Betrayal can be extremely painful, but it's up to you how much that pain damages you permanently.
Emily V. Gordon
Your life story is a gift, and it should be treated as such.
Women compete, compare, undermine, and undercut one another - at least, that is the prevailing notion of how we interact.
I definitely think, when you're a teenager, it's more forgiving to talk to strangers and go up to people at a mall or whatever.
Cheating is very rarely about the actual act of being with another person.
For so long, TV consisted of a limited number of shows a year, and those shows had to appeal to as many people as possible. The joy of TV now is that shows don't have to be broad anymore - they can be small, weird, and niche.
There's nothing like listening to the drone of QVC's always-bubbly pitchwomen, as they try to move loose-fitting tunics with 'just the right amount of sparkle,' to soothe you into a healing slumber.
As any daytime judge show can tell you, spending someone's money or taking their stuff because they hurt your feelings is not justified.
Holiday food is rich and indulgent. Going-home-to-see-family food is richer and even more indulgent.
Sometimes new spouses don't fully process the commitment they've made until after the deal is done, and then they panic.
Marriage will not change your spouse. It will not make him or her more mature, more loyal to you, or better at housework.
If you've experienced cheating in a new marriage, the real work is not obsessively combing through all the details of what happened, but rather figuring out if your relationship is worth saving.
Nothing makes me feel more mushy and full of love for my husband than going back and looking at our flirtation unfolding online. I love reading our old e-mails, texts, and Gchats.
In high school, I decided that all of my female friends were stupid and traded them for guy friends. I loved horror movies and heavy metal and used these interests to become a 'guys' girl.'
Everybody's got baggage, and not just the classic, 'Oh I have so much baggage,' but everyone comes with so much context, and you're not just dating a person: you're dating all their context, too. Part of relationships is negotiating each other's context.
If you've had a marriage that ended because of a betrayal in trust on your spouse's behalf, the idea of trusting another person with your heart can seem completely ridiculous.
A lot of people end up getting married more out of expectation than out of passion for each other, but if your options have ever been, 'We either get married or break up,' be careful. Marriage should be a new addition you add to the house that is your relationship, not the structure you impose on the house once it's already built.
Often, when cheating happens, we rush to place blame solely on one person - either the person who did the cheating, or more insidiously, if it happened to us, we blame ourselves for not being 'good enough' to keep them around. But putting it all on one person doesn't paint the entire picture.
In Hollywood, it seems that the people least successful at being married are the ones most eager to tie the knot over and over again.
A lot of new stepparents fall into the trap of letting children disobey household expectations in order to gain favor with them.
Do remember to pick your battles when you start parenting your stepchildren.
Keeping physical items from the past is important - we keep old toys, grandparents' jewelry, yearbooks, dance recital programs - and we assign meaning to them. Those items become the memories, and that's a very healthy thing to do. The problems occur when we have too many of those sentimental items, and they start weighing us down.
Marriage is not a magical potion that serves to amplify adoration, reduce deep-seated feelings of resentment, erase fears of commitment, or answer questions about whether or not this is the right move. Marriage is a ceremony that cements your current bond to another human being, and while that's a huge thing, that's all it does.
When we each focus on being the dominant force in our own universe rather than invading other universes, we all win.
Some divorcees turn their pain inward. They brood, and they grieve for a long time, always wondering if they could have done something differently to keep this from happening. They make every problem in their relationship into something they could have prevented.
Never marry because it seems like what you should do.
I'd watch shows like 'The Kids in the Hall' or 'Twin Peaks,' and I'd see weird people being celebrated and appreciated without compromising their weirdness. On 'The Facts of Life,' I'd see girls who were pudgy, beautiful, popular, tomboyish - many ways of being female - and I'd feel quietly reassured.
Parents go to sleep early. This is universal.
Post-divorce, the world can feel harsh and full of jagged edges.
Not deciding is a decision. People don't realize that not making a decision is a decision in itself.
Being completely independent doesn't make you a strong woman - it's being strong enough to trust yourself in other people's hands that takes guts.
If you don't simply communicate with your spouse what household tasks you would like them to do, you are setting yourself up to be angry.
I am fairly convinced that people plan destination weddings because they would actually like to elope but want to have given you the option to attend.
Far from 'rotting my brain,' as I was often told would happen, TV helped me feel less alone at a time when I spent so much time alone.
I thought of 'The Big Sick' as a placeholder title, to be completely honest. I've grown to love it.
I'm tired of hearing about 'Damages,' I don't care how life-changing 'The Wire' is, and I don't want to hear another word about 'Battlestar Galactica' or its super-awesome ending.
Sacrificing your relationship for your career sounds noble and romantic from the outside, but the reality is that it can create a pattern of self-destruction that will ultimately burn you out on the career you've worked so hard to build. It's a trap and, for some, an easy way out of having to maintain relationships under stress.
Your wedding day is supposed to be your big day, and yet a lot of engaged couples find that instead of creating an event that will be important to them, they're dodging through a minefield of modern etiquette traps.
Sometimes we put so much effort into things we're doing, like dating or wedding planning, that we don't stop to think about whether or not we even want the results of that effort.
You didn't have to know anything about show business to appreciate the characters' humor, because at its heart, 'Party Down' was about following dreams, dealing with rejection, and surviving all the lame jobs we've all had to work just to get by in the meantime.
When I was young and less wise, I thought that being a feminist meant being independent. It meant not sacrificing your needs for anyone else's and not relying on anyone else for even a smidgen of your happiness or well being.
I had a tightly knit group of female friends in elementary school - we called ourselves the Sensational Six.
'The Babadook,' written and directed by a woman, is a gorgeously told female-focused story of grief, longing, loneliness, and what mourning can become.
Stays at the in-laws' aren't inherently sexy.
I grew up in a very small town in North Carolina, weird and pudgy, without too many other kids to play with. I spent a lot of time watching TV. It was my reassurance that the outside world was bigger and more colorful than the one I lived in.
I have a pretty intense work ethic. If something's not done, I cannot let go until I get it done.
No matter how you handle alcohol at your wedding, you will most likely be upsetting someone.
Get married wherever you like, make accommodations for the people you love so they can attend, and forget about the people who can't.
People get married for a wide array of reasons and have all sorts of expectations of how marriage will change the relationship. And while it's true that turning the person you're dating into a legal partner does affect certain things, those who expect marriage to be a cure-all for all your relationship woes are sorely mistaken.
Things can be tough even when surrounded by nice Pottery Barn stuff.
