Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.

Keep in mind that the tendency to be judgmental - toward yourself or another person - is a good barometer of how anxious or stressed out you are. Judging others is simply the flip side of judging yourself.

Underground issues from one relationship or context invariably fuel our fires in another.

Believing that all women should want to be mothers makes about as much sense as believing that all men should want to be engineers.

The best apology, I think, was from my husband, Steve, who slept with a close friend of mine decades back, when we were committed to being life partners but not yet married. And many of the factors that made Steve's apology so healing are universal. One important thing is that he confessed to the affair, rather than my discovering it. He looked deeply into his own history in terms of why this happened, but he never used that history as an excuse.

Telling a true story about personal experience is not just a matter of being oneself, or even or finding oneself. It is also a matter of choosing oneself.

If we only listened with the same passion that we feel about being heard.