Quotes & Sayings About Not Trying In Relationships

I am a feminist. I'm trying to show the relationships between men and women, always the structural relations, not individual villains. I'd never make a husband a villain. I try very hard in my work not to - because if I made one man a villain, the rest would be off the hook. I'm interested in the system of oppression. — Alix Kates Shulman

Love is an afternoon of fishing when I'd sooner be at the ballet.
Love is eating burnt toast and lumpy graving with a big smile.
Love is hearing the words 'You're beautiful' as I fail to squeeze into my fat jeans.
Love is refusing to bring up the past, even if doing so would be a slam dunk to prove your point.
Love is your hand wiping away my tears, trying to erase streaks of mascara.
Love is the warm hug that extinguishes an argument.
Love is a humbly-uttered apology, even if not at fault.
Love is easy to recognize but so hard to define; however, I think it boils down to this ...
Love is caring so much about the feelings of someone else, you sacrifice whatever it takes to help him or her feel better.
In other words, love is my heart being sensitive to yours. — Richelle E. Goodrich

If you are in a relationship, stop trying to figure out who wears the pants between the two of you. Relationships work best when both of you are not wearing pants. — Miriam

I love you, he thought, because you are honest with me and because you are willing to speak the truth to me when others might seek to curry favor instead. I love you because you are in this bed with me, not trying to conceive the much-awaited next generation of Windhams, but just holding my hand.
Gayle Windham — Grace Burrowes

When people ask about relationships, they always say, "How did you guys meet?" Not, "OMG, tell me about your third year! And when a relationship is in trouble, the desperate couple is always trying to recapture the magic of when they first met. The real tragedy is that, without time travel or amnesia, it's impossible to ever get back there. Which is why to most people, marriage is about as magical as watching David Copperfield make Claudia Schiffer disappear. — Shane Kuhn

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call pornography in it, because I feel that pornography is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit
a twenty-second best. — Robertson Davies

Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they're trying to find someone who's going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take. — Anthony Robbins

eRemember though, that happiness can never be achieved through the expectations levied on another; such a notion is not doomed to fail - but is just doomed! Happiness can never be achieved through the distress or destruction that one imposes on the other person. When a child, now grown-up, does not resolve their deep-seeded anger with a parent or parents, the "other person" plays Hell trying to make-up for it. Married, divorced or dead, the 'other person' can never replace what was lost so much
earlier in the life and soul of the oppressed. Forgiveness must be the course for any future, substantive relationships. — H. Kirk Rainer

That's why I loved being with you. We could do the simplest things, like toss starfish into the ocean and share a burger and talk and even then I knew that I was fortunate. Because you were the first guy who wasn't constantly trying to impress me. You accepted who you were, but more than that, you accepted me for me. And nothing else mattered
not my family or your family or anyone else in the world. It was just us. — Nicholas Sparks

Live a real experience of love is one of the greatest pleasures of life. It feels like the soul, but to express the feelings depends on the ideas of each. Constrain the love of our neurotic needs and we with him. Live a life trying to make others take responsibility for our needs as we recklessly abandon.

We want to be loved and not love, we want to be understood and we do not understand, we want the support of others and we give our them. When we abandon ourselves, we want to find someone who will fill the hole that we dug. The dissatisfaction, emptiness turn on continual search for new relationships, the results will be repeated frustrating.

Each is solely responsible for their own purposes. Only those who can find love in your life One Love Truth
— Zibia Gasparetto

I could now see her the way she actually is and not in the distorted way my mind presented her to me when I was trying to find a reason to reject her and move on — Jack Weyland

It's not that he was flirting, unless flirting was just about wanting to really see someone. People thought that someone like him - good-looking, young, cool clothes - was going to be dismissive, and when he wasn't, when he was just easy and open with them, they glowed. It was a feeling he tried to re-create a hundred times a day, in every interaction. It also calmed him. If he looked at someone and they looked at him and there was a true connection, no matter how brief, then it meant that he didn't need to replay the encounter anxiously afterwards, trying to find where it had all gone wrong. — Jade Chang

