Carolyn Gold Heilbrun Quotes

A marriage is like a long trip in a tiny row boat: if one passenger starts to rock the boat, the other has to steady it, otherwise, they will go to the bottom together.

In marriage, it's always that give and take and rebalancing that we have to do in how we can help each other. But, I have been known at times by my sons, that is the name that they call me-the Mitt stabilizer.

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.

When you're trying to get laid, everything's great, but once you've been with someone eight years and the future is not finite, you have time to sit and really examine every little thing that irritates you.

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.

People say, 'Why is he bored with her?' Because he's a human being, that's why; same way his wife is bored with him. That is marriage - anything that's supposed to be forever, your going to get bored with it. And there is nothing wrong with it, so don't take it personal; if you are with somebody for ten years and they are not bored with you? Then something is wrong with them.

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?"

When you’re in love, sometimes you have to swallow your pride, and sometimes you have to keep your pride. It’s a balance. But when the relationship is right, you find the balance.

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

Passion, sexual passion, may lead to marriage, but cannot sustain marriage. The purpose of marriage is the raising of children, for which patience, not passion, is the necessary foundation.

Marriage can either be a classroom where people become wiser and better, or a prison where people become resentful; and bitter.

Many brief follies--that is what you call love. And your marriage puts an end to many brief follies, with a single long stupidity.

Happiness is peace after strife, the overcoming of difficulties, the feeling of security and well-being. The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

But perhaps this is what goes wrong with long marriages--you state your opinions, your likes and dislikes, at the beginning and then forget to mention when they change" (135).

Marriage like government is a series of compromises. One must give and take, repair and restrain, endure and be patient.

A happy marriage perhaps represents the ideal of human relationship -- a setting in which each partner, while acknowledging the need of the other, feels free to be what he or she by nature is: a relationship in which instinct as well as intellect can find expression; in which giving and taking are equal; in which each accepts the other, and I confronts Thou.

Men would like monogamy better if it sounded less like monotony.

You seem to be absolutely unaware of the phenomenon of marriage - which is destructive to both man and woman. Love is creative, marriage is destructive. But love is not dependable: this moment it may be there and the next moment gone. And man wants permanent things; he is obsessed with permanent things. He wants security, safety, he wants to cling. Hence love is not reliable, so he created marriage.

...I'm no longer the scales most lovers are, weighing the deeds and gifts and treasures proffered against those received or stolen from the other, trying always to bring into fatal balance two separate things.

Marriage simplifies life and complicates the day.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.

I don't think 50-50 relationships exist. Men have an incredibly variety of options. It's much harder for a woman to do both things. I think traditional relationships work best.

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

If you had grown up with me, this is one of the things I would have tried to teach you: Marry a man who loves you more than you love him. Because I have both now, and when it is the other way around, there is no spell in the world that can even out the balance.

After youve been married quite a few years, you learn to take orders; it just comes easy.