Sam Reviews: "Courage my Love" by Merle Shain

"Psychoanalysts believe that if a baby has a good relationship with the breast he grows up to feel gratitude and learns to love.  But if the breast eludes him as often as it gives succor and relief, he feels anger and fear and learns envy and guilt and hate."

"If he ends up having to beg for what he needs, he learns more than just not to love, he learns to fear needing love, and to resent anyone who has that power over him."

"You can look the country over, searching for someone who sees the person you want to believe you are, but in the end, if you don't give yourself approval they won't be able to do much anything for you, no matter how much you try."

"The world was always yours, you would not take it.  Reach out your hand to yourself and it is yours."  -Archibald MacLeish

"You want to be in love all the time.  It's not possible to have romance every day in a longstanding relationship.  I can give you contentment and loyalty and enough security so you can grow.  But I can't give you excitement, I can't promise to admire you each and every day.  And while we would have, I hope, little renaissances along the way, there would not be that beating heart excitement which you seem to crave."

"Human love is based in every day, not fantasies or illusions.  It acknowledges the other person as a separate person and even loves them for their imperfections, for their vulnerabilities and their incompleteness, abd allows them to change and to grow.  It seeks to honor, not to use, to empower, not to overpower, and when it fails, it just gets cranky, it does not blow a fuse."

"In that world we all seek, that world of gifts given and gifts received, that world where there is goodness of fit, where there is always someone to catch our fall, the name of trust goes hand in hand with love."

"Respect is love in plain clothes, someone once said, and so is acceptance and understanding and really being known."

"There are people who idealize others as a way of solacing themselves, and others who keep you on a treadmill, auditioning for their approval, but always seem to keep the approval strangely in reserve.  And there are people who seem to always be in crisis, but it's hard to find a person who gives as good as they get or one who loves you for yourself."

"Intimacy requires accommodation and gentleness at the core."

"There is no intimacy unless there is mutual acceptance and mutual trust, no matter whatever else there is."

"One can make deals, or one can make love.  A deal asks back and love gives away and a contract has to be paid.  But love never comes due, because once given away, it always comes back to you."

"There was a time when we needed each other for support, both financial and domestic, but each sex can those things pretty well for themselves today.  Emotional support is the only thing we really need each other for now.  And if we aren't able to do that for each other, there won't be any reason to be together at all."

"Many of us have been sidelined bht violations so commonplace we can hardly find a friend to listen to us when we need to vent."

"The contract between men and women is entirely different now.  Nobody promises to love, honor, and obey any more.  At best, they promise to give it their best shot.  In a society in which fear of commitment has reached epidemic proportions, marriage is considered the last of the romantic gestures.  A triumph of hope over experience, and most people prefer to live together making bargains rather than promises."

"I don't want to be patient anymore.  And I don't want to be impatient either.  I want to be treated fairly.  And I don't want any more points for denying my needs."

Sam Reviews: "Hearts That We Broke Long Ago" by Merle Shain

"For my son - should he ever wonder if I loved him enough and my father who I never got to tell how much I did."

"Why, if she wished to drown herself, she was torturing herself with shallow waters."

"Whether the melon falls on the knife or the knife falls on the melon, it's the melon that suffers."

"Some of us hurl ourselves at life, and others crouch and wait for it to roll up over us, but you can usually tell who it is who is taking on life and who it is who is fending it off and whether this is a new game or whether it is old."

"The first person she ever loved was her father whom she could never please, and this man she was trying so hard to won, the one with the iron band locked around his heart, was just a substitute for him, someone with whom she could plat at trying to please her father still."

"It has been said that women of our generation 'grew up to be the men they always wanted to marry'."

"I am a part of all that I have met, and so, my friend, are you, and most of hd would have skipped a chapter here and there if we were the ones to choose.  But in the end it doesn't matter how what happened to you made you what you are today, only if you want to be there, and if it feeds you enough for you to stay."

"The girl who can't dance says the band can't play."

"No one is cheated in this world, unless it's by himself."

"When you want to, there are many ways to give hostages fortune, many ways to be sucked like a firefly to the flame, so those who fear abandonment find someone new to abandon them over and over again, and those who feel unworthy ask to be humbled, and the world always answers their prayers."

"According to [Hasidic Jews], on Judgement Day, each person will be invited to hang from the Tree of Sorrows all of his own miseries, and that done, he will be given permission to walk around the tree and survey everyone else's miseries in order to select a set he likes better.  ...  'Take what you want,' said God, 'and pay for it.'"

"It doesn't matter if you are chained by a golden chain or an iron one if it holds you in a place that is doing you harm."

"All things are possible and nothing safe."

"No one goes forward who hasn't finished with the past, and those, who try to, keep coming out the same door they went in."

