Just as we judge death as a failure, we feel relationships have failed if they do not last. The same way we say the only complete and successful life is one that lasted ninety-five years, we feel that the only successful and complete relationships are those that last forever.

The reality is that relationships are successful and heal us even if they only last six months. They do what they are supposed to. When they are no longer needed, they are complete and successful.

Unfortunately, we don't always know that relationships are complete and successful.

It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone... but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.

Distance and time are the two wedges that separate relationships.

When it really matters, get in the car (or on the plane) and meet them face-to-face.

When you want it to last, don't wait to talk about it. Solve it now before the gap becomes too wide.

I've often wondered what makes a relationship last. I guess the best answer is it's the one right after the next to the last one.

sometimes a person ends a good relationship because the areas they think are bad are being intensified by their personal issues that they have not dealt with properly. sometimes people break apart a home because they are unaware of their projections and are not ready to appreciate a good thing.

A long-lived relationship is about so many things. It is such a dense and complex process — always a process — and it's not to be summed up. It's not to be turned into some kind of vignette. If we are serious, we also have to recognize that even the longest and richest and densest relationship must end, and we see it around us. We see it in that inevitability of time's power, if you will.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?

Relationships never break cleanly. Like a valuable vase, they are smashed and then glued back together, smashed and glued, smashed and glued until the pieces just don’t fit together anymore.

Love is so short and forgetting is so long.

Living in a world of flux, subjugated to the indecipherable laws of constant vicissitudes, our encounters cannot but be momentary flashes. The glamor cannot last because we change, the others change, circumstances change. So I wouldn’t call the end of a relationship a failure.

Advances in communication technology foster a false fantasy of togetherness by transmitting the impression of contact- phone calls, faxes, e-mail- without its substance. And when a relationship is ailing from frank time deprivation, both parties often aver that nothing can be done. Every activity they spend time on (besides each other) has been classified as indispensable: cleaning the house, catching the news, balancing the checkbook.

All relationships require work. They require endless communication and tremendous understanding, and they can be very challenging. But while giving up isn’t always the answer, sometimes you have to walk away, especially when you lose your sense of self.

The end of a relationship is the end of a home.