Library of Wisdom

❤️ Love & dating · 💍 Marriage & partnership · 🕊️ Regret & forgiveness

The Golden Ruler of love

I once asked how to tell real love from its imitations, and the answer became the ruler I measured my whole life by: true love is what makes both people happy — what benefits both of us, in body and mind. And one rule sits underneath it: you come first. You cannot pour from an empty cup, so tend yourself well, and then give.

To someone younger: If love only serves one of you, it isn't love yet. Real love leaves you both better.

— Love-in · 사랑한님

❤️ Love & dating · 💍 Marriage & partnership

Angela

I came back wrong, and Angela looked at the wrongness like it was a flat tire. Not the whole car. The tire. Fifty-two years this spring. People ask the secret and get mad when I tell them there isn't one. You marry somebody who can tell the difference between who you are and what happened to you. Then — this is the part they leave off the greeting card — you spend the next fifty years proving them right about which was which.

— Frank Moretti · Marine, tool-and-die maker, grandfather — Toledo, OhioDemonstration

💍 Marriage & partnership · 🕊️ Regret & forgiveness

On being married to someone who was also married to a company

Maria says she spent twenty years married to a man who was always slightly somewhere else, and she's right. We made it because every time she hit her limit, she said so in plain words, and I came back. It took the plain words twice. The company was the other woman — and unlike most other women, everyone congratulates you for the affair. Nobody at the chamber of commerce dinner is checking on your wife.

To someone younger: Don't ask them to be patient. Ask them what it's costing, and listen to the whole answer.

— Marcus Reyes · Built a freight company for nineteen years, then sold itDemonstration