, if he can get in.”
I smiled, “I don’t imagine that will be a problem.”
Prince William is currently attending Eton and Prince Harry is finishing up at Ludgrove.
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Mary Robertson (The Diana I Knew: Loving Memories of the Friendship Between an American Mother and Her Son's Nanny Who Became the Princess of Wales)
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And yet. And yet. If asked - if pressed - Honora would have to say she is strangely content. It's an odd feeling that she cannot describe to anyone - not to her mother and certainly not to Sexton, whose unhappiness seems to have no bounds, whose unhappiness is defined now by what he does not have, which is almost everything. He will always, in his mind, be the salesman who no longer has anything to sell. A man who longs for the open road but who cannot ever take it. Whereas Honora, oddly, now has more purpose than she ever did before. She is a dutiful wife who tends to her husband in spite of his weaknesses. She is a woman with ingenuity. She is a woman without illusions. She is a woman who, above all, is too busy trying to make a go of it to fret about her marriage.
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Anita Shreve (Sea Glass (Fortune's Rocks Quartet, #2))
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Ellie Haworth is living the dream. She often tells herself so when she wakes up, hungover from too much white wine, feeling the ache of melancholy, in her perfect flat that nobody eve messes up in her absence. (She secretly wants a cat, but is afraid of becoming a cliche.) She holds down a job as a feature writer on a a national newspaper, has obedient hair, a body that is basically plump and slender in the right places, and is pretty enough to attract attention that she still pretends offends her. She has a sharp tongue-too sharp, according to her mother-a ready wit, several credit cards, and a small car she can manage without male help. When she meets people she knew at school, she can detect envy when she describes her life: she has not yet reached an age where the lack of a husband or children could b regarded as failure. When she meets meant, she can see them ticking off her attributes - great job, nice rack, sense of fun - as if she's a prize to be won.
If, recently, she has become aware that the dream is a little fuzzy, that the edge she was once famed for at the office has deserted her since John came, that the relationship she had once found invigorating has begun to consume her in ways that are not exactly enviable, she chose not to look to hard. After all, it's easy when you're surrounded by people like you, journalists, and writers who drink hard, party hard have sloppy, disastrous affairs and unhappy partners home who, tired of their neglect, will eventually have affairs. She is one of them, one of their cohorts, living the life of the glossy magazine pages, a life she has pursued since she first knew she wanted to write. She is successful, single, selfish. Ellie Haworth is as happy as she can be. As anyone can be, considering.
And nobody gets everything, so Ellie tells herself, when occasionally she wakes up trying to remember whose dream she's meant to be living.
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Jojo Moyes (The Last Letter from Your Lover)
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Have you ever struggled through a fight but kept pushing on? Kara Tippetts, who is a mother of four had died of breast cancer. She had written The Hardest Peace to show how she was living the best way she could in her situation. She had never expressed any sort emotion that was never any positive feeling. Starting chapter one Tippetts combines both the mind and the heart in her writing. She does not give the reader any way of comparing their life to her story, having to look back on their own. Her book distinguishes many of her hardships that she had before her passing. Abuse, drugs, and broken relationships all lead up to her talk of cancer. Throughout this whole story Tippetts calls her cancer “hard”. She describes her fight with each hard, while demonstrating her feelings of grace. She had never once let her children or husband see her as unhappy. She wanted them to remember her as being this loving wife and mother that cared deeply for them.
I feel that this books stands out before all other when speaking of the fight against cancer. Having to always look in the positives shows that you accept what you have. Kara Tippetts has shown that living with happiness, means to enjoy life. When always focusing on the negatives you always feel like you need to please others rather than yourself. Her life, I feel resembles the Catholic Social teaching, “Call to family, community, and participations.” This teaching, I feel resembles her because it shows that marriage and family must be supported and strengthened. Tippetts wanted to show her happiness to her family, wanting to show that she is not in any case, worried. She wanted them to know that she was going to be home soon, meaning with God in Heaven. So what I have taken out of her story is this one thing, “Always keep a positive mind and never show that you are unhappy, for at the end of life there is always a silver lining.
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Kara Tippetts
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The quest of the handsome prince was complete. He had found his fair maiden and the world had its fairytale. In her ivory tower, Cinderella was unhappy, locked away from her friends, her family and the outside world. As the public celebrated the Prince’s fortune, the shades of the prison-house closed inexorably around Diana.
For all her aristocratic breeding, this innocent young kindergarten teacher felt totally at sea in the deferential hierarchy of Buckingham Palace. There were many tears in those three months and many more to come after that. Weight simply dropped off, her waist shrinking from 29 inches when the engagement was announced down to 23 inches on her wedding day. It was during this turbulent time that her bulimia nervosa, which would take nearly a decade to overcome, began. The note Diana left her friends at Coleherne Court saying: “For God’s sake ring me up--I’m going to need you.” It proved painfully accurate.
As Carolyn Bartholomew, who watched her waste away during her engagement, recalls: “She went to live at Buckingham Palace and then the tears started. This little thing got so thin. I was so worried about her. She wasn’t happy, she was suddenly plunged into all this pressure and it was a nightmare for her. She was dizzy with it, bombarded from all sides. It was a whirlwind and she was ashen, she was grey.”
