51 Quotes by Ada Calhoun

The people I know who are happy realize they can't care about everything," says Deal. "You have to decide what you care about. If everything matters to you, you're going to go nuts.

Somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.

One night in December 2018, the Tony-winning actress and singer TOnya Pinkins talked onstage about her experience of menopause adding: "Things are so much better than they were decades ago, but they can be bad and better at the same time." "Bad and better" is one way to think about our prospects at this stage of life too.

Generation X women, who as children lacked cell phones and helicopter parents, came up relying on our own wits. To keep ourselves safe, we took control. We worked hard and made lists and tried to do everything all at once for a very long time without much help. We took responsibility for ourselves--and later we also took responsibility for our work or partners or children or parents. We should be proud of ourselves.

We bear financial responsibilities that men had in the old days while still saddled with traditional caregiving duties. We generally incur this double whammy precisely while hitting peak stress in both our careers and child-raising--in our forties, at an age when most of our mothers and grandmothers were already empty nesters.

Gen Xers are in 'the prime of their lives' at a particularly dangerous and divisive moment,' Boomer marketing expert Faith Popcorn told me. 'They have been hit hard financially and dismissed culturally. They have tons of debt. They're squeezed on both sides by children and aging parents. The grim state of adulthood is hitting them hard. If they're exhausted and bewildered, they have every reason to feel that way.

So what's the secret to staying together?" I asked her. "Be nice?" she offered. I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don't leave. That's all.

The boring parts don't last forever. In retrospect, they aren't even boring.

The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.