“Masculinity and femininity attract one another, and their attributes are complementary; however this entails more than simply a male being attracted to a female: What actually complements the immature man who runs around, or cheats, or neglects his duties, is the masculine woman because he needs her to lead and to take charge, to take care of him. Immaturity is a state of need, and one of those needs is the need to be kept in check.”
“I can't forge a marriage founded on lies."
"Aren't most?"
"Ever the romantic."
"Ever practical.”
Source: King of Scars
“An empty room can be an instrument for introspection. It was a reflection of the void created by the decision to distance myself from a relationship that had defined me to others and to myself. If I was not a wife, who was I? I was removing a label that marked my place in a social system, but was I still “me” without that label?”
Source: Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
“It wasn’t that difficult to cook. Or to eat well. The key was to do it with love, for myself and for my family.”
Source: Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
“The image of woman as mother is universal, not specific to any culture. But in India, that image is elevated to iconic status by a society that puts marriage and motherhood at the core of a woman’s existence.”
Source: Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
“Who knows what goes on in a marriage? Even my parents, who had a compatible marriage, had their points of contention. They had figured out how to disagree and how to find common ground.”
Source: Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
“The thing about marriages, bad ones especially, is the utter disregard with which the couple and those around them treat the cracks when they first emerge. Like tectonic plates that crush and grind against each other under the surface of the earth, the damage does not happen on one sunny morning when the earthquake hits. When a couple splits, it is the result of an inevitable break that has been brewing for years without respite.”
Source: Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
“What do you do when you know that staying together is not easy and breaking up is even more difficult?”
Source: Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
“It took more than motherhood to move me toward meditation. I first had to lose things—my mother, my marriage, my cynicism. I had to make life-changing decisions. Yet I moved, step by step, into the unknown inner world. Hesitatingly. Skeptically. Slowly.”
Source: Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
“Another socially important variable associated with mental ability is that of marriage, or more specifically that of who marries whom. A consistent finding in several studies of the characteristics of spouses is that there is a tendency for spouses to be similar in some—but not all—aspects of mental ability; in other words, some aspects of mental ability do show substantial “assortative mating.”
For example, in a study of married couples, Watson et al. (2004) examined spouses' scores on two mental ability tasks—a vocabulary test and a matrix reasoning test. Interestingly, even though vocabulary and matrix reasoning tend to be correlated with each other (both are strongly g-loaded tests), they revealed quite different results when correlations between spouses were considered. On the one hand, wives' and husbands' levels of vocabulary showed a fairly strong positive correlation, about .45.
But, on the other hand, wives' and husbands' levels of matrix reasoning were correlated only about .10. This result is consistent with previous findings, in which spouses have tended to show quite similar levels of verbal comprehension ability, but no particular similarity in mathematical reasoning ability (e.g., Botwin, Buss, & Shackelford, 1997).
Why should it be the case that spouses tend to be similar in verbal abilities, but not so similar in (equally g-loaded) nonverbal reasoning abilities? One likely explanation—as you might guess—is that two people will tend to have more rewarding conversations if they have similar levels of verbal ability, but that similar levels of nonverbal or mathematical reasoning ability are unlikely to contribute in an important way to any aspect of relationship quality.”
Source: Individual Differences and Personality