Relationship Reality Quotes

You don't love someone because they're perfect," she says. "You love them in spite of the fact that they're not." I don't know how to respond to that; it's like being told after thirty-five years that the sky, which I've seen as a brilliant blue, is in fact rather green.

Happy endings are absolutely ludicrous, they're not true at all. We see the guy carry the girl across the threshold and everybody lives happily ever after -- that's bullshit. Three weeks later he's beating her up and she's suing for divorce and he's got cancer.

If you're dating a man who you think might be "Mr. Right," if he a) got older, b) got a new job, or c) visited a psychiatrist, you are in for a nasty surprise. The cocoon-to-butterfly theory only works on cocoons and butterflies.

If you grew up in a dysfunctional family, then there is really no hope for you to have a good relationship. That is another myth that we have to throw off, so that we can get into what I call Reality.

You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?

The best you can hope for in a relationship is to find someone whose flaws are the sort you don’t mind. It is futile to look for someone who has no flaws, or someone who is capable of significant change; that sort of person exists only in our imaginations.

Nobody's dumb in this relationship [with his wife] or in the relationships of any of the other guys in the band. But it's also not the cliché that those on the outside envision.

Any husband who says, "My wife and I are completely equal partners," is talking about either a law firm or a hand of bridge.

It's funny, my girlfriends think that because I am married to a fashion designer, I get all these great tips and hints about great fashion, but it's not like that at all. He never tells me what to wear.

Unfortunately, we are a society that does look down on divorce when, ironically, there are more single divorced people in the world right now. So, the fact of the matter is that it's a reality, and more people should obviously embrace wanting to change, wanting to move on from a relationship that just no longer works for them.

There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry.

If a relationship is going to work, it will require compromise and, even then, it is not always going to end the way you want it to.

Marriage is not a natural phenomenon. It is artificial, arbitrary. And when it disappears you cannot do anything to bring it back. You can pretend, but that pretension makes you a hypocrite. And your pretension cannot deceive the woman, because she has known your love and the pretension cannot become the substitute. The only way is to separate - in friendship, because you have given each other so much.

I think it's wonderful when a love story begins with a great deal of romance and affection, passion and excitement, that's how it should be. But I don't necessarily know that it's the wisest thing in the world to expect that it ends there, or that it should, 30 years down the road, still look as it did on the night of your first kiss.

If you're in a good marriage, you have the sense that it won't be forever.

I always say to people, 'You know, if Romeo and Juliet got married, nobody would care about them.' Imagine Romeo and Juliet, six kids yelling, 'Mama, Mama, Papa, Papa!'

I think that no relationship goes completely according to plan or the way you wished it had.

Passion is for holidays, not homecoming.

I used to think a wedding was a simple affair. Boy and girl meet, they fall in love, he buys a ring, she buys a dress, they say I do. I was wrong. That's getting married. A wedding is an entirely different proposition.

I learned that as much as you think when you're walking down that aisle that this forever, sometimes it's just not forever. You can have the best of intentions.

My life is written about as though I've had this idyllic ending. But a marriage is something you have to work at.

I think in a lot of romantic comedies it ends with a kiss, and I feel like in modern day relationships, and maybe just my own experience, it starts with a kiss and then all sort of falls apart and then comes together.

The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character.

We grow up believing that love is like a fairytale that comes with all things good. What no one points out is how hard it is to live up to love or the tests along the way, small or big.

In the West, marriage is collapsing because it is based on love. And a marriage that is based on love is bound to fail. There is a reason for this: whenever two persons fall in love, both of them present what is beautiful in themselves to the other and hide the ugly. When you fall in love, whether you are a man or a woman, you show your most beautiful face to the other - but it is not your reality, it is not your totality.