51 Quotes by Ada Calhoun

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling -- it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise," writes psychologist Erich Fromm. "If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?

By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. To hitch your rickety wagon to the flickering star of another fallible human being -- what an insane thing to do. What a burden, and what a gift.

Maybe the Generation X story need not be: We're broke. We're unstable. We're alone. Maybe it can be: We've had a hard row to hoe. We've been one big experiment. And yet, look at us: we've accomplished so much.

People who don't marry miss both the pelting hardships of marriage and its warm rewards.

...there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again.

Failure is part of being human, and it is definitely part of being married.

We are some of the best-educated human beings in history and among the first adults in recent American history in worse financial shape than our parents.

In their forties, our parents' generation could expect to own a house and to have savings. In our forties, we are often still scrambling like we did at twenty-five. According to a 2017 national survey by CareerBuilder, 78 percent of US workers live paycheck-paycheck; nearly three in four say they are in debt.

In my experience, Gen X women spend lotsof time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings. They often tell me that they are embarrassed to even bring them up. Some of the unhappiest women I spoke with, no matter how depressed or exhausted they were, apologized for “whining.” Almost every one of them also described herself as “lucky.