Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

It’s how apathetic your partners are, how indifferent they are to their ambitions, whether they be income-earning or not. It would be one thing if your partners

But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.

This relationship isn’t meeting your needs; it’s pushing your buttons.

But transformation often demands that we separate our emotional responses from our rational minds.

A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they’re in one. Its only defining quality is that it’s composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.

To do better you’re going to have to try.

If you’d like to become the emotionally evolved man it seems so very clear to me that you are on the brink of becoming, you’re going to have to evolve beyond asking every kitten you meet if she’s your mother. She isn’t. You are.

It means that if you yearn to be free of a particular relationship and you feel that yearning lodged within you more firmly than any of the other competing and contrary yearnings are lodged, your desire to leave is not only valid, but probably the right thing to do. Even if someone you love is hurt by that.

whatever you feel about his or her father separate from the choices you make and the actions you take in regard to his or her relationship with his or her dad. Your behavior and words will deeply impact your child’s life—