Alan Cohen Quotes

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.

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

If you go into a relationship expecting someone else to fill you up, you're doomed right off.

It's nice to be with someone, but I don't think you need to be in a relationship to feel complete. That would be really sad.

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.

It is only when we no longer compulsively need someone that we can have a real relationship with them.

If we are happy within ourselves, we don't accept or demand that our partner should fulfill every need. We need to be comfortable with our own company.

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

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.

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

It is the same way with dating. The time you are most prepared for dating is when you don't need anyone to complete you, fulfill you, or instill in you a sense of worth or purpose.

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.

We need to help people to discover the true meaning of love. Love is generally confused with dependence. Those of us who have grown in true love know that we can love only in proportion to our capacity for independence.

To me 'they lived happily ever after' means to be happy with yourself! My parents always taught me that being happy has to work without Prince Charming. My life is completed without a prince but it's nice of course to have someone who loves you and fights for you.

You are so much better off on your own than with the wrong person.

When you truly give up trying to be whole through others, you end up receiving what you always wanted from others.

I really always expected to somebody to make me happy and I don't think you can really enter into a relationship until you are happy.

I am already inherently full and complete as I am. Man doesn't need woman and woman doesn't need man in order to experience his or her inherent fullness.

I learned about not just being with someone because I don't want to be alone: being willing to be alone, and then find something that feels right and just reaching for companionship for companionship's sake. Not letting drama lead my life.

I am totally okay on my own. I don't want to have to have a man to feel whole. It's not that I need that to feel like I have a full life. No, I have a full life.

I don't need a person to make me happy.

With any relationship that you have, don't lose yourself in it.

Love one another, but let’s try not to possess one another.

If your happiness depends on your children being happy, that makes them your hostages. So stay out of their business, stop using them for your happiness, and be your own happiness. And that way you are the teacher for your children: someone who knows how to live a happy life.

How we love others is affected by how we love ourselves, and for the first time in a long time, I was whole.