Quotes on romance

Perhaps it is because I've been in the throes of romance for the past 10 months, a relationship that keeps getting better and better, but I've been struggling to find words to describe or express my feelings to my beloved. That is why I set out to find some well-crafted quotes on romance, quotes new to me. I found some that are most excellent: “Romance is thinking about your significant other, when you are supposed to be thinking about something else.” ― Nicholas Sparks “A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part “The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays “When love is not madness it is not love.” ― Pedro Calderón de la Barca “Every great love starts with a great story...” ― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook [more . . . ]

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The stress children put on a marriage

The happily ever after trope goes something like this:  Love, marriage, children, happiness.   However, that is not what the statistics show.  "Parents often become more distant and businesslike with each other as they attend to the details of parenting."  The source of this sad passage is "Decades of Studies Show What Happens to Marriages After Having Kids," in Fortune Magazine. The statistics show that having children drives a married couple apart more than it brings them more closely together:

The irony is that even as the marital satisfaction of new parents declines, the likelihood of them divorcing also declines. So, having children may make you miserable, but you’ll be miserable together.

Worse still, this decrease in marital satisfaction likely leads to a change in general happiness, because the biggest predictor of overall life satisfaction is one’s satisfaction with their spouse.

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The body as the yardstick for meaning

Mark Johnson (of "Metaphors we live By," written with George Lakoff) gave this excellent talk destroying the notion that meaning is something ethereal and disembodied. Instead, the body is the yardstick for meaning. This talk turns much of traditional epistemology upside down. Johnson opens the talk with a Billy Collins talk titled "Purity."

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The ways in which it is expensive to be poor

People who are poor get ripped off in many ways that people with money would never tolerate. That is the point of this article at Alternate, 8 Ways Being Poor is Wildly Expensive in America. The sharply higher costs of having a place to live, food to eat and a means of getting around are merely the first 3 of the 8.

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