Billy Graham Quotes

A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect love. Could it be otherwise, when both men and women are so imperfect? Could aught else be expected? Yet all do expect it.

Marrying a man is like buying something you've been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn't always go with everything else in the house.

Pity the married couple who expect too much from one another.

I don't have this fantasy about marriage anymore. Everyone says it takes hard work. Well, it kind of does - and I'm much more pragmatic about romance than I used to be.

If we did not look to marriage as the principal source of happiness, fewer marriages would end in tears.

There is no magic person out there, no perfect human being out there waiting for you.

If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone, they'd never marry.

Newlyweds, they have this ideal, this picture of what marriage is like, something similar of their favorite memories growing up. If only it were that simple.

Some of the reason why you have so many divorces is that we tend to get married, most of the time, not for ourselves, but for others, or for how it looks to others.

I had a very wise person tell me that he thinks marriage, when you're younger, you keep thinking you can fix things. That's what people do. And you can't really fix anything. It shouldn't be a massive difficult thing every day. Life's difficult enough.

I think that with marriages, people have to understand that you have to look at your marriage and understand what is needed in your marriage - not what people think your marriage should be or what people want your marriage to be.

I think every person deserves two marriages, because you may not get the first one right. You really never knew. That's why divorce is so big. We all want it to last, but that's not always the reality of it.

I'm not going to pretend that I am the best thing in their life and they have to be totally loyal.

I love movies, but I think people think relationships are supposed to go how they go in movies. The ones I like are the ones that represent life.

The idea that you can get everything you want in one person is destructive, and maybe when you accept that the number is closer to 50 or 60 or 70 percent, that's when you can start to make some progress in choosing the right person.

Especially in writing love stories, there's always the assumption that once you've said 'I do,' once you get to the point where you're married, well, the hard part is over.

When I was young and, supposedly so beautiful, I had a tsunami of men crashing in on me and some really, really nice guys wanted to marry me. But I only ever wanted to marry for love. And I did. And it worked... for the first 20 minutes.

Marriage is not super-important to me - most end in divorce. I love the idea of being with someone forever, but I don't think it happens very often.

I still think marriage is a goofy institution if you set it up as this institution with a predetermined set of rules. It's unhealthy to have a predisposed expectation of what you think a marriage should be - as this thing at the end of the rainbow. False expectations take away joy.

A marriage is likely to be called happy if neither party ever expected to get much happiness out of it.

The wonder is not that some married people are less happy than they hoped to be, but that any married people, out of the honeymoon, or even in it, are ever happy at all.

She wasn't, nor ever had been, under the illusion that marriage was a relationship characterized by endless bliss and romance. Throw any two people together, add the inevitable ups and downs, give the mixture a vigorous stir, and a few stormy arguments were inevitable, no matter how the couple loved each other.

I'm an enormous product of my century, I'm a product of my upbringing. I was not aware of the fact that I was entering marriage with the highest set of expectations that humans have ever brought to the institution. It was really good to find that out. It doesn't have to be the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the moon and the stars - it can just be the moon. It's enough that it just can be what it is.

All marriages have a time limit if you enter them for the wrong reasons. Marriage doesn't get easier...it only gets harder. If you marry someone hoping it will improve things, you might as well set your timer the second you say, 'I do.

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.