Her first night at Clarence House, the Queen Mother’s London residence, was the calm before the coming storm. She was left to her own devices when she arrived, no-one from the royal family least of all her future husband, thinking it necessary to welcome her to her new world. The popular myth paints a homely picture of the Queen Mother clucking around Diana as she schooled her in the subtle arts of royal protocol while the Queen’s senior lady-in-waiting, Lady Susan Hussey took the young woman aside for tuition in regal history. In reality, Diana was given less training in her new job than the average supermarket checkout operator.
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Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
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It took two breaths for her vision to clear, and but one for her to realize the world was upside down, and someone—a man, judging by the thick calves before her—was standing very close to her. She was dripping wet and freezing cold. A shiver coursed through her, but the uncomfortableness was nothing compared with the pain in her head. Her blood seemed to be filling her entire face at a rapid pace. It whooshed in her ears. She tried to lift her head to see who stood in front of her, but it was useless. Her neck muscles refused to obey. The whooshing became a roar, and darkness began to eat at the corners of her vision. She struggled to form a call for help, but it was nearly impossible. Her tongue was in revolt, and sand seemed to line her throat. She swallowed and strangled out one word. “Help.”
A grunt resounded above her, followed by a brown wooden bucket being set beside her head, and then a man appearing as he crouched. Well, not any man, but Thor MacLeod, her husband. He looked as unhappy to see her as she felt to see him. A grimace turned his lips down, his dark eyebrows almost touched in a V, and his eyes, well, his eyes had been transformed to a swirling, violent sea. Crimson smeared across his right cheek in an ominous path. “Hello, wife.” The last word rolled with distaste off his tongue. That was fine with her. She didn’t care to be wed to him either.
“It seems wherever ye are trouble finds ye.”
“And yet knowing this ye are so dimwitted as to seek me out,” she snapped as a wave of dizziness overcame her. She had to squeeze her eyes shut against it, while inhaling a breath as well as she could, given she was hanging upside down. And why was that? “Why am I upside down,” she demanded, cringing at the weakness of her tone.
“One in yer position should nae have such a haughty tone,” the man shot back.
She hated that he had a point. “What, pray tell, sort of tone would it please ye for me to take, my lord? If ye’ll tell me, I’ll do my best to adopt it,” she said, trying to sound genuinely like she cared, but she could hear herself, and she knew she’d failed miserably.
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Julie Johnstone
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ANDREY: Oh where is it now, where has my past gone, the time when I was young, merry, clever, when I had fine thoughts, fine dreams, when my present and my future were lit up by hope? Why is it that no sooner have we begun to live, we become boring, grey, uninteresting, lazy, indifferent, useless, unhappy… Our town has existed now for two hundred years, it has a hundred thousand inhabitants – and not one of them who isn’t exactly like the others, not one hero, not one scholar, not one artist, not one who stands out in the slightest bit, who might inspire envy or a passionate desire to emulate him. They just eat, drink, sleep, then they die… others are born and they too eat, drink, sleep, and in order not to be dulled by boredom, they diversify their life with vile gossip, vodka, cards, law suits, and the wives deceive their husbands and the husbands lie, pretend they see nothing and hear nothing, and an irremediably coarse influence weighs down on the children, and the spark of God’s spirit dies in them and they become the same kind of pitiful corpses, one like another, as their mothers and fathers…
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Anton Chekhov (Plays: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters)
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I shouldn’t dream of marrying anyone unless I was madly in love with him. And of course there is really nothing a woman enjoys so much as doing all the things she doesn’t like for the sake of someone she does like. And the more self-willed she is, the more she likes it.’
‘I’m afraid I disagree with you. The boot is on the other leg as a rule.’ He spoke with a slight sneer.
‘Exactly,’ I cried eagerly. ‘And that’s why there are so many unhappy marriages. It’s all the fault of the men. Either they give way to their women–and then the women despise them–or else they are utterly selfish, insist on their own way and never say “thank you”. Successful husbands make their wives do just what they want, and then make a frightful fuss of them for doing it. Women like to be mastered, but they hate not to have their sacrifices appreciated. On the other hand, men don’t really appreciate women who are nice to them all the time. When I am married, I shall be a devil most of the time, but every now and then, when my husband least expects it, I shall show him what a perfect angel I can be.’
Harry laughed outright.
‘What a cat-and-dog life you will lead!
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Agatha Christie (The Man in the Brown Suit (Colonel Race, #1))
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hoped. Susan couldn’t understand why her husband would get annoyed when she was happy. If Susan became excited about something, he would get quiet and completely disengage. She was left feeling completely confused as to why her husband was so unhappy when there was clearly something to be happy about. Susan would carefully approach her husband, asking if there was anything wrong, to which he would reply with a simple no. His silent treatment would continue for sometimes weeks at a time, leaving Susan feeling worried that she had done something to hurt him.