The importance of building relationships among colleagues, of trying to create coalitions behind the issues that you are championing, was not something I ever had much insight into until I was elected and started serving in the Senate. — Hillary Clinton

I think men can really get in the way when you are trying to sort your life out and get on with it. Because they just take up so much space. I'm not under any illusions that I could have been where I am now in literary terms if I had been heterosexual. I really believe I would not be. — Jeanette Winterson

Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not 'smash their mommy' and still receive love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle. — Bell Hooks

Acceptance doesn't mean tolerating unhealthy relationships or problem behaviour. In relationships, acceptance has two key qualities. First, it means being willing to recognize that your partner, right here and right now, is struggling too. It means allowing for the possibility that his motivations might be good and constructive, even if it doesn't feel that way. It means not getting caught up in the belief that he's wrong or doesn't care about you, and instead embracing the possibility that he's doing the best he can. He may even be trying to make you happy--but in a way that only makes sense inside the male mind. Acceptance also means embracing the formidable task of empathizing with your partner's struggle when you least want to do so. — Shawn T. Smith

Somewhere along the way, there develops within the soul a yearning that can no longer be ignored, a craving for the great love affair. We feel it drawing ever closer. It is the greatest of them all. It cannot fail. It is all consuming. It is incomparable. It is the love affair with our own true nature and the source from which it comes. The desire is in all of us but, more often than not, it is ignored for other interests. We wrestle with each interest, trying to make it work, growing with each adventure until the light has grown bright enough for us to reach for it. — Donna Goddard

Meditation for me is not a children's play, it is a deep transformation. How to know this transformation? It is being reflected every moment in your relationships. Do you try to possess someone? Then you are violent. How can one possess someone? Are you trying to dominate someone? Then you are violent. How can one dominate anyone? Love cannot dominate, love cannot possess. — Rajneesh

In general, people are not drawn to perfection in others. People are drawn to shared interests, shared problems, and an individual's life energy.
Humans connect with humans. Hiding one's humanity and trying to project an image of perfection makes a person vague, slippery, lifeless, and uninteresting. — Robert Glover

Mysteries always have the potential for interesting connections between the elements. I'm also most interested in the relationship between the characters. As in 'Masterpiece,' I'm trying to create characters who not only are solving a mystery but are solving the riddle of their own personal relationships. — Elise Broach

I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going. — Michael Chabon

I think Jesus is saying, Look, you guys are running around like monkeys trying to get people to clap, but people are fallen, they are separated from God, so they have no idea what is good or bad, worthy to be judged or set free, beautiful or ugly to begin with. Why not get your glory from God? Why not accept your feelings of redemption because of His pleasure in you, not the fickle and empty favor of man? And only then will you know who you are, and only then will you have true, uninhibited relationships with others. — Donald Miller

First of all, it's friendship with God that makes possible friendship with one another in a manner that is not that we just like one another, but that were are joined by common judgments, by God, for the good of God's church. Such friendship occurs not by trying to be each other's friend, but by discovering you were engaged in common good work that is so determinative, you cannot live without one another. Now, if the church is that, it will talk about friendship in a way that avoids the superficiality of the language of relationship. Because relationships are meant to be spontaneous and short. Friendship, if it is the friendship of God, is to be characterized by fidelity in which you are even willing to tell the friend the truth. Which may mean you will risk the friendship. You need to be in that kind of community to survive the loneliness that threatens all of our souls. — Stanley Hauerwas

We pissed each other off, royally and frequently in those early days. But we were getting better, bit by bit. I stopped thinking he was going to cage me and he stopped thinking I was trying flee. The poetry was not lost on us. He had abandonment issues and I had commitment issues. Go figure. Also, the sex which had been fumbling and awkward at the beginning of the relationship got really hot, we figured that was a promising sign general relationship progress.
Mostly though we realized it was about leaving the doors and windows of the relationship wide open. That way he could see in, and I could see out. — Amanda Palmer

