Bill Wilson Quotes

The person who needs the other person the least in a relationship is the stronger member.

Love is generally confused with dependence; but in point of fact, you can love only in proportion to your capacity for independence.

I don't think it's necessarily healthy to go into relationships as a needy person. Better to go in with a full deck.

Let's face it - no matter how independent you are, you still have this nagging need to be desired.

True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we've expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways.

You will not become dependent on the people you love. You will share - and sharing is beautiful.

Children who have learned to be comfortably dependent can become not only comfortably independent but also comfortable with having people depend on them. They can lean, stand, and be leaned upon, because they know what a good feeling it can be to feel needed.

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.

Being able to depend on someone doesn't mean you're dependent on them.

But relying on one person for your every need is so dangerous. One set of hands isn't enough to keep you from falling.

If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own two feet, he or she may be a life saver, but the relationship is not one of love.

Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.

I think if we want to find happiness by finding a life partner, then it's a little selfish. You should be complete within yourself, so that when you're in a relationship, you can give out happiness rather than expect it.

I never wanted to weigh more heavily on a man than a bird.

In the past I would self destruct when it came to love - I was immature, throwing myself into things but now times have changed, I want a relationship where you understand the other person.

Life cannot be without relationship, but we have made it so agonizing and hideous by basing it on personal and possessive love. Can one love and yet not possess? You will find the true answer not in escape, ideals, beliefs but through the understanding of the causes of dependence and possessiveness.

The best relationship is one that does not foster too much independence nor too much dependence, but exists in the healthy interdependence zone.

I want to reach everyone, but I have a dedication to women. Being that I'm a woman myself, and with the things that I've gone through, I've dealt with a lot of women that are in the dark and blind about relationships who depend on men for their happiness, emotionally and financially.

When I was younger, the idea of the bad boy was appealing, but then I grew up and realized that stable people are more fulfilling. Bad boys need more time to themselves. I want to be in a relationship with someone who knows how to take care of himself and is therefore able to take care of me. That way, we can put each other first.

When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on - series polygamy - until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimension to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.

I was still too young to know that there is no such thing as love without trust. There is only obsession and co-dependence.

Romance, like alcohol, should be enjoyed but must not be allowed to become necessary.

I can live without it all - love with its blood pump, sex with its messy hungers, men with their peacock strutting, their silly sexual baggage, their wet tongues in my ear.

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

I learned again and again in my life, until you get your own act together, you’re not ready for Big Love. What you’re ready for is one of those codependent relationships where you desperately need a partner.