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Avery Neal (If He's So Great, Why Do I Feel So Bad?: Recognizing and Overcoming Subtle Abuse)
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We never know. We always think we’ll know, but we don’t. Every woman I know whose husband had an affair never saw it coming even when the signs were obvious. They were there with Davis too. Not that he left me for an actual woman—just the freedom to go find one who was nothing like me—but his unhappiness and jitters were there. The way he no longer spoke about our life like he was happy about it or like it was something he wanted. He talked about our life like he was enduring it, surviving. I was so shocked when he announced he was leaving me that I just started laughing hysterically
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Lucinda Berry (Under Her Care)
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The Old Cordelier, seventh issue: “I believe that Liberty is humanity; thus I believe that Liberty would not prevent the relations of prisoners from seeing their fathers, their husbands, or their sons; I believe that Liberty would not condemn a mother to knock in vain for eight hours at the door of the Conciergerie, in the hope of speaking to her son, and when this unhappy woman had accomplished a hundred leagues in spite of her great age, to oblige her, to see him yet once again, to wait for him upon the road to the scaffold. I believe that Liberty is magnanimous: she would not insult a condemned criminal at the foot of the guillotine, and after his execution, because death wipes out the crime.
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H.G. Parry (A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians (The Shadow Histories, #1))
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He’d grown up with a mother who was always angry. And sure, Gail had been dealt a raw hand with a husband who left her bankrupt with a four-year-old, but her anger just seemed to grow and grow. Teddy loved her, but he was constantly afraid he was going to end up like her, someone who was angry at the cars on the road, cashiers who were slow, and the price of organic blueberries. That unhappiness was in his genes. He had to stay ahead of
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Jennifer Close (Marrying the Ketchups)
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If she had listened to her father, if she had listened to the cousin's husband, she would never have married Note and the years of unhappiness would never have occurred. But they did, because she was headstrong, as everyone is at the age of twenty, and when we simply cannot see, however much we may think we can . The world is full of twenty-year-olds, she thought, all of them blind.
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Alexander McCall Smith (The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency 10 Books Set)
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[...] However, even in the early years of their marriage, when she was about 30 years old, Margery records how she told her husband she no longer wanted to have sex with him; indeed, that Jesus himself had told her not to. [...]
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Janina Ramírez (Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of it)
“
[...] In a rather sad and humiliating scene we see the couple celebrating Midsummer Eve in 1413. Her husband asks:
'Margery, if there came a man with a sword who would slice off my head unless I should have sex with you as I have done before, tell me the truth from your conscience — for you say you will not lie — whether you would allow my head to be sliced off or allow me to be intimate with you, like in the past?' She replies, 'Truthfully, I would rather see you be slain than that we should turn again to the impurity of sexual activity.'
She goads him further, asking why he won't try to have sex with her, even though they sleep in the same bed. He says: 'He became so afraid when he touched her that he dared not do more.' A far cry from the domineering husband we might expect from a medieval marriage. Margery adds insult to injury, explaining that she still lusts after other men but is sickened by her own husband.
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Janina Ramírez (Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of it)
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Blood stink and blood sweat,
teeth unhappy in your shoulder,
my hair ripe, clothes tumbled and wet.
The madwoman in the attic groans
down to me, your fingers in my mouth,
your nails bitten sweet and salty-metallic.
I groan up to her, my mouth at her ear,
another voice in the clear air.
I think of Highsmith’s snails,
the silver trails they leave
on the tablecloth between us.
A canyon behind the house,
murder house and happy.
Sleep drunk and blood drunk,
you man, you husband.
The night in my mouth
a fricative waiting to be born,
a downpouring of silence that goes on and on
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crystal vega-huerta
“
was shaking his head sadly as he spoke—was that I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands. So I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
“
While Najee wasn’t ashamed or regretful of the day and the night she’d spent in Ian’s arms, she didn’t want him thinking she was the type of woman that would cheat on her husband. Unhappy marriage or not…She
”
”
Leila Lacey (I Remember Me)
“
CAST: Gertrude Berg as Bessie Glass, operator of a hotel in the Catskill Mountains. Joseph Greenwald (1935) as Barney Glass, her husband. Josef Buloff as Barney, 1953–54. WRITER: Gertrude Berg. House of Glass was quickly created by Gertrude Berg after the initial cancellation of her popular serial, The Goldbergs. She took the setting and characters from her own life: her father had run such a place in the teens, giving her experiences with waiters, bellboys, cooks, and guests from all walks of life. The character of Barney Glass was an almost literal lift from her father. The stories she wrote were the stories she remembered, and “where there were unhappy endings I added happy ones. … The radio hotel always solved its problems with a laugh.” But it couldn’t beat Burns and Allen, its competition on CBS, and it faded after eight months.
”
”
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
“
In my opinion, it’s too soon for Helen to marry anyone, but when she does…she will need a husband with a placid temperament. One who will allow her to develop at her own pace.”
“And you assume I wouldn’t,” he said rather than asked.
“I think you will command and govern a wife just as you do everything else. I don’t believe you would ever harm her physically, but you’ll whittle her to fit your life, and make her exceedingly unhappy. This environment--London, the crowds, the department store--is so ill suited to her nature that she would wither like a transplanted orchid. I’m afraid I can’t support the idea of marriage for you and Helen.” Pausing, she took a long breath before saying, “I believe it’s in her best interest for the engagement to be broken.”
A heavy silence descended.
“Is that what she wants?”
“She said earlier today that she has no wish to see you again.”
Throughout Kathleen’s speech, Winterborne had looked away as if he were only half listening. At that last remark, however, she found herself the target of a bladelike gaze.
