Anyone can behave with skill and integrity when their partner is doing the same. What makes us grown-ups is the capacity to remain skillful, even when our partners act like full-fledged lunatics. Staying on course, maintaining your program, when things are going well is like riding a bicycle downhill.

Requests can be particularly difficult for women for two reasons. First, the traditional socialization of girls renders desire illegitimate, pulling them toward equating pleasure with selfishness.

The lack of an internal boundary inevitably leads to control or withdrawal. If there is no membrane between you and whatever external stimulus gets thrown at you, then you attempt to regulate your own level of comfort or discomfort by managing the stimulus.

object when people, especially therapists, talk about “resolving grief,” as if grief could ever be so compliant. We humans don’t “resolve” grief; we live with it. The pain of our losses recedes, over time, and we get on with our lives. But periodically one may well feel the chill hand on the heart—what we miss, our mortality—its sudden grip like a

Moving into acceptance means moving into grief, without being a victim. You own your choice. “I am getting enough in this relationship,” you say, “to make it worth my while to mourn the rest.” And mourn we do. Real love is not for the faint of heart. What we miss in our relationships we truly miss.

We become so involved, mostly in our own heads, with that over which we have no control that we fail to do what we can. “What if I move and he doesn’t?” “What if I write my dissertation and they don’t like it?” “What if I take a new job and hate it?” We are so busy attempting to manage the result that we fail simply to run the race.

The truth is that relationships do not make us happy. Relationships are the crucible in which we get to work on ourselves, in which we have the opportunity to stretch, grow, and, if we are fortunate, thrive.

Remember, patriarchy codes intimacy as feminine, idealizing it in principle and devaluing it in fact.

Just as we are inclined, in intimate relationships, to re-create the familiar themes we grew up with, we are also predisposed to restore the familiar in our relationship to ourselves; we tend to treat ourselves the way we were treated. It is what we know.