God shows us what authentic love is in John 3:16, probably the most famous verse in the Bible. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life" (NKJV). God so loved the world. He loved the whole world; not just the good part of the world, the part that loved him already, or the part that he knew would love him back. We need to expand our hearts, our comfort zones, and our friend zones. He gave his only Son. He was willing to make real sacrifices to build real relationships. Sometimes we need to put aside projects and schedules for the sake of people. Like Jesus, we need to be interruptible. Whoever. He showed unconditional love and acceptance. Love is risky. We might be rejected. We might be crucified by the people we are trying to help. But ultimately, love will prevail. — Judah Smith

The lamb baa-ed vigorously as Mary dragged it into the manicure room, and Zel winced. She really should insist Julie come work, She could use the help, plus it would mean extra mother-daughter time
and, Zel thought wryly, I won't have to find a spare tower in the suburbs.
Closing the appointment book, Zel went to finish trimming Linda's hair. "Did I hear a sheep out there?" Linda asked.
"Sick dog," Zel said. "Now, bend your head down." Linda obeyed and Zel ran her fingers through the back of her hair to check for evenness. All she needed to do was think of a way to make Julie come without Julie immediately assuming her mother was trying to ruin her life. Not an easy task. — Sarah Beth Durst

Ask anyone and they'll most likely say their family is crazy, and if they don't say their family is crazy, their friends are crazy. That's because everyone is crazy after taking the mask off. People are most themselves when not really trying to fit in, when either alone or around those already closest to them, and that is crazy. — Criss Jami

You can't "make" someone your soul mate. You can try but it will always be very hard work. Human relationships are hard even when they are easy, so it's important to be in one with a soul mate. She felt she could learn to love Shane; that she might grow to love him over time. She always felt she could make her mind up and then accomplish anything, but the heart and the mind have different agendas. If she was going to try to make this relationship work, it had to come from her heart, not from 'making up her mind'. You don't have to "try" to be anything when you are with your soul mate because they are looking for who you are, not for who you are trying to be. — Kate McGahan

I've calmed down. Looking back, I was engaged more in dramas than I was in relationships. I've spent a lot of my life being in it for the plot, and I don't do that anymore. I'm satisfied. I'm not competing with myself. I accomplished things I wanted to do, so everything I do now is because I want to, not because I'm trying to prove something. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye. — Catherynne M Valente

The need for sociability induce man to be in touch with his fellow men. However, this need might not ("ne saurait", Fr.) find its full (or complete) satisfaction in the conventional (or superficial, - "conventionnel", Fr.) and deceitful world, in which (or where) everyone is mainly (or mostly) trying to assert oneself in front of others ("devant les autres", Fr.), to appear, and hoping to find in society ("mondaine", Fr.) relationships some advantages for his interest and vanity (or vainglory or conceit", Fr.). — African Spir

There's something I have to say," I said seriously, looking her in the eye.
She smiled. "Oookay." She was mocking me-mocking my tone-but I didn't care.
"Okay. Here it is. I love you," I said. "And I never, ever wanted to hurt you. It's like, the number one thing I never want to do, but somehow, I keep doing it. And I'm sorry, I just ... that's all I wanted to say all this time. All I was trying to do ... with that thing with your dad, not telling you ... was not to hurt you. And I'm sorry that I did.
Alley stared at me.
"And I'm sorry that I did it again. With the Chloe thing. Which was stupid. Like, really, really, stupid. And I-"
"Can you just stop, for a second?" Ally said, holding up a hand.
"What?" I said.
"Can you say the first part again?" she asked, rolling her fingers around for a rewind.
I racked my brain.
"Um ... I love you?" I said.
"That's the part, Cuz I love you, too. — Kieran Scott

Sometimes, you can be more than enough for someone, but they choose not to be in your life. Always remember that Satan works hard to keep people miserable by feeding their fears, so they stay in their comfort zone. The truth is some people value what is predictable, more than chemistry. — Shannon L. Alder