Quotes & Sayings About Married Life

The apartment is a laboratory in which we conduct experiments, perform research on each other. We discover Henry hates it when I absentmindedly click my spoon against my teeth while reading the paper at breakfast. We agree that it is okay for me to listen to Joni Mitchell and it is okay for Henry to listen to the Shaggs as long as the other person isn't around. We figure out that Henry should do all the cooking and I should be in charge of laundry and neither of us is willing to vacuum so we hire a cleaning service. — Audrey Niffenegger

How strange it is, our little procession of life! The child says, "When I am a big boy." But what is that? The big boy says, "When I grow up." And then, grown up, he says, "When I get married." But to be married, what is that after all? The thought changes to "When I'm able to retire." And then, when retirement comes, he looks back over the landscape traversed; a cold wind seems to sweep over it; somehow he has missed it all, and it is gone. — Stephen Leacock

I got married in Vegas on Warped Tour on July 4 - that's how crazy my life has been. — Geoff Rickly

Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns. — Tom Spanbauer

I think I've had an interesting life. I've done films, TV, theatre and got married. I don't have any regrets. — Kabir Bedi

SHE WAS MEETING a man she had recently and abruptly fallen in love with. She was in a state of ghastly anxiety. He was married, for one thing, to a Korean woman whom he described as the embodiment of all that was feminine and elegant. Not only that, but a psychic had told her that a relationship with him could cripple her emotionally for the rest of her life. On top of this, she was tormented by the feeling that she looked inadequate. — Mary Gaitskill

God's plan for your life is happening right now. It doesn't begin when you get married or when you get your dream job or when everything feels perfect. You are IN the plan. - TLC's friend Kris (p.159) — Tara Leigh Cobble

Laila remembered Mammy telling Babi once that she had married a man who had no convictions. Mammy didn't understand. She didn't understand that if she looked into a mirror, she would find the one unfailing conviction of his life looking right back at her. — Khaled Hosseini

Getting married and settling down isn't the most important thing in my life. — Liam Neeson

Get a peek at what married life is like for Layken and Will in This Girl, the third book — Colleen Hoover

There is no way to mess this up," I said, right against her mouth. "Even if we didn't get married tomorrow, you're the love of my life. I'm with you until we both die, at the same time, when I am one hundred and you are ninety three. — Christina Lauren

Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians. — Sarah Moore Grimke

Intimacy and sex are totally different things. Intimacy is a bond that God brings about between two married people. It comes from years of commitment, of sharing and talking and working through problems. Years of getting to know that person better than anyone else in life. A physical relationship with someone like that - that's intimacy. And anything less is a lie. — Karen Kingsbury

She had never been able to stand her husband, though not for one minute in their married life had she permitted this to make her unhappy. Only people who are fond of somebody can ever be unhappy, she had told her daughter before her wedding. — Anna Seghers

I would think it odd, he said, that he had never married. I did not, in fact, think it at all odd
the statistical chances against any woman being prepared to endure both the hairiness of his legs and the tedium of his conversation seemed to be negligible. I did not express this view, but said sympathetically that the military life must be difficult to combine with the domestic. — Sarah Caudwell

A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage. My wife married a man; I saw no reason why she should inherit a baby. — John Steinbeck

Bluestocking, Nancy. Married life has quite changed something — Kate Atkinson

Are you a good human being, Gerry? I mean good in the sense that if you put everything in the scales, they'd tip that way?" It startled her. "I don't know. I haven't thought of myself that way. I think I like the lush life a little too much. That's why I married George. I'm vain. I like men to admire me. I've got a coarse streak that comes out at the wrong times. But I do try to live up to ... some kind of a better image of myself. And I try to improve. I came from nothing, Trav, from a little raggedy-ass spread in the Panhandle with too many kids and too few rooms. — John D. MacDonald

If the married life possess love and virtue, these will be both its duty and reward — Thiruvalluvar

You know, I might get married at 50 or 60, when it actually means something to say 'for the rest of my life.' — Diane Kruger

