...changing one's own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other.

Despite all of their flaws and difficulties, these men don't want to walk out on their own lives, leave their wives and children. They want to come home.

Women are unhappy in their marriages because they want men to be more related than most men know how to be. And men are unhappy in their marriages because their women seem so unhappy with them.

...strength is not the absence of vulnerability. Strength is knowing what your weaknesses are and working with them.

We are so busy attempting to manage the result that we fail simply to run the race.

Revenge is really a perverse form of communication, a twisted attempt at repair.

Learning to listen relationally, listen with cool heads and clear boundaries, listen with the quietness of the heart and the gentleness of the body, means having a self so developed it can afford to yield.

The paradox of real love is that our capacity to sustain intimacy rests on our capacity to tolerate aloneness inside the relationship.

As women shut down their needs, they also shut down their sense of pleasure.