Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage Quotes

You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow - this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

Maybe the difference between first marriage and second marriage is that the second time at least you know you are gambling.

Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.

Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

The problem, simply put, is that we cannot choose everything simultaneously. So we live in danger of becoming paralyzed by indecision, terrified that every choice might be the wrong choice.

Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.

By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.

This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)

For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.

the great lack of parity between husbands and wives has always been spawned by the disproportionate degree of self-sacrifice that women are willing to make on behalf of those they love.

I was a veritable Johnny Appleseed of grand expectations, and all I reaped for my trouble was a harvest of bitter fruit.

The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.

Marriage is a game. They (the anxious and powerful) set the rules. We (the ordinary and subversive) bow obediently before those rules. And then we go home and do whatever the hell we want anyhow.

I am openly prideful, secretly judgemental, and cowardly in conflict.

The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.

Psychologists suggest that we must reach back at least three generations to look for clues whenever we begin untangling the emotional legacy of any one family's history.

The Buddha taught that most problems - if only you give them enough time and space - will eventually wear themselves out.

There was no better path to autonomy for an ambitious young businesswoman than to be married off to a respectable corpse.

Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love it's more like love's shady second cousin who's always borrowing money and can't hold down a job.