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One of the most common problems in marriage occurs when she wants empathy and he's trying to fix things. Tell your partner what kind of listening you want ... Treat your mate as if he wants to make you happy but doesn't know how. You love him, after all. You picked him. Help him out.
TERRENCE REAL, O Magazine, Jan. 2007
The crisis between men and women boils down to a simple historical fact - women have changed and men have not.
TERRENCE REAL, "Men and Women in Crisis: The Journey to Harvest"
The bonds of silence and protection run deeper, for the moment, than his trust in me.
TERRENCE REAL, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women
Both in counseling couples and in workshops I've led around the country, I have taught people from all walks of life how to turn bad relationships into good ones, and good relationships into great ones. Because great is what you're really after. Great is what you deserve. Not merely a relationship you can live with, but one that is truly alive--passionately, tenderly, maddeningly filled to the brim with unexpected twists and turns, with comfort and solidity, with the sense of knowing and being known, and loving each other anyway. How do you get such a relationship? You don't get it, you build it, thoughtfully and skillfully, brick by brick.
TERRENCE REAL, The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work
Women are unhappy in their marriages because they want men to be more related than most men know how to be. And men are unhappy in their marriages because their women seem so unhappy with them.
TERRENCE REAL, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women
One of the paradoxes of healthy intimacy is that sustained connection rests on our capacity to put our relationship at risk from time to time. Slaves do not make loving partners.
TERRENCE REAL, "Men and Women in Crisis: The Journey to Harvest"
Like those rare conditions which causes a person's own immune system to assault itself, depression is a disorder wherein the self attacks the self.
TERRENCE REAL, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression
We tend not to recognize depression in men because the disorder itself is seen as unmanly. Depression carries, to many, a double stain--the stigma of mental illness and also the stigma of "feminine" emotionality. Those in a relationship with a depressed man are themselves often faced with a painful dilemma. They can either confront his condition--which may further shame him--or else collude with him in minimizing it, a course that offers no hope for relief.
TERRENCE REAL, I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression
One way to describe the new vision of twenty-first-century marriage is that we have grafted onto the companionship marriage of the previous century the expectations and mores of a lover relationship--the kind of passion, attention, and emotional closeness that we most commonly associate with youth, and with the early stages of a relationship. The common thread running through both of these times is that the couple is principally concerned with itself. I call this nose-to-nose energy. But sooner or later--and certainly with the advent of those things that won't go away--healthy couples turn to side-by-side energy. No longer principally wrapped up in each other, the partners stand in harness together shoulder to shoulder, facing out toward the life they are building.
TERRENCE REAL, The New Rules of Marriage: What You Need to Know to Make Love Work
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