Perhaps, she thought uneasily, it would be best to leave soon.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
Stop doing this,” she cried fiercely. “You’ll drive me mad. You want to behave as if I belong to you, but I don’t, and I never will. Your worst nightmare is becoming a husband and father, and so you seem determined to form some kind of lesser attachment that I do not want. Even if I were pregnant and you felt duty-bound to propose, I would still refuse you, because I know it would make you as unhappy as it would make me.”
Devon’s intensity didn’t lessen, but it changed from anger into something else. He held her with a gaze of hot blue infinity.
“What if I said I loved you?” he asked softly.
The question drove a spike of pain through her chest. “Don’t.” Her eyes smarted with tears. “You’re not the kind of man who could ever say that and mean it.”
“It’s not who I was.” His voice was steady. “But it’s who I am now. You’ve shown me.”
For at least a half minute, the only sound was the crackling, shivering fire on the hearth.
She didn’t understand what he truly thought or felt. But she would be a fool to believe him.
“Devon,” she eventually said, “when it comes to love…neither you nor I can trust your promises.”
She couldn’t see through the glittering film of misery, but she was aware of him moving, bending to pick up the coat he had tossed aside, rummaging for something.
He came to her, catching her arm lightly in his hand, drawing her to the bed. The mattress was so high that he had to fit his hands around her waist and hoist her upward to sit on it. He set something on her lap.
“What is this?” She looked down at a small wooden box.
His expression was unfathomable. “A gift for you.”
Her sharp tongue got the better of her. “A parting gift?”
Devon scowled. “Open it.”
Obeying, she lifted the lid. The box was lined with red velvet. Pulling aside a protective layer of cloth, she uncovered a tiny gold pocket watch on a long chain, the casing delicately engraved with flowers and leaves. A glass window on the hinged front cover revealed a white enamel dial and black hour and minute markers.
“It belonged to my mother,” she heard Devon say. “It’s the only possession of hers that I have. She never carried it.” Irony edged his voice. “Time was never important to her.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
After six months of hardship and going to therapy three times a week, Sandy’s now elated. She realized—as has almost everyone I know who has been left or broken up with—that, by divorcing her, her husband relieved her of the job of eventually leaving him. As my mom has said, when one person is unhappy, it usually means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet. Sandy hadn’t realized how unhappy she was until he was gone.
”
”
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))
“
Please forgive me for inconveniencing you, Mr. Winterborne. I don’t intend to stay long.”
“Does anyone know you’re here?” he asked curtly.
“No.”
“Speak your piece, then, and make it fast.”
“Very well. I--”
“But if it has anything to do with Lady Helen,” he interrupted, “then leave now. She can come to me herself if there’s something that needs to be discussed.”
“I’m afraid Helen can’t go anywhere at the moment. She’s been in bed all day, ill with a nervous condition.”
His eyes changed, some unfathomable emotion spangling the dark depths. “A nervous condition,” he repeated, his voice iced with scorn. “That seems a common complaint among aristocratic ladies. Someday I’d like to know what makes you all so nervous.”
Kathleen would have expected a show of sympathy or a few words of concern for the woman he was betrothed to. “I’m afraid you are the cause of Helen’s distress,” she said bluntly. “Your visit yesterday put her in a state.”
Winterborne was silent, his eyes black and piercing.
“She told me only a little about what happened,” Kathleen continued. “But it’s clear that there is much you don’t understand about Helen. My late husband’s parents kept all three of their daughters very secluded. More than was good for them. As a result, all three are quite young for their age. Helen is one-and-twenty, but she hasn’t had the same experiences, or seasoning, as other girls her age. She knows nothing of the world outside Eversby Priory. Everything is new to her. Everything. The only men she has ever associated with have been a handful of close relations, the servants, and the occasional visitor to the estate. Most of what she knows about men has been from books and fairy tales.”
“No one can be that sheltered,” Winterborne said flatly.
“Not in your world. But at an estate like Eversby Priory, it’s entirely possible.” Kathleen paused. “In my opinion, it’s too soon for Helen to marry anyone, but when she does…she will need a husband with a placid temperament. One who will allow her to develop at her own pace.”
“And you assume I wouldn’t,” he said rather than asked.
“I think you will command and govern a wife just as you do everything else. I don’t believe you would ever harm her physically, but you’ll whittle her to fit your life, and make her exceedingly unhappy. This environment--London, the crowds, the department store--is so ill suited to her nature that she would wither like a transplanted orchid. I’m afraid I can’t support the idea of marriage for you and Helen.” Pausing, she took a long breath before saying, “I believe it’s in her best interest for the engagement to be broken.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
Neni had wanted to yell back at her mother and tell her to stop justifying her husband acting as if his unhappiness was everyone’s fault.