"Despair is anger with no place to go, pain that has gone deep inside and dug in deep."

"Fears fight wars, and conquer worlds, build temples and bank accounts, get married and raise kids, but those who fear are always planning their defenses and their retreat, never living life, just escaping, never loving, only weeping."

"The answer doesn't lie in learning how to protect yourself from life.  It lies in learning how to strengthen yourself so you can let a bit more in."

"Why must I pretend to scorn in order to pity?  Why must I hide myself in self-contempt in order to understand? Why must I be so ashamed if my strength, so proud of weakness?  Why must I live in a cage like a criminal, defying and hating, I who love peace and friendship? Why was I born without a skin?  O God, that I must wear armor in order to touch or be touched."  Eugene O'Neill "The Great God Brown"

"Sometimes when a child doesn't get what he needs when he is small an anger develops deep within him because he feels unsupported, and hence frightened and alone.  And because the road between fear and hate is such a short one, many people travel over it without ever leaving home."

"We all need love, and want it, and fear to get it too.  Fear that if it comes, is to accept our need for it and give it power over us.  So many people spend their lives trying to dissuade themselves of their needs, and they ask for love in a thousand places and spit to windward when it answers their call."

"As long as you blame someone it makes the problem not yours but theirs, and allows you to keep it without taking responsibility for anything but pointing the finger.  Which means you give them responsibility for your life and paralyze yourself forever in a place you don't want to be."


"When you are continually seeking the privileged place of the favored child, you are trading off acceptance of yourself as you actually are for an idealized image of the person you wish you were, which means judging yourself by higher standards than you'd set for anyone else.  So you're always finding yourself wanting, always letting yourself down, and your overblown evo always lets you know."

"I can handle hurts of many kinds, the challenges galore.  It's kindness I have trouble with, and tenderness from someone I could love that always makes me cry.  I suppose the joy reminds."

"Unexpected emotions are a good way to figure out what hurts.  Tempers that flare about unimportant things, tears that appear at odd times when we don't expect them, tell us what we feel even when we aren't telling ourselves."

"Our North American culture, more than any other, thrusts independence on us at an early age, and needs for community and affection and dependence are sacrificed to the god of standing tall.  Which means that a lot of people who needed to be protected when they were small got pushed from the nest too soon and had to learn to lool after themselves.  But often what they learned to protect themselves from was their own needs, needs that were never wrong."


"Fear is not love.  Nor os love dependence, jealousy, possessiveness, domination, responsibility, duty, self-pity, or any of thr other things that conventionally pass for love."

"All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own, just as by our actions we create the world we live in, what we send into the world is out there to greet us on the morrow when we go out to see."


"Thank you for the gift of my life and for helping me develop the strength to be a giver.  I realize now that it is a privilege to be able to give."

"No one can have too many people in their life who love them, only not enough."

"Cynicism is a form of cowardice, a failure of courage to hope."

"To hope is to set yourself up for a possible loss, so many people deny their hopes and by so doing detach themselves from shat they want, not recognizing that hope is a forward scout on the path of time, and without it there is no tomorrow, there is not even much to be said for today."

"I don't know where we got the idea that it is an either/or situation, that it's freedom or commitment, personal growth or responsibility, and that if we choose commitment it will be our loss and not our gain.  Because one grows in commitment, one doesn't diminish.

Sam Reviews "When Lovers Are Friends" by Merle Shain

I'm not sure if the title is misleading, or if this author's philosophy is that all people we care about are "lovers" but not necessarily "sexual lovers".  This books is about friendship, not about relationships, but I still feel like there is a lot of great information and metaphors in this book.  I continue to be impressed by how powerful her words are while being so simply written and quick to read.

"For my friends whom I need not name as they know who they are and what they mean to me."

"Love is short, forgetting's long, and understanding takes longer still."

"Independence carried to the furthest extreme is just loneliness and death, nothing more than another defense, and there is no growth in it, only a safe harbour for a while."

"We are a society of winners where almost everybody feels himself a loser, where but i clothes and size of genitalia as well as make of car tell us who we are.  We are youth cult where everyone is made to feel old, a live cult where far too many feel unloved.  And because we set up life so it hurts, most of us hurt a lot."

"Perhaps it's because we are all so desperate for love that we believe if ever it comes to us we will be happy evermore, and when it comes along we pay with the self we had for the love we want."

"If you are you, and we are us, then who is it that's I?"

"Marriage has done terrible things to friendship in the name of love."

"The search for the perfect other is always search for what we lack.  And the reason that we never find them is because the search goes on as long as we feel inadequate ourselves."

"We all have defenses we use more than wr need, and for everything they protect us from they cost us something more.  Defenses come in many forms, many more than I can name, and while some of them are more primitive than others, they all keep the world away from us just the same."

