37 Quotes by Carolyn Hax

You can’t make people like you under the best of circumstances, and you certainly can’t make them like you while you’re actively badgering them on what you perceive to be their failures of conscience.

The sudden death of a partner while expecting a child is so universally understood as awful that I don’t think anyone with any other weight to carry is going to get to same kind of sympathy – except perhaps people who lose a child.

There’s nothing wrong with being happy somewhere, even if it’s the little pond you grew up in, as long as you are in fact comfortable vs. bored.

Instead of talking at each other about the non-business-related contact, talk to each other about your concerns about marriage. Listen a lot, too.

Unfortunately, I think the expectation is that birthday girls don’t pay.

Don’t freight your answers with any notions of what you’re “supposed” to do, and just see where your feelings point you. It can feel weird to be so formal about it, but if you’re not used to doing it, then there’s no shame in retraining yourself.

Once given, a gift is yours to use, store or dispose of as you see fit.

Attractions are things we all should be good at saying no to, because our Department of Attraction is arguably the least reliable and productive office in our entire brain.

When you are stuck in a group of people who merely trade turns at talking about themselves instead of actually conversing, it could be a matter of their not really knowing how to converse as opposed to being too small-minded or excessively Facebooked.