”
”
Imbolo Mbue (Behold the Dreamers)
“
let’s think about Jesus’s statement. It’s a command against something that many of us feel is involuntary. I mean, I don’t normally think I choose anxiety. I’ve never said to my husband, “Honey, I’m going to take some time to go for a walk and just focus on how I can make myself feel utterly out of control and stressed out. I will fixate on all the things I’m unhappy about or I can’t change in my life, and hopefully when I return, I will be a raving lunatic.” That would be ridiculous. But, if you think about it, Jesus states this as if it is indeed a choice. Do not worry. It’s a command from Jesus
”
”
Michelle Anthony (Becoming a Spiritually Healthy Family: Avoiding the 6 Dysfunctional Parenting Styles)
“
Tiff’s allowing her kids the luxury of watching television brought to mind a dinner Pete, the kids, and I went to with a few other couples and their kids. We were at a restaurant where the service was friendly but slow, and after five minutes, all of our kids were growing restless. My husband and I reached for our iPhones, because years earlier we’d decided (or at least accepted) that we’d let our children play on screens while they waited for food in restaurants. Another couple, for reasons of civility or table manners or brain development, had a no-screens-at-the-table policy in effect, so instead they reached for the piles of toys they’d carried with them, in big tote bags brimming with markers and Play-Doh and Disney figurines. They poured these nondigital diversions onto the table, turning the place settings into an elevated rec room. Another couple at the table disapproved of both of these choices. They wanted their children to sit nicely and participate in the conversation. Mostly this meant their kids flopped around and played with the saltshakers and kicked each other’s knees. The one childless couple at the table grimaced at all of us. I could see them silently interrogating each other, trying to understand how it was possible that all six of their friends were such ineffectual parents. Everyone was tense and unhappy. Everyone felt watched and judged. Everyone was wondering who was doing it the right way. But worst of all, worse than the atmosphere of guardedness and anxiety, was the fact that no one was acknowledging any of it.
This, it turns out, is the most important rule of parenting as a competitive sport: Nobody ever, no matter what, admits to competing. We smile and nod and hold our judgments until we get home from the restaurant. We say things like, “There’s no single right way.” We say these things as we sip our drinks, and only when we get home do we say to our partner or the nearest person who will listen, “What the fuck are they doing with those kids?” Nothing is acknowledged. Nothing is discussed. And on and on the parenting game goes; it’s hard to win while pretending not to play.
”
”
Kim Brooks (Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear)
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They say a mother is only as happy as her most unhappy child.
”
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Jamie Brenner (The Husband Hour)
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Who's happy here? It's all sham and fakery," Nimmo said laconically, not bothering to look up from the magazine. "No one's happy here. It's not possible. Arre yaar, think about it, what are the things you normal people get unhappy about? I don't mean you, but grown-ups like you--what makes them unhappy? Price-rise, children's school admissions, husbands' beatings, wives' cheatings, Hindu-Muslim riots, Indo-Pak war--outside things that settle down eventually. But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can't.
”
”
Arundhati Roy (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness)
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He told me that people were saying my novel was feminist, and his advice to me—he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke—was that I should never call myself a feminist since feminists are women who are unhappy because they cannot find husbands.
”
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
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so I repeat, quite soon, you would meet someone that could match your mentality and would be a friend to you as well as a husband. Because that is what is needed in marriage . . . friendship. And that is why there are so many unhappy people in the world, because when love flies up the chimney the heat goes out of the ashes. And love does fly up the chimney, my dear, that love that drives you . . . ’ He stopped; then inclining his head on one side, he asked, ‘Dare I say it to you, you a young lady, that the love that drives you to bed with its first flush fades. It’s bound to fade, and then, as I said, if it doesn’t leave friendship behind, life becomes a withered thing. I speak from experience, my dear, for I have so many clients that are walking about dead because they didn’t prepare for love dying on them.
”
”
Catherine Cookson (The Black Candle)
“
After speaking with Rachel, I spoke with Rachel’s mom, Leah, about how her mind-set changed in response to Rachel’s addiction, and about what she tells other parents experiencing similar struggles.12 Leah tells parents that she learned a key lesson the first time she was in Beit T’Shuvah director Harriet Rossetto’s office with her husband seated beside her: Rossetto, a formidable presence behind her vast desk, asked Leah and her husband what was most important to them, and Leah replied, “I just want Rachel to be happy.” Turning her deep, probing eyes on Leah, Rossetto laid into her with advice Leah now passes on to other parents: “Saying you just want your kid to be happy puts enormous pressure on the child. They feel if they’re not happy, they’re failing. Periods of unhappiness are okay and our kids need to know that; it’s the struggle that makes you who you are.” Rossetto advises that the goal of a kid’s happiness is actually a dual burden, negatively affecting both child and parent. “The whole family system has to change,” says Rossetto. “The child is addicted to pleasure seeking. The parent is addicted to controlling a child’s choices and behaviors and creating a perfect human being, so their emotions are a mess. If the child is having a good day, Mommy and Daddy are happy, and if he’s not having a good day Mommy and Daddy are in despair. Severing that umbilicus is what our family program does. A parent’s well-being can’t be dependent on whether or not the kid is having a good day.” In addition to counseling other parents, Leah puts Rossetto’s wisdom into daily practice with her two youngest children, who still live at home. She says, “At times we make life too easy for kids by not letting them experience things we think of as traumas but that are, in reality, not all that bad, and we solve problems for them instead of letting them stew over some things. When my kids are storming about the house, it’s tempting to feel ‘My kid is angry at me’ and to want to do something about it. Now, I can accept that they can be unhappy or angry, and I don’t need to soothe their feelings; it’s okay.
