For some it takes a lifetime to find true love, But for the lucky ones a lifetime is merely enough to share the love they've found.

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.

Living with golden fantasies of an endlessly nurtured infancy can be a neurotic refusal to grow up.

But it's hard to be hip over thirty when everyone else is nineteen, when the last dance we learned was the Lindy, and the last we heard, girls who looked like Barbara Streisand were trying to do something about it.

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.

as we acquire new aches and new pains, our health care is, of necessity, being supplied by internists, cardiologists, dermatologists, podiatrists, urologists, periodontists, gynecologists and psychiatrists, from all of whom we want a second opinion. We want a second opinion that says, don't worry, you are going to live forever.

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