Dan Savage Quotes

As a monogamous creature, I feel sometimes that it fills up a function that affairs have in married people's life.

Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

The sweetest part of being a couple is sharing your life with someone else. But my life, evidently, had not been good enough to share.

People often say that when couples are married for a long time, they start to look alike. I don't believe that. But I do believe their sentences start to look alike.

And another thing. Don’t ever kid yourself about loving some one. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.

You surely know that in the course of a long marriage it is not unusual for a husband or a wife to develop a crush on someone else.

My impression is that staying together as a couple does not correspond to the challenges themselves, but whether the very idea of breaking up is an option on the table. If it is, then some people take it. If it's not, then they will keep working at it. You must know people who were terribly suited who make it work. And there are couples who seem perfectly suited that break up. It's a mystery to everyone.

Modern multiple divorce is rooted in the fact that many are seeking in human relationships what human relationships can never give. Why do they have multiple divorce, instead of merely promiscuous affairs? Because they are seeking more than merely sexual relationship.

When married people don't get on they can separate, but if they're not married it's impossible. It's a tie that only death can sever.

Over the long haul, many of those people [in a difficult marriage] will begin to reciprocate, because you are meeting a basic need in their life, the need for love, and they know they don't deserve love many times.

Marriage is an arrangement by which two people start by getting the best out of each other and often end by getting the worst.

Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn't be said; maybe every relationship started over every time two people came together.

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

Sometimes people who had been together for a long time got to imagining that things used to be better, even when they weren't.

The story of a couple is always very fragile, especially over more than thirty years. People know it's not easy, and even though you have strong feeling and desire and endless love, it doesn't always happen.

Most men find it difficult to remain true to a single woman, but relatively easy to be true to three or four at the same time.

It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness.

I can't imagine anything more stressful than monogamy.

I don't believe [monogamy] is realistic. But, I believe that we, as people, have the power to make it happen.

And, there are negatives and positives to it. Like, you know, just like a marriage, where you're like, "Well, this... you know, is the sex still as exciting as it was two years ago?"

He tried to give his wife pleasure in little ways, because he had come to realize, after nearly two decades together, how often he disappointed her in the big things. It was never intentional. They simply had very different notions of what ought to take up most space in life.

I saw you happy. Happier than you've been in a long time. With someone you like that much, the lows are as low as the highs are high.

These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. There were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. Money is no substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.

I am not convinced that men and women were ever meant to share the same house, though some people can do it beautifully.

I know that people change. I thought... I thought we're going to change together. I thought that's what it meant to be in love.