”
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Julie Lythcott-Haims (How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success)
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Although the preceding examples have been dramatic, codependency doesn’t necessarily have to be so intense. And it doesn’t always involve experiences with deeply troubled people. Kristen is married, has two young children, and knows of no alcoholism or compulsive disorders in her immediate or extended family. Yet, she calls herself codependent. Her problem, she says, is that other people’s moods control her emotions; she, in turn, tries to control their feelings. “If my husband is happy, and I feel responsible for that, then I’m happy. If he’s upset, I feel responsible for that, too. I’m anxious, uncomfortable, and upset until he feels better. I try to make him feel better. I feel guilty if I can’t. And he gets angry with me for trying. “And it’s not only with him that I behave codependently,” she added. “It’s with everyone: my parents, my children, guests in my home. Somehow, I just seem to lose myself in other people. I get enmeshed in them. “I’d like to do something about it—this thing called codependency—before it gets any worse. I’m not terribly unhappy,” she said, “but I’d like to learn how to relax and start enjoying myself and other people.” A minister summarized the condition this way: “Some people are really codependent, and some of us are a little bit codependent.
”
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Melody Beattie (Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself)
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She dared to tell herself that perhaps she would have been happier with him, alone with him in that house she had restored for him with as much love as he had felt when he restored his house for her, and that simple hypothesis dismayed her because it permitted her to realize the extreme of unhappiness she had reached. Then she summoned her last strength and obliged her husband to talk to her without evasion, to confront her, to argue with her, to cry with her in rage at the loss of paradise, until they heard the last rooster crow, and the light filtered in through the lace curtains of the palace, and the sun rose, and her husband, puffy with so much talk, exhausted with lack of sleep, his heart fortified with so much weeping, laced his shoes, tightened his belt, fastened everything that remained to him of his manhood, and told her yes, my love, they were going to look for the love they had lost in Europe: starting tomorrow and forever after.
”
”
Gabriel García Márquez (Love in the Time of Cholera)
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I love too intensely and I’m consumed by my own love (analysis, jealousy, doubt)—so much so that when I’m in love, I always end up slightly extinguished and saddened. When I love, I become harsh, serious, intolerant. A heavy shadow settles over my relationships. I love and want to be loved with so much gravitas that it quickly becomes exhausting (for me, for the other person). It’s always an unhappy kind of love.
”
”
Maud Ventura (My Husband)
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Do not think, thinking is not natural in women. Do not think, thinking is harmful in women. Thinking too freely led unhappy Eve to pick the fatal apple from the tree, to press upon Adam, her husband, to incriminate him in her sin of disobedience.
”
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Joyce Carol Oates (Butcher)
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Getting more into one-on-one therapy helped. It helped me to keep going, and it helped me to quit drinking. I almost feel it’s mandatory in my position. C’mon, buddy, you’ve got to get your head shrunk. Because your head gets so big, you need to shrink it. You need to go to some guy who’s going to tell you what you already know about yourself and pay attention to you for an hour straight. Which we all like. We all need a little attention.
The first time I ever considered therapy was back in Boston, during my run in Richard III. I was staying at our director David Wheeler’s house for a few days, and he came into my room one morning to share some good news with me. “Hey, Al!” he said. “You just won the National Board of Review!” It was my first major film award for The Godfather. I said to him, in the softest voice I could summon up, “I was going to ask you, David, do you have the name of a psychiatrist? Because I need one.” That was my answer to him. Not that I was unhappy about winning such a prestigious award, but there were just other things on my mind.
I saw a psychiatrist in Boston first, and then I went and got myself a guy in New York. I fell in love with the process, and I got to a point where I was in therapy five days a week at certain times. I highly recommend therapy if you’re at all leaning in that direction. Maybe you don’t need it five times a week, but give it a whirl. There’s an old story: A woman goes to a therapist for years. It’s her last appointment, because she feels she’s come to a great place in her life and is ready to move on. She wants to congratulate her therapist and say goodbye. So she tells him, “You’ve done so much good for me. I love my husband so much. Every day with my kids is just a joy. My work is going off the charts. I’m seeing a whole new side of life. You’ve been so wonderful. I never hear you speak. You just take it all in. Please tell me, how did you do it?” The doctor looks at her and says, “No habla inglés.” That’s an interpretation of therapy too; you need to talk and get it out. When I was living with Jill, before I ever went to therapy, I used to just sit in the bathtub alone and talk about things. I cleared my mind to myself.
It’s an unusual relationship that you forge when you find a good doctor, someone you feel has that kind of commitment to you. And then they take some colossal amount of time off, and you don’t see them for the whole summer. I had one of those episodes when I couldn’t find my doctor. I might have been spared about twenty years of tsuris if I could have avoided it. It’s a good idea that when your psychiatrist goes away, you know where they are and you can call them when you’re in trouble. They need rest too. I can deal with, “Hey, my daughter’s graduating college, I’ll be out for a few days.” But going up a fucking river somewhere, to not be available for, like, six weeks? Come on, my life was capable of going right off the rails in far less time than that.
I used to have recurring dreams in which I go to my psychiatrist’s office but can’t find him anywhere. He’s in the building, but he’s unavailable. I’m at the door, but there’s not even a buzzer I can press to let him know I’m there and no way to let me in. That was my dream. Now I have that feeling about my agent.
”
”
Al Pacino (Sonny Boy)
“
An elegant Italian woman, worldly, sophisticated. Francesca. At the end of World War II, she meets and marries an American soldier, moves with him to his small Iowan farm town of good people who bring carrot cakes to their neighbors, look after the elderly, and ostracize those who flout norms by, say, committing adultery. Her husband is kind, devoted, and limited. She loves her children.
