we love as soon as we learn to distinguish a separate 'you' and 'me.' Love is our attempt to assuage the terror and isolation of that separateness.

Just as children, step by step, must separate from their parents, we will have to separate from them. And we will probably suffer...from some degree of separation anxiety: because separation ends sweet symbiosis. Because separation reduces our power and control. Because separation makes us feel less needed, less important. And because separation exposes our children to danger.

Our daily existence requires both closeness and distance, the wholeness of self, the wholeness of intimacy.

Our early lessons in love and our developmental history shape the expectations we bring into marriage.

Lust is what keeps you wanting to do it even when you have no desire to be with each other. Love is what makes you want to be with each other even when you have no desire to do it.

I could tell it was going to be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

Our mother gives us our earliest lessons in love- and its partner, hate. Our father-our "second other"-elaborates on them.