Ada Calhoun Quotes

I want to say that one day you and your husband will fight about missed flights, and you'll find yourself wistful for the days when you had to pay for only your own mistakes. I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage. You will gaze at this man you once adored and think, It sure would be nice to have this whole place to myself.

Gen Xers are in 'the prime of their lives' at a particularly dangerous and divisive moment,' Boomer marketing expert Faith Popcorn told me. 'They have been hit hard financially and dismissed culturally. They have tons of debt. They're squeezed on both sides by children and aging parents. The grim state of adulthood is hitting them hard. If they're exhausted and bewildered, they have every reason to feel that way.

...even good marriages sometimes involve flinging a remote control at the wall.

(Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.)

...that's part of what marriage means: sometimes hating this other person but staying together because you promised you would.

The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.

Sometimes we can thank our feelings for sharing and ignore them. Maybe wanting doesn't have to perfectly coincide with getting. Maybe sometimes not-getting has a value of its own.

By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. To hitch your rickety wagon to the flickering star of another fallible human being -- what an insane thing to do. What a burden, and what a gift.

Forsaking all others means going deep with one person -- exhaustingly deep.

Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition.

All the couples therapy and communication seminars in the world won't save you if you aren't prepared to close your eyes and hug the mainmast through a storm.

Failure is part of being human, and it is definitely part of being married.

Wherever you go, there you are. You would just have different problems. Are the problems you have now so bad that any other problems would be better?

We bear financial responsibilities that men had in the old days while still saddled with traditional caregiving duties. We generally incur this double whammy precisely while hitting peak stress in both our careers and child-raising--in our forties, at an age when most of our mothers and grandmothers were already empty nesters.

The boring parts don't last forever. In retrospect, they aren't even boring.

As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.