Anne Edgar

25 Things You Need To Know About Love, Desire & Commitment

Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment. 
Rania Naim
October 4, 2016
“To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Tagged: Love, Balance, Life, inspiration
“Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Finding Someone, Being With Someone, Elizabeth Gilbert, Relationships
“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave. A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master…”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Tagged: Love, Relationships, Dating, romance, inspiration, Sex, reevaluate
“A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
“When you have only two minutes to say good-bye to the person you love most in the world, and you don’t know when you’ll see each other again, you can become logjammed with the effort to say and do and settle everything at once.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
“We invented marriage. Couples invented marriage. We also invented divorce,mind you. And we invented infidelity,too, as well as romantic misery. In fact we invented the whole sloppy mess of love and intimacy and aversion and euphoria and failure. But most importantly of all, most subversively of all, most stubbornly of all, we invented privacy.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
“Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistuinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody—so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
“You can measure the happiness of a marriage by the number of scars that each partner carries on their tongues, earned from years of biting back angry words.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Marriage, Commitment
“Real, sane, mature love—the kind that pays the mortgage year after year and picks up the kids after school—is not based on infatuation but on affection and respect.’”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, real love, Respect
“Infatuation is not quite the same thing as love; it's more like love's shady second cousin who's always borrowing money and can't hold down a job.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Infatuation
“Plant an expectation; reap a disappointment.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Expectations
“For if there is one thing I have learned over the years about men, it is that feelings of powerlessness do not usually bring forth their finest qualities.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Men
“Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Marriage
“People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of it.’?”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Acceptance, Flaws
“By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later—again, for its own mysterious reasons.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, The Heart
“Then again, you cannot stop the flood of desire as it moves through the world, inappropriate though it may sometimes be. It is the prerogative of all humans to make ludicrous choices, to fall in love with the most unlikely of partners, and to set themselves up for the most predictable of calamities.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Desire
“This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Commitment, Intimacy
“There is hardly a more gracious gift that we can offer somebody than to accept them fully, to love them almost despite themselves.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
Tagged: Love, Commitment, real love, Acceptance
“Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Desire
“In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, forgiveness
“The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely to fall in love.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment
“It's so much easier and cheaper to keep the river uncontaminated in the first place than it is to clean it up again once it's been polluted.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment
“The emotional place where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as the emotional place where a marriage finds itself toward the end, after many years of partnership.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Marriage
“Every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world – that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Love Story
Tagged: Love, Commitment, Marriage
“In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
Tagged: Love, Expectation