14 Quotes Tagged: human-relationships

When one man has been under very remarkable obligations to another, with whom he subsequently quarrels, a common sense of decency, as it were, makes of the former a much severer enemy than a mere stranger would be. To account for your own hard-heartedness and ingratitude in such a case, you are bound to prove the other party's crime. It is not that you are selfish, brutal, and angry at the failure of a speculation — no, no — it is that your partner has led you into it by the basest treachery and with the most sinister motives. From a mere sense of consistency, a persecutor is bound to show that the fallen man is a villain — otherwise he, the persecutor, is a wretch himself.

Without institutional obligations, the upkeep of friendships require must be very deliberate...

However, the weakness of friendship is also the source of its immeasurable strength. Why do true friendships make us happier than spouses or children? Because they're always a deliberate choice, never an obligation...

Someone does not cease to be your parent, boss, or spouse because you stop liking them. Friendship is more real because either person can walk away at any time. Its fragility proves its purity.

Most couples wait too long to go (to marriage counseling). There's an average six-year delay between the first cracks in a marriage and actually getting help...

When entropy decays the happiness of a marriage over time, it's not just a linear downward progression for everyone. Often, there's a phase change (like water to ice)... In marriage this goes by the appropriately intimidating term negative sentiment override.

Idealization hasn't faded — it has flipped. If love is positive delusion, NSO is utter disillusionment. You are biased against, not toward, your partner. The facts haven't necessarily changed, just your interpretation of them. Rather than attributing problems to context, attributions now lie in someone's poor character traits.

To Aristotle, friends “are disposed toward each other as they are disposed to themselves: a friend is another self.”

… Your brain is like a clever lawyer, twisting the words in Darwin’s contract. Selfishness can actually be altruism — if I believe that you are me.

"Jeff Hall's research found that it took as many as sixty hours to develop a light friendship, sometimes one hundred hours to get to full-fledged "friend" status, and two hundred or more hours to unlock the vaunted "best friend" achievement...

Hall also found that how people talked mattered. We've all hit that wall with a potential friend where the small talk starts to go in circles...

Want to make good friends without the dozens of hours?... Arthur Aron got strangers to feel like lifelong pals in just forty-five minutes. How? Well that leads us to our second costly signal: vulnerability."

Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are.

"..."For the first time in history, the typical American now spends more years single than married." Marriage has gone from being a cornerstone to a capstone. It used to be something you did while young and on a path to adulthood. Now its demands seem so onerous that people want to make sure they have all their ducks in a row before attempting it — if they choose to walk down the aisle at all...

Yes, the average marriage has been getting worse year after year without much hope, but there's something you should know about the best marriages right now...

They are better than any in the history of humanity. Period.

... it's winner takes all. And that's why Finkel calls wedlock in our era "the all or nothing marriage.

Edith Wharton in the 1800s? “There is one friend in the life of each of us who seems not as a separate person, however dear and beloved, but an expansion, an interpretation, of one’s self.”

… In psychology it’s called “self-expansion theory” — that we expand our notion of our self to include those we’re close to.

… When women heard the names of their close friends, their gray matter responded the same way it did when they heard their own name.

My theory is - we don't really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and quickly as if anybody's there.

Class never runs scared.
It is sure-footed and confident.
It can handle anything that comes along.
Class has a sense of humor.
It knows a good laugh is the best lubricant for oiling the machinery of human relations.

Class never makes excuses.
It takes its lumps and learns from past mistakes.
Class knows that good manners are nothing more than a series of small, inconsequential sacrifices.

Class bespeaks an aristocracy that has nothing to do with ancestors or money.
Some wealthy “blue bloods” have no class, while individuals who are struggling to make ends meet are loaded with it.

Class is real.
It can’t be faked.

Class never tried to build itself by tearing others down.
Class is already up and need not strive to look better by making others look worse.

Class can “walk with kings and keep it’s virtue and talk with crowds and keep the common touch.” Everyone is comfortable with the person who has class because that person is comfortable with himself.

If you have class, you’ve got it made.

If you don’t have class, no matter what else you have, it doesn’t make any difference.

"...the most wonderful form of crazy that love brings: idealization... A 1999 study showed that people in happy relationships spend five times as long talking about their sweetheart's good qualities as bad. As Robert Seidenberg said, "Love is a human religion in which another person is believed in."

...Realism may be accurate, but it's our illusions that foretell our happiness in love. And the more crazy, the better. People who idealized their partner the most felt no decline in relationship satisfaction over a study of the first three years in marriage.

...When researchers ask people in the throes of infatuation about their partner's downsides, they can recognize and identify the bad stuff... But they emotionally discount the negative: it's not a big deal. Or those flaws are even "charming." This attitude helps grease the wheels of a relationship"

"We've all read a thousand articles that say marriage makes you healthier and happier. Umm, no. Many of these studies merely survey married people and single people, compare the happiness levels, find that the married people are doing better, and crow "See? Marriage makes you healthy and happy." But that's committing an error called "survivorship bias." If you want to determine if getting married makes you happier, you need to include separated, divorced, and widowed people in with the currently married, not with the unmarried...

A 2010 study from Australia even said previous research probably underestimated just how happy people in happy marriages are. But the flip side is even more damning than you may have guessed. A study of medical records of five thousand patients analyzed the most stressful life events people deal with. Divorce came in #2 (Death of a spouse was number one.) Divorce even beat going to prison."

And as a general rule, which may make all creditors who are inclined to be severe pretty comfortable in their minds, no men embarrassed are altogether honest, very likely. They conceal something; they exaggerate chances of good luck; hide away the reals state of affairs; say that things are flourishing when they are hopeless; keep a smiling face (a dreary smile it is) upon the verge of bankruptcy — are ready to lay hold of any pretext for delay, or of any money, so as to stave off the inevitable ruin a few days longer.

"Sixty-nine percent of ongoing problems never get resolved. No, I'm not saying that to depress you. The point is that it's not what you talk about, it's how you talk about it. Everyone thinks the issue is clarity, but studies show that most couples (if they do talk) are actually pretty clear...

It's about regulation, not resolution of the conflict. War is inevitable, but you have to obey the Geneva Convention rules. No chemical warfare. No torturing prisoners. Maya Angelou once said, "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.