Two best friends traveled from the Burdekin in North Queensland sometime in the 1960s and walked into the Union and fell in love with Grace. Tom finch was the smarter talker of the two and won first round, marrying her before his name came up in the lottery sending him to Vietnam on a tour of duty. He never returned. The heartbroken, patient one, Bill Mackee, grieved a best friend and married the love of his life, adopting the twins when they were four years old. — Melina Marchetta

When was the last time you looked at anything, solely, and concentratedly, and for its own sake? Ordinary life passes in a near blur. If we go to the theatre or the cinema, the images before us change constantly, and there is the distraction of language. Our loved ones are so well known to us that there is no need to look at them, and one of the gentle jokes of married life is that we do not. — Jeanette Winterson

Getting married has certainly made a massive difference to my own life. So I am committed to giving support for family finances and having the right policies for work-life balance that make it easier for couples to have a rich family life. — Gordon Brown

Embrace each other with love, smiles and warm hug. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The first thing you notice about women in Hollywood, besides their low percentage of body fat, is how few are married. And the number of great-looking, successful single women without a social life is staggering ... The most glaring misconception about Hollywood is that it is the romance capital of the world. — Lynda Obst

I love Conrad and I probably always would. I would spend my whole life loving him one way or another. Maybe I would get married, maybe I would have a family, but it wouldn't matter, because a piece of my heart, the piece where summer lived, would always be Conrad's — Jenny Han

She'd never really existed to him. She was of no consequence in his life. He was married to a beautiful woman. Jane was pornography. Jane was the adult movie that didn't appear on his hotel bill. Jane was Internet porn, where every fetish can be fulfilled. You have a fetish for humiliating fat girls? Enter your credit card number and click right here. — Liane Moriarty

In contrast to earlier textually-focused studies, recent scholarship on worship also highlights diversity and change. Projects to create new rituals and to redesign familiar ones, particularly in ways that make them more fluid and open-ended, have been a hallmark of much Western religious life since the 1960s.7 To take one example within Judaism, some couples now personalize or customize the traditional huppah or canopy beneath which they are married. In some instances, guests decorate a panel of cloth, and meet before the ceremony to offer the bride and groom their encouragement and advice, and join the pieces together. Vanessa Ochs characterizes this as part of a broader, explicit drive 'to personalize and to create community' within contemporary Judaism. — Melanie J. Wright

Researchers warn us against walking out on married life without a dang good reason. — Ariel Gore

Why do you need everyone married?" Christopher has said to him angrily, when Henry has asked about his son's life. "Why can't you just leave people alone?"
He doesn't want people alone. — Elizabeth Strout

The problem may be a literary one: we are given a single story line about what makes a good life, even though not a few who follow that story line have bad lives. We speak as though there is one good plot with one happy outcome, while the myriad forms a life can take flower - and wither - all around us.
Even those who live out the best version of the familiar story line might not find happiness as their reward. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I know a woman who was lovingly married for seventy years. She has had a long, meaningful life that she has lived according to her principles. But I wouldn't call her happy; her compassion for the vulnerable and concern for the future have given her a despondent worldview. What she has had instead of happiness requires better language to describe. There are entirely different criteria for a good life that might matter more to a person - honor, meaning, depth, engagement, hope. — Rebecca Solnit

I got married about three years ago again to a wonderful German woman. Her name is Monika and she is beautiful. She is one of the biggest women Zappa fans I have ever met in my life. — Jimmy Carl Black

The strength of love is beyond measure. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In married life three is company and two none. — Oscar Wilde

When you're about to get married, and then you're not, it's all a big shock. You think, 'Well, okay, so I'm never going to lead a totally conventional life now.' — Rosamund Pike

I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life. — Charles Bukowski

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. — Richard Russo

The baggage in your individual life will weigh down your married life. Do something about it. — Ted Lowe

I wasn't stupid. I knew life wasn't like in the movies, where people struggled to get together, and the happy ever after with a beautiful sunset behind the kissing couple as the movie ended. From what I could, the kiss wasn't the end. The kiss was when things started to get complicated. Or when people got married. That seemed to be the really hard stuff - to make it last. — Lina Andersson