One day her family leaves town for a week, to show their pigs at a state fair. She's alone in the farmhouse for the first time in her married life. She relishes her solitude. Until a photographer fro National Geographic knocks on the door, asking directions to a nearby landmark... and they fall into a passionate, four-day affair. He begs her to run away with him; she packs her bags.
Until, at the last minute, she unpacks them.
Partly because she's married, and she has children, and the town's eyes are on them all.
But also because she knows that she and the photographer have already taken each other to the perfect and beautiful world. And that now it's time to descend to the actual one. If they try to live in that other world for good, it will recede into the distance; it will be as if they'd never been there at all. She says goodbye, and they long for each other for the rest of their lives.
Yet Francesca is quietly sustained by their encounter, the photographer creatively renewed. On his deathbed years later, he sends her a book of images he made, commemorating their four days together.
If this story sounds familiar , it's because it comes from The Bridges of Madison County, a 1992 novel by Robert James Waller that sold more than twelve million copies, and a 1995 movie, starring Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood, that grossed $182 million. The press attributed its popularity to a rash of women trapped in unhappy marriages and pining for handsome photographers.
But that's not what the story was really about.
In the frenzy after the book came out, there were two camps: one that loved it because the couple's love was pure and endured over the decades. The other camp saw this as a copout--that real love is working through challenges of an actual relationship.
Which was right?
”
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Susan Cain (Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole)
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love and want to be loved with so much gravitas that it quickly becomes exhausting (for me, for the other person). It’s always an unhappy kind of love.
”
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Maud Ventura (My Husband)
“
He will take in the tall, lean figure; the small breasts; the gentle swell below her navel; the flare of her pelvic bones that are like wings hovering over the long, gazelle-like legs; the fragile instep; and finally the toes, the clever gap between the big toe and the second. He will take it all in, memorizing every detail . . . Celeste has had one husband and one lover, the latter like her, a wayfarer in the wasteland of an unhappy marriage, and the affair didn’t help either of them find their bearings. She succumbs to Digby’s lack of irony or self-consciousness, an innocence and purity that gives him authority, like the bold lines he sketches. His passion for her singes her skin, enlivens her. Who would not want to be loved that way?
”
”
Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
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We were careful to secure the garter just so. Too close to the nylon risked a run. You cannot imagine the troubles suggested, in those days, by a stocking with a run: the woman was drunk, careless, unhappy, indifferent (to her husband’s career, even to his affections), ready to go home. Slip, then sheath—small white dress shields pinned under each arm with tiny gold safety pins—then shoes, jewelry, a spray of perfume. I’d be faint with the heat in my column of clothes by the time I came downstairs. Peter, my husband, waiting, newly shaved, handsome in his tropical-weight suit, white shirt, and thin tie, having a first drink and looking a little wilted himself. And the girls we passed on the street or who met us at the door, or who only moved across my inner eye by then in their white ao dais, were like pale leaves stirring in the humid stillness, sunstruck indications of some unseen breeze: cool, weightless, beautiful. It was at a garden party on a Sunday afternoon, early in our first month in Saigon. The party was in the elegant courtyard of a villa not far from the Basilica. A lovely street lined with tamarind trees. We’d only been there a few minutes ourselves when I turned to see a young family paused at the entrance, posed as if for a pretty picture beneath a swag of scarlet bougainvillea. Baby boy in the arms of the slim mother, daughter at her side, tall father in a pale suit—another engineer, I learned later. It was much later still, decades later, that I suddenly wondered, laughing to think about it, why so many engineers were needed. I was twenty-three then, with a bachelor’s from Marymount. For a year before my marriage, I’d taught kindergarten at a parish school
”
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Alice McDermott (Absolution)
“
This constant dialogue of What should I do to keep everyone happy? drains a lot of mental energy that could otherwise be used in more productive or creative ways. For years I wondered what had happened to me after college, when I had my first child. Why was it that I could no longer muster up the ability to write fiction, even when I had the free time? Why was I choosing to plop down in front of the TV at the end of the day, wasting my evenings watching reruns of The Office instead of feeding my soul with creative work? I wasn’t even doing that much. When friends asked me what I was up to, I never had an answer. I was at home, deciding what to do with my baby—what the best choice of clothing and food and activities was for us. Worrying over whether he was gaining enough weight, or whether he had died from SIDS every time he was down for a nap. Do I take him to the store or go out later, after my husband gets home? Will the baby be unhappy if I take him out? (Will he poop up the back of his onesie? Almost definitely.) Will my husband feel neglected if I steal off to the store during our precious alone time? Should I breastfeed now or should I try to pump? Should I put the baby in a cute outfit or keep him comfy in pajamas? Even when my days appeared uneventful, I was in my head all the time but rarely thinking about myself in that bigger, deeper way that used to make my life feel meaningful. What consumed most of my mental effort had minimal emotional rewards. It simply left me feeling drained. I finally understood why so many women said they lost themselves after becoming mothers. I no longer had the mental and emotional capacity to tend to my interior life, my creative life, my meaning-driven life. At the end of the day, I had nothing left in my mind to give.