"As the story began to unfold it became clear that the man who he thought was championing his cause was really the problem and that without him it wouldn't exist.  The young man was up for promotion, which meant he would pass out of the older man's control, so the older man invented a problem that only he could solve.  He told the young man how much opposition there was to his appointment, how many people there were who didn't want him around.  And then when the young man was appointed, the older man took a lot of bows for managing the impossible.  And the young man felt grateful as well as dependent, so the older professor didn't have to worry about losing his control over him for a while."

"Getting control over others has a lot to do with making them feel weak.  You can make them feel indebted or make them feel inadequate in yet some other way."

"Many a person who kept another from growing up and away then found they had to carry that person for the rest of their days."

"We often fear being rejected so very much that we reject ourselves first before anyone else has the chance."

"Some people don't have to wait for others to accept them but accept themselves first, while others - no matter how much love they get - stand begging forever at a door they themselves have closed."

"If you must seek approval, choose the right audience to seek it from, and if you don't like what you hear get another opinion, get two or three.  And when someone wants you to be what you aren't or refuses you permission to be who you are, try to understand that is their problem, really, and you don't have to make it yours.  And don't let anyone tell you you have to be perfect to be loved, because that simply isn't true.  If the people in your life only love you if you put on a false front, they don't love you at all, so you haven't much to lose."

"Some people let others define them because they need their approval so much they are willing to let them call the shots, and others do it because they are so lacking in self-worth they are afraid that if anyone found out who they really were they would be rejected out of hand.  But if being honest means that occasionally you give yourself away by acknowledging limitations in yourself that someone might have missed before, well, that's only as bad as you consider it to be."

"There is something terrifying about learning that someone you'd always felt to be much more courageous than yourself has given up the fight."

"It is much easier to be courageous when people are applauding you than when you are in defeat.  And many of us who pass as brave when a crowd is all waving hats would crumble if they turned on us and started throwing rocks."

"A girl I know has been married since she was very young to a man she has loved since she was a child, and she has a life that in almost every way is story-book perfect and unblemished by hurt of any kind.  But she isn't half as strong within herself as other friends of mine who have had some bad days mixed in with the good.  And although I have heard others say they envy her and that they wish their lives had been so blessed, the fact is that she is very insecure at times, and as the years go by she worries more and more about how she would survive if her husband wasn't by her side."

"A lot of people get confused when they listen to a friend about what the purpose of that listening is, and feel they should do something to help out.  So they either take their friend's life away from them or, trying so hard to pull them from the hole they're in, fall inside themselves."

"There seem to be three main streams to life - the emotional, the sensual, and the rational - and all of us are made up of all these three, although in differing amounts.  ...  I don't know how we become lopsided or what causes one skein in the braid to become thicker than the rest - whether we back away from what we are afraid of, or go with the part of us that functions best.  I only know that most people grow more in one way than in others, and the side of them which is the most developed, determines their life.  And because this is the case, the side of them which is the most developed also dictates the kind of friend they make."

"It takes a long time to understand that there is no relationship which is all-supporting, only those which help you grow stronger in yourself.  So a lot of people never realize how important it is to have real friends or how crucial they can be even if you have a mate."

"I wish that men understood better the value of friendship as women are coming to know it now, because too often they still see other people as things to be conquered or held off.  Men have allies and they have enemies, but only a few of them really have friends."

"We are an achievement-oriented society, so a lot of men put their energy into getting ahead and being a success, postponing closeness with other human beings as if it were a luxury they couldn't afford just yet, and they complain a lot about all the work there is to do as if the priorities were set by someone else.  And many of them think of fulfillment as something to be found in money, wealth, success, and applause and don't learn until it's too late that the only wealth that really counts is having loving friends."

"I don't think you could have done me much more harm if you had hated me.  How odd that you should think of that as love."

"You don't get from friends what you give to them, you get what they have to give."

"You will save yourself a lot of grief if you keep in mind that you don't have you for a friend, however much you might wish you did.  You have that person out there instead.  Perhaps you will take chicken soup to a friend who is sick, and they will forget your birthday just the same.  Or maybe you will have them to your parties and they will give none to which you might be asked.  But maybe they will hand you a piece of truth one day, in a sentence tossed off with a sidelong glance, and if it's something you couldn't have found inside yourself, you will have been repaid in full."

"Life doesn't consist of total people.  It consists of moments, moments which are gifts that you can pick up and hang like pearls around your neck, but no one will hand them to you.  You have to supply the string in order to hug them to yourself."

"We are all essentially alone, and sometimes the people whom you love can make it through, and sometimes they can't get to you no matter how much they try."

"The people in one's life are like the pillars on one's porch you see life through.  And sometimes they hold you up, and sometimes they lean on you, and sometimes