The point of life is not to be married or single - it is to be. We are human beings, or humans being. It does not matter so much what lifestyle we choose - it's what we make of the opportunities to grow, that counts. — Alan Cohen

If Miss Beresford had not been in such a hurry to marry a poor country clergyman, there was no knowing what she might not have become. But Dixon was too loyal to desert her in her affliction and downfall (alias her married life). — Elizabeth Gaskell

Why would anyone get married and have babies? That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life. Or the scariest thing I've ever heard in my life. — Aziz Ansari

My life really began when I married my husband. — Nancy Reagan

I was schooled at home, then didn't go to university because I married when I was 17. I didn't go into work until late in my life. — Carolina Herrera

Do you realize that you've been married to me for just about half of your entire life?"
Her head came down, her eyes opened wide to stare at him. "Is that all?" she asked. "It seems an eternity".
"Did I say a quiet lion?" Alexander pulled a face. "An eternity with me has turned you into a bitch, my dear". — Colleen McCullough

For a while, I thought the great disappointment of my life was that I don't have a family of my own. Then it dawned on me: That's not what I think; that's what married people think. — Lewis Black

Sexual touch is the dessert of married life! — Laura M. Brotherson

My mum wants me to get married - and have children, of course. She's met Gaga; we've been dating a while. We're in a committed relationship, and I'm really happy in my relationship. I'm a very lucky guy. As far as having more of a domestic life and settling down into my relationship, we have to see what happens. — Taylor Kinney

People think that they can love only when they find a worthy partner - nonsense! You will never find one. People think they will love only when they find a perfect man or a perfect woman. Nonsense! You will never find them, because perfect women and perfect men don't exist. And if they exist, they won't bother about your love. They will not be interested. I have heard about a man who remained a bachelor his whole life because he was in search of a perfect woman. When he was seventy, somebody asked, "You have been traveling and traveling - from New York to Kathmandu, from Kathmandu to Rome, from Rome to London you have been searching. Could you not find a perfect woman? Not even one?" The old man became very sad. He said, "Yes, once I did. One day, long ago, I came across a perfect woman." The inquirer said, "Then what happened? Why didn't you get married?" Sadly, the old man said, "What to do? She was looking for a perfect man. — Osho

I kind of had my life planned out for me. I'd be married at some point, have, you know, 1.5 children, and be a principal possibly one day. But I think that that was kind of my problem. I allowed myself to plan out my life and didn't let provident direction guide my life. — Clay Aiken

Birth control doesn't mean no children. It just means that people have a choice how they want to live. Like rutting, unthinking, breeding animals - or like reasoning creatures. Will a married couple have one, two or three children - whatever number will keep the world population steady and provide a full life of opportunity for everyone? Or will they have four, five or six, unthinking and uncaring, and raise them in hunger and cold and misery? Like that world out there, — Harry Harrison

Afterward, he would leave her, and he would go to sleep in his own home. "It's hard to understand," he would tell Lila whenever she would press his gently on the subject, "but with us Arabs, a man can come and go, and his wife will not say a word. She'll notice the length of his absences, but she won't press him or ask for explanations. For his part, so long as he acts modestly and doesn't show off his lover in plain view, then he will not bring shame on his family. — Anat Talshir

With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes
one of the tragedies of married life. — Virginia Woolf

We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life. — David Amram

I can handle being married for my money; it's being married for my life insurance that gives me pause ... — Jacob M. Appel

My own sex life is very monogamous and happy ... just a happy married sex life! — Tom Ford

Love the family! Defend and promote it as the basic cell of human
society; nurture it as the prime sanctuary of life. Give great care to the
preparation of engaged couples and be close to young married couples, so
that they will be for their children and the whole community an eloquent
testimony of God's love. — Pope John Paul II

I've always dreamed of becoming a mother. I thought I would get married and do it all the traditional way, but life kept going on, my career kept me busy - and I had not stopped to become a mommy. — Kym Whitley

