Please stop dating and marrying people who are your parents' types. The attraction will not last and you're doing it to fill an unmet need for approval that you never received from your family in childhood. Your romantic partner is not supposed to be a peace offering or any other kind of goodwill offering.

Sometimes you don't know how much you loved someone until you start falling out of love with them. Because you start falling out of love with them in a million different ways, and you go, "Wow, I didn't even know I loved that person in that way." And so, a million ways of falling out makes you realize the million ways that you fell in. Then you end up falling in love with those many ways that you're falling out of love. It's the worst. You never really escape from that kind of love, do you?

You can have a pet zebra and put that zebra into a small cage every day and tell the zebra that you love it, but no matter how you and the zebra love each other, the fact remains, that the zebra should be let out of that cage and should belong to someone who can treat it better, the way it should be treated, someone who can make it happy.

If someone else makes my partner a better person, if someone else makes my partner happier than I can, if someone else breathes life into my partner in a way I cannot; then my partner should be with that person, not with me. It seems like people fail to grasp that wanting to be with someone is totally different from needing someone to belong to you. Wanting to be with someone is totally different from needing to keep someone.

It's frightening to be alone... but it is even more frightening to be with someone who makes you feel alone.

A man who studies my weaknesses not to exploit them but to guard them; a man who observes my vulnerabilities not to play them but to swaddle them; a man who waits for my fragilities not to impose upon them but to protect them; a man who exposes my nakedness not to taste but to connect. A man. A man like this.

Make sure of this one thing: that the person you choose to stay with is someone you do not have to shrink yourself for, cut yourself into smaller pieces for, minimize yourself for. Do not ever, ever, ever stay with someone for whom you need to be less than! The person who is meant for you will call you into higher parts of yourself, encouraging you to rise, to soar higher.

I don't know why people need things to last forever before they can say that those things "work". Nothing needs to last forever so I know they "work". They work while they work and when it's time to move on, it's time to move on. The human body doesn't even last forever; does that mean it didn't "work"? It fulfilled its purpose and then it moved on. We should expect nothing more from anything else.

I will never want to be the one a man chooses to be with because I'm the one he knows will always forgive him over and over again. God forbid I ever become that. God forbid a man ever stays with me because true love scares him. May I never be just a man's safe choice.