”
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Gemma Hartley (Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward)
“
Husbands die every day, Dolores. Why, one is probably dying right now, while we're sitting here talking. I should know, shouldn't I? After all, look what happened to mine. An accident is sometimes and unhappy woman's best friend.
”
”
Stephen King (Dolores Claiborne)
“
A woman who walks out the first time a man mistreats her gets respect fast. You would respect such a woman too, wouldn't you? You don’t need to be aggressive to get respect. A very gentle person can get respect. What is required is consistency between words and behavior. The work that you will do as a result of following the methods in this book will get you more respect. That’s important because your husband is not going to be able to love you better if he can’t respect you. Respect and love go hand in hand. We
”
”
Jack Ito (What To Do When He Won't Change: Saving Your Marriage When He is Angry, Selfish, Unhappy, or Avoids You)
“
The husband damages the relationship by abusing his wife, whether physically or emotionally, and whether by violence, verbal abuse, or neglect. The wife also loses her husband's respect by allowing this to go on—by continuing to participate in it. Certainly she isn't helping her husband by allowing him to do things which harm her, the relationship, and himself. This bears repeating—you can’t show love to your husband, or earn his respect, by allowing him to do things which harm himself, you, or the relationship. Everything that your husband does to harm you or to harm the relationship also harms himself. Letting such behaviors go on deprives him of what he could have, with you, if he didn’t do such behaviors. It reduces his respect for you. And unless he is an insensitive man, he loses respect for himself. We don’t have to think of a wildly dangerous man to imagine this situation. Even a man who would rather spend his time with his computer than with his wife is harming his relationship. It is neglect, at least. He will not feel like a better husband for it. Can you imagine him thinking, “I'm a good husband because I spend all my time on the computer (gambling, golfing, at work, etc.)”?
”
”
Jack Ito (What To Do When He Won't Change: Saving Your Marriage When He is Angry, Selfish, Unhappy, or Avoids You)
“
There is no one who can hang onto their relationship by force, but there are an abundance of people who try. The more we fear, the tighter we grasp, and the more we lose our grip. Your husband grew up with a lot of cultural rules and experiences. He chooses his actions according to what he knows (his habits) and according to what he fears (his insecurities). You can be his butterfly, but only if he doesn't cage you in a glass jar. Love is given freely, not taken by force. Knowing each other intimately, trusting, growing, supporting, and feeling free are all part of the same package. You can have that. And as much as you want it, he wants it too (for himself, at least). Keeping that in mind will be key to his loosening his grip on you. The more your husband restricts you and controls you, the less freedom he can have for himself. If he wants you to stay home all the time rather than spend time with your friends, then you can give him what he wants. Tell him you will be happy to be with him instead of your friends. The only condition is that he spend that time with you, doing something meaningful. If he doesn't follow through, go out with your friends. Most men will decide very soon that it’s ok for you to go out once in awhile. Then, that will be what they want, too. The more control you give your husband, the more he will resist it. If your husband is always telling you what to do, don't fight it. Instead, nicely ask for his advice with everything, and he will tire of giving you advice and stop telling you what to do. There are other methods to use for over-controlling men, but this works most of the time, is low conflict, and promotes
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Jack Ito (What To Do When He Won't Change: Saving Your Marriage When He is Angry, Selfish, Unhappy, or Avoids You)
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better relationship. We can except that fire burns, but we don't have to let it burn down our house. Distinguishing between what you don't like and what is actually harmful to the relationship is an important distinction which will help you to know what needs to be accepted and when you need to have good boundaries. You also must distinguish between what he doesn't like and what you do that is bad for the relationship. Even a difficult husband is sometimes right.
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Jack Ito (What To Do When He Won't Change: Saving Your Marriage When He is Angry, Selfish, Unhappy, or Avoids You)
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Acceptance begins to happen when we stop trying to change something about our partner. At that point we become more sad and less angry. When you don't change in a way that your husband wants you to, he will eventually realize that you are just not going to be the way he wants you to be (locked in a cage, under control, only attending to him, a supermodel, etc.). It is a real experience of loss for him. He loses his image of how he believed you were or could be. It’s kind of pitiable, but it's necessary if he is to love who you really are.
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Jack Ito (What To Do When He Won't Change: Saving Your Marriage When He is Angry, Selfish, Unhappy, or Avoids You)
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And, although your relationship may not be good for either of you right now, it is working a little. Husbands, like most everyone else, continue to do what works a little. Difficult men are like people who drive a clunky car, belching blue smoke. As long as it works, they are ok. When it breaks down, then they fix it. There will be no significant demand on your husband to adapt—to change for the better—until his way breaks down.
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Jack Ito (What To Do When He Won't Change: Saving Your Marriage When He is Angry, Selfish, Unhappy, or Avoids You)
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When it comes to love, I’ve learned nothing. I’ve been reliving the same scenario ever since I was a teenager: I love too intensely and I’m consumed by my own love (analysis, jealousy, doubt)—so much so that when I’m in love, I always end up slightly extinguished and saddened. When I love, I become harsh, serious, intolerant. A heavy shadow settles over my relationships. I love and want to be loved with so much gravitas that it quickly becomes exhausting (for me, for the other person). It’s always an unhappy kind of love.
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Right, Jo; better be happy old maids than unhappy wives, or unmaidenly girls, running about to find husbands
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