It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.

Even when people capitalize my name, I don't freak out, even though that would not be my choice.

In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.

The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.

Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.

Women have endeavored to guide men to love because patriarchal thinking has sanctioned this work even as it has undermined it by teaching men to refuse guidance...A useful gift all love's practitioners can give is the offering of forgiveness. It not only allows us to move away from blame, from seeing others as the cause of our sustained lovelessness, but it enables us to experience agency, to know we can be responsible for giving and finding love.

I think it's crazy for us to think that people don't understand what's being foregrounded in their lives at a given point in time.