51 Quotes by Ada Calhoun

As cancer treatments progress and people live longer with chronic illness or dementia, the absence of family leave and affordable health insurance could prove yet more debilitating for those cohorts in midlife.

Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition.

It feels like every day there's another report of a company's bold new plan to cut costs and increase annual savings by "streamlining"--read: having fewer people do more work.

Listening to other women's stories this year has given me confirmation, finally, that our expectations have been absurd. So many women I spoke with--objectively successful women--felt ashamed of their perceived failures.What if we're not failures? What if what we've done is good? At any rate, maybe it's good enough.

My own parents have been married since 1974, weathering a how-much-time-do-you-have list of crises. I went to my mother for advice once when Neal and I were fighting. "How do you stay married?" I asked her. Her reply: "You don't get divorced.

Single women may still be marginalized or stigmatized even--some say especially--when they are happy about being single.

In order to have a family life and a career, women must move twice as fast to arrive at the same place. Rather than being assisted with this unlikely feat--say, via paid parental leave, accelerator programs at work, or partners willing to sideline their own careers for a few years--women are scolded, told they should have found a boyfriend in college, had a baby by twenty-seven.

As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.

I'm not knocking choices, just saying that having so many of them with so little support has led to a great deal of shame. Being a full and equal partner both at work and at home, having a rich social life, contributing to society, staying in shape - doing all that is exponentially harder than doing any one thing. We asked for more, and did we ever get it. I firmly believe it's fairer. Easier? No.