The issue of who will throw the garbage won't be so trivial when no one is throwing it away, and it starts to stink. When the plates pile up in the kitchen sink, or when the bathroom is grimy and the shampoo ran out. No, it won't be funny then. — Eeva Lancaster

The night above. We two. Full moon.
I started to weep, you laughed.
Your scorn was a god, my laments
moments and doves in a chain.
The night below. We two. Crystal of pain.
You wept over great distances.
My ache was a clutch of agonies
over your sickly heart of sand.
Dawn married us on the bed,
our mouths to the frozen spout
of unstaunched blood.
The sun came through the shuttered balcony
and the coral of life opened its branches
over my shrouded heart.

- Night of Sleepless Love — Federico Garcia Lorca

My dad was never married. He was kind of a rolling stone. But he was never disrespectful. At the same time, even though he had women in his life when I was a kid, there wasn't any consistency. — Kevin Hart

What trunk?" Velkan
"My trunk. I'm moving in" Esperetta
"In where?" Velkan
"My room. Here." Esperetta
Completely stunned and flabbgausted, he opened and closed his mouth, unable to speak.
Esperetta walked over to him and placed her finger on his chin before she closed his mouth. "I know you dont trust me, but tough shit."
"This is my home and you're my husband. I made a mistake and for that I'm sorry, but I'm through being an idiot." Esperetta
"Dark-Hunters can't be married." Velkan
"Well then, someone should have told Artemis before she made her bargain with you and brought me back to life, huh? You were created as a married Dark-Hunter. I hardly think they can complain now." Esperetta
She did have a point about that
"But
" Velkan
She ended his words with a kiss. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Su describes her anger as "a little femina, two centimeters tall" who claps inside her head every time she speaks out. "I'm dedicating my life to her, whatever the trends of the times. No more anger-sitters. No more camps or schools. No more lollipops. She's going to get all the advantages my expanse of years can provide, every opportunity to become whatever she wants to become, even if she wants to get married and have lots of little angers. — June Arnold

There aren't a whole lot of things I want out of life. My bucket list is extremely short: Achieve the success in the industry I want, and get married. If I achieve both of those, I can die completely stoked. I don't need anything else. — Samuel Larsen

When Hillel died, it was during one of the happiest times of my life. I was married and completely in love and had a baby on the way. — Flea

Nobody wants to hear that any aspect of my awesome life is bad. I get that. But there are days, maybe two or three times a year, when I get completely overwhelmed by my job and go to my office, lie on the floor, and cry for ten minutes. Then I think: Mindy, you have literally the best life in the world besides that hot lawyer who married George Clooney. This is what you dreamed about when you were a weird, determined little ten-year-old. There are more than a thousand people in one square mile of this studio who would kill to have this job. Get your ass up off the floor and go back into that writers' room, you weakling. Then I get up, pour myself a generous glass of whiskey and club soda, think about the sustained grit of my parents, and go back to work. — Mindy Kaling

Aren't you afraid, though?" Ayumi asked Aomame.
"Afraid of what?"
"Don't you see? You and he might never cross paths again. Of course, a chance meeting could occur, and I hope it happens. I really do, for your sake. But realistically speaking, you have to see there's a huge possibility you'll never be able to meet him again. And even if you do meet, he might already be married to somebody else. He might have two kids. Isn't that so? And in that case, you may have to live the rest of your life alone, never being joined with the one person you love in all the world. Don't you find that scary?
Aomame stared at the red wine in her glass. "Maybe I do," she said. "But at least I have someone I love. — Haruki Murakami

Junction nineteen! Una, she came off at Junction nineteen! You've added an hour to your journey before you even started. Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?"
Oh GOD. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to THEM and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still having sex?" Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-it-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, "Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo," than, "Super, thanks. — Helen Fielding

Improvising, I participated in the discussion, and questioned another woman in the group. I asked her how old she was and she answered, "Thirty." I replied, "No, you are not thirty but instead eighty and lying on your deathbed. And now you are looking back on your life, a life which was childless but full of financial success and social prestige." And then I invited her to imagine what she would feel in this situation. "What will you think of it? What will you say to yourself?" Let me quote what she actually said from a tape which was recorded during that session. "Oh, I married a millionaire, I had an easy life full of wealth, and I lived it up! I flirted with men; I teased them! But now I am eighty; I have no children of my own. Looking back as an old woman, I cannot see what all that was for; actually, I must say, my life was a failure! — Viktor E. Frankl

All of us face hard choices in our lives. Some face more than their share. We have to decide how to balance the demands of work and family. Caring for a sick child or an aging parent. Figuring out how to pay for college. Finding a good job, and what to do if you lose it. Whether to get married - or stay married. How to give our kids the opportunities they dream about and deserve. Life is about making such choices. Our choices and how we handle them shape the people we become. For leaders and nations, they can mean the difference between war and peace, poverty and prosperity. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

I'm a married woman. I love my husband; I have a good life. — Gennifer Flowers

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream. — Donald G. Mitchell

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. — Stendhal

You don't get married for yourself, you get married because you're better together than separate. — Dirk Hayhurst

Apparently 26 years ago, Arnold gave an interview to Oui magazine about his sex life. The good news is that Arnold is married to Maria Shriver and now that he's had a sex scandal, the Kennedy family has finally accepted him. — Jay Leno

Eventually as a teenager, I was pulled up on stage by James Brown's saxophone player, Maceo Parker, during one of his concerts and scatted on his stage for 20 minutes. After I was done, Maceo's bass player got down on one knee as if he were proposing, took a string off of his bass guitar and coiled it up around my ring finger. He hushed the crowd and said into the microphone, "Wendy, from this day forward you are married to music. You have a gift from God. You must devote your life to using this gift or else you will deprive the world of something so special." I got the chills. — Wendy Starland

There was another reason. The main one."
"Reason?" I said stupidly.
"Why I married you."
"Which was?" I don't know what I expected him to say, perhaps some further revelation of his family's contorted affairs. What he did say was more of a shock, in its way.
"Because I wanted you." He turned from the window to face me. "More than I ever wanted anything in my life," he added softly. — Diana Gabaldon

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine. — Grace Paley

You are married. Healing is not a profession but a way of life. Your spouse is not your patient but your flesh. Healing, then, is a task for your heart as well as your head and your hand. — Walter Wangerin Jr.

Such disappointments, betrayals and reconciliations were the stuff of married life, but she and Jack had gone through them before the wedding. Now, at least, she felt confident that she knew him. Nothing was likely to surprise her. It was a funny way to do things, but it might be better than making your vows first and getting to know your spouse afterward. — Ken Follett

You don't have to be married to have a good friend as your partner for life. — Greta Garbo

But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn't say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between the creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving. For now, she slept. — Anthony Marra

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. — T.C. Boyle

Are you asking if I would have been better off if I'd never met my wife, or married her, or lost her? I'll tell you this, a day with her was better than a life without her. — Alice Hoffman

OK, so my parents were married in 1955 and my mom knew my dad was gay and my dad knew he was gay and so I was, like, 'Why in the heck did you get married?' Like, what was going on? What was that time? It's like this crazy paradox that my whole life is based on, or my family's based on. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand '55. — Mike Mills

I'm at that point in my life where I definitely want to get married soon. I've got my dogs as surrogates, but I'm ready for kids. — Michael Bay

I don't care how happily married you are or how deeply enmeshed you are with your children and family and career
every woman needs a couple of chicks who'll break out the sangria just because you need to vent. — Jen Lancaster

My mother, whose interest in chemistry was rather minimal, nevertheless went to graduate school in the subject and married my father, for whom it was as important as life itself. — George Akerlof

Why do ever think about to get married??
Do we dare, all life to get worried, to be curious, to be angry, to think for money like they are gold, to think about what next to buy, to cry and even and more to happen?
Marriage is like the gold, you find it or not, it depends from you but you once lost you can't find the same gold or the same wife, it's in about of luck to find the same. Imaginate that you have gold, but you don't have money, so you go to a pawnshop and what happens the gold becomes money, but reality you have two diffirent stuff. This doesn't mean that by doing that you get the same, why don't you go and give your wife for other person??? Will be the same like your wife will live in this person for which you have replaced her??
Of course, NOT! — Deyth Banger

I've had an absolutely charmed life in every aspect of it. I do for my job what I would do for a hobby if it wasn't my job. Half the secret of happiness, I'm ecstatically happily married with three great kids, you know. It's been a blessed life. — Graeme Base

By the way," I said, "I wanted to tell you - about why I decided to hike the PCT? I got divorced. I was married and not long ago I got divorced, and also about four years ago my mom died - she was only forty-five and she got cancer suddenly and died. It's been a hard time in my life and I've sort of gotten offtrack. So I ... " He opened his eyes wider, looking at me. "I thought it would help me find my center, to come out here." I made a crumpled gesture with my hands, out of words, a bit surprised that I'd let so many tumble out. — Cheryl Strayed

The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets. — Edwin Percy Whipple

In life I've always considered myself statistically challenged. I married my high school sweetheart and then he joined the Army. Lucky for me, love has nothing to do with statistics. — Shawn Kirsten Maravel

There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It's funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don't want a baby? Don't have one. I don't want to get married? I won't. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don't apologize. Don't explain. Don't ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it. — Shonda Rhimes

I suppose it must be admitted that I was raised in a "dysfunctional" family, but in truth, I do not think I had any sense of that as I was growing up. Probably part of the reason was that all of my extended kin had families at least as dysfunctional as mine. Just to give a little of the flavor of it, my "Aunt Fern," who lived just across the street and was one of the most present and puissant female relatives in my life, was, to be genealogically precise, my mother's brother's, first wife's, second husband's, father's, 3rd, 4th, and 5th wife. (She married "Uncle Lew" three times in the course of her seven matrimonial ventures.) — Carlfred Broderick

She had to do that
she had to become a widow, for life, before she was even married. That's why I never got married. I'm thirty-eight years old. I can read and write very well
my mother made sure I was educated
and I do the bookwork for all the shops and businesses in the slum. I do the taxes for every man who pays them. I make a good living here, and I have respect. I shouldn't been married fifteen or even twenty years ago. But she was a widow, all her life, for me. And I couldn't do it. I just couldn't allow myself to get married. I kept hoping I would see him, the sailor with the best moustache. My mother had one very old, faded photograph of the two of them, looking very serious and stern. That's why I lived in this area. I always hoped I would see him. And I never married. And she died last week, Lin. My mother died last week. — Gregory David Roberts

Reuben nails my fantasies everytime, with iron rods of reality. He asserts that I am going to die, but probably not for a while, and that maybe I should try getting married and having a life first. He is 70 and knows things, which is why I go to him. But it's sad to leave my romantic illusions at the door of this passage. Although false and destructive and useless, they've been tremendous company. — Suzanne Finnamore

The truth is that Fate does not go out of its way to be dramatic. If you or I had the power of life and death in our hands, we should no doubt arrange some remarkably bright and telling effects. A man who spilt the salt callously would be drowned next week in the Dead Sea, and a couple who married in May would expire simultaneously in the May following. But Fate cannot worry to think out all the clever things that we should think out. It goes about its business solidly and unromantically, and by the ordinary laws of chance it achieves every now and then something startling and romantic. Superstition thrives on the fact that only the accidental dramas are reported. — A.A. Milne

By the time I retire, I will have fought the best. I will have made my money. Maybe I'll be a boxing commentator. I'll go back to school, definitely. I already have a plan. My life's set. I'll be on an island, married, playing golf in the sun. That will be my life. — Oscar De La Hoya

The number of people who have either gotten married or had kids or started dating or just made great friends over Instagram is countless. I think we're the only platform that continues to be successful in bringing people together in real life for these real relationships. — Kevin Systrom