Lori Gottlieb Quotes

What parents needed, I believed, wasn't another book about how they had to calm down and take a break. What they needed was an actual break from the deluge of parenting books.

Next time you're about to rule out some guy because he's not your ideal, try to focus on the good things about him, because some guy is going to have to focus on the good things about you, even though he may have wanted someone more easygoing or taller. Every time you start to dissect some guy, note that he's willfully ignoring all of this in order to go out with you.

The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking - people imagine that if they say no, they won't be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however - to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program - is more about lack of trust in oneself. Will I mess this up? Will this turn out badly? Isn't it safer to stay where I am?

Typically therapists are several steps ahead of our patients - not because we're smarter or wiser but because we have the vantage point of being outside their lives. I'll say to a patient who has bought the ring but can't seem to find the right time to propose to his girlfriend, "I don't think you're sure you want to marry her," and he'll say, "What? Of course I am! I'm doing it this weekend!" And then he goes home and doesn't propose, because the weather was bad and he wanted to do it at the beach. We'll have the same dialogue for weeks, until one day he'll come back and say, "Maybe I don't want to marry her." Many people who say, "No, that's not me," find themselves a week or a month or a year later saying, "Yeah, actually, that's me.

We can't have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.

Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we're depriving them of happiness as adults?

Above all, I didn't want to fall into the trap that Buddhists call idiot compassion - an apt phrase, given John's worldview. In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people's feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.

Your feelings don't have to mesh with what you think they should be," he explained. "They'll be there regardless, so you might as well welcome them because they hold important clues.

You can let more people into the mix who could possibly make you happy. Or you can hold out for that two percent of men who you assume meet your requirements, and hope that coincidentally, someone in that two percent feels that you're in his two percent. And even then, the people you assume to meet your requirements might in fact not be the right fit for you.

The nature of life is change, but the nature of people is to resist change.

I thought I should call a matchmaker.

For me, this seemed like a radical step. It never occurred to me to hire a matchmaker when I was younger because I always believed I'd meet a man on my own. He'd be sitting next to me on an airplane, waiting in line behind me at the dry cleaner, working in the same office attending the same party, hanging out at the same coffeehouse.

It seemed ridiculous now, when I thought about the odds of this happening. After all, we don't subject other important aspects of out lives to pure chance. When you want to get a job you don't just hang out in the lobbies of office buildings, hoping an employer will strike up a conversation with you. When you want to buy a house, you don't walk aimlessly from neighborhood to neighborhood on your own, hoping to spot a house that happens to be for sale, matches your personal taste and contains the appropriate number of bedrooms and bathrooms. That's too random. If that's your only method of house hunting, you might end up homeless. So you hire a real estate broker to show you the potential homes that meet your needs. By the same token, why not hire a matchmaker to show you potential partners?

How long do you think the sentence for this crime should be? A year? Five? Ten?' Many of us torture ourselves over our mistakes for decades, even after we've genuinely attempted to make amends. How reasonable is that sentence?

Uncertainty, I'm starting to realize, doesn't mean the loss of hope - it means there's possibility. I don't know what will happen next - how potentially exciting!

An interesting paradox of the therapy process: In order to do their job, therapists try to see patients as they really are, which means noticing their vulnerabilities and entrenched patterns and struggles. Patients, of course, want to be helped, but they also want to be liked and admired. In other words, they want to hide their vulnerabilities and entrenched patterns and struggles. That's not to say that therapists don't look for a patient's strengths and try to build on those. We do. But while we aim to discover what's not working, patients try to keep the illusion going to avoid shame - to seem more together than they really are. Both parties have the well-being of the patient in mind but often work at cross-purposes in the service of a mutual goal.

If the queen had balls, she'd be the king." If you go through life picking and choosing, if you don't recognize that "the perfect is the enemy of the good," you may deprive yourself of joy.

If we have a choice between believing one of two things, both of which we have evidence for -- I'm unlovable, I'm lovable - often we choose the one that makes us feel bad. Why do we keep our radios tuned to the same static-ridden stations (the everyone's-life-is-better-than-mine, the I-can't-trust-people station, the nothing-works-out-for-me station) instead of moving the dial up or down? Change the station. Walk around the bars. Who's stopping us but ourselves?

Follow your envy - it shows you what you want.

Dating is about grand romantic gestures that mean little over the long term. Marriage is about small acts of kindness that bond you over a lifetime.

What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction - a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person's type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It's no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.

Don't judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don't be afraid of the truth.

Avoidance is a simple way of coping by not having to cope.

When I look at my friend's marriages, with their routine day-to-dayness, they actually seem far more romantic than any dating relationship might be. Dating seems romantic, but for the most part it's an extended audition. Marriage seems boring, but for the most part it's a state of comfort and acceptance. Dating is about grand romantic gestures that mean little over the long-term. Marriage is about small acts of kindness that bond you over a lifetime. It's quietly romantic. He makes her tea. She goes to the doctor appointment with him. They listen to each other's daily trivia. They put up with each other's quirks. They're there for each other.

You can have compassion without forgiving. There are many ways to move on, and pretending to feel a certain way isn't one of them.

Look for reasons to say 'yes' instead of 'no,' he reminded me. Screen in rather than constantly screening out. Always ask yourself this: If an interesting guy were right in front of you, would you honestly turn that person away because of a few pounds or inches, or a sentence in a profile that you don't like? If so, that's fine. Just don't complain when you can't find anybody suitable because you've eliminated every potential guy on a technicality. Because if these guys eliminated people on technicalities, they probably wouldn't date you, either.

In therapy we aim for self-compassion (Am I human?) versus self-esteem (a judgment: Am I good or bad?).

The three words women most want to hear from a man are, "You lost weight"

Well you seem like you're enjoying the experience of suffering, so I thought I'd help you out with that... There's a difference between pain and suffering,' Wendell says, 'You're going to have to feel pain- everyone feels pain at times- but you don't have to suffer so much. You're not choosing the pain, but you're choosing the suffering

Our younger selves think in terms of a beginning, middle, and some kind of resolution. But somewhere along the way - perhaps in that middle - we realize that everyone lives with things that may not get worked out. That the middle has to be the resolution, and how we make meaning of it becomes our task.

Sometimes "drama", no matter how unpleasant, can be a form of self-medication, a way to calm ourselves down by avoiding the crises brewing inside.

People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn't the absence of feelings; it's a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.