True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.

I gave examples from my clinical practice of how love was not wholly a thought or feeling. I told of how that very evening there would be some man sitting at a bar in the local village, crying into his beer and sputtering to the bartender how much he loved his wife and children while at the same time he was wasting his family's money and depriving them of his attention. We recounted how this man was thinking love and feeling love--were they not real tears in his eyes?--but he was not in truth behaving with love.

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths, the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.

When we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us.

Going into the unknown is invariably frightening, but we learn what is significantly new only through adventures.

America's greatest sin is the refusal to delay gratification.

The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort.