“Your soulmate is not the person who rejected you.”
“It is possible for your ex, your boyfriend or girlfriend, or your husband or wife, to no longer be your type.”
“All too often, a man gets into debt mainly, or even only, to get inside a woman or women.”
“We have allowed our love stories to end too early. We seem to know too much about how love starts, and recklessly little about how it might continue.”
“The ability to live a God-pleasing life, indeed, to inherit eternal life, does not stem from our dedication to God or vows of our will; rather, it flows to us from the power of the divine life granted to us through our supernatural union with Christ. The very life of God through Christ via the Holy Spirit has taken up residence inside us. We are irrevocably wed to the divine nature, and human marriage is a powerful picture, or symbol, of this union.”
“Some women are not gold diggers. They dig for metals that are way more precious.”
“Never judge a book by its cover. At first glance, even Jesus appeared unimpressive.”
“Here- instead of the estuaries and enormous sweeps of grass as in her marsh- clear water flowed as far as she could see through a bright and open cypress forest. Brilliant white herons and storks stood among the water lilies and floating plants so green they seemed to glow. Hunched up on cypress knees as large as easy chairs, they ate pimento-cheese sandwiches and potato chips, grinning as geese glided just below their toes.”
“A cheating partner is a person who is either in bondage or isn’t loved the proper way.”
“Young women s expectations of safety and entitlement to respect have perhaps risen faster than some young men s willingness to respect them, says Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at Evergreen State College and has written about the history of dating. Exploitative and disrespectful men have always existed. There are many evolved men, but there may be something going on in culture now that is making some more resistant to evolving.”
“It s people running around looking for anything to generate volume: Oh, teenage girls are taking their clothes off? And that s getting a lot of hits? Then let s turn a blind eye to the consequences. Oh, your daughter s on Tinder? Well, she s just meeting friends. It s all about high-volume usage. I don t think it s necessarily a cynical, let s destroy women thing - it s how can I get my next quarter s bonus? And I think to the extent that the digital social media society normalizes impulses- think it, post it, Roberts says, we ve also created a context for more and more provocative propositions, whatever they are: Look at my boobs. Do you want to hook up? It s moved the bar for what s normal and normalized extreme behavior; everything outrageous becomes normalized so rapidly. You realize how insane things are today when you think about the relative rate of change. When I was in high school, if I had gone around saying, Here s a picture of me, like me, I would have gotten punched. If a girl went around passing out naked pictures of herself, people would have thought she needed therapy. Now that s just Selfie Sunday. (--- Paul Roberts quoted from the book)”
“Some people do not mind losing the person or thing that some people would kill to have.”
“In the era of social dating,it is just an experience that feels like a scene in a rom-com” to “absolute disasters”
“There should be no excuse as to why you don t invest quality time into your partner.”
“It’s very possible that you one day end up feeling like there’s no need for you to date after all. Maybe you won’t need anything other than your job and a hobby. Maybe living with a pet and going out with your girlfriends every other weekend will be more than enough companionship for you.”
“We are in uncharted territory when it comes to sex and the internet, says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. There have been two major transitions in heterosexual mating, Garcia says, in the last four million years. The first was around ten to fifteen thousand years ago, in the agricultural revolution, when we became less migratory and more settled, leading to the establishment of marriage as a cultural contract. And the second major transition is with the rise of the Internet, Garcia says. Suddenly, instead of meeting through proximity, community connections, and family and friends, people could meet each other virtually and engage in amorous activity with the click of a button. Internet meeting is now surpassing every other form. “It’s changing so much about the way we act both romantically and sexually,” Garcia says. “It is unprecedented from an evolutionary standpoint.” And yet this massive shift in our behavior has gone almost completely unexamined, especially given how the internet permeates modern life. While there have been studies about how men and women use social media differently- how they use language and present themselves differently, for example- there s not a lot of research about how they behave sexually online; and there is virtually nothing about how girls and boys do. While there has been concern about the online interaction of children and adults, it s striking that so little attention has been paid to the ways in which the Internet has changed the sexual behavior of girls and boys interacting together. This may be because the behavior has been largely hidden or unknown, or, again, due to the fear of not seeming sex-positive, mistaking responsibility for judgement. And there are questions to ask, from the standpoint of girls and boys physical and emotional health and the ethics of their treatment of each other. Sex on a screen is different from sex that develops in person, this much seems seems self-evident, just as talking on a screen is different from face-to-face communication. And so if talking on a screen reduces one s ability to be empathic, for example, then how does sex on a screen change sexual behavior? Are people more likely to act aggressively or unethically, as in other types of online communication? How do gender roles and sexism play into cybersex? And how does the influence of porn, which became available online at about the same time as social networking, factor in?”
“First impression matters but consistent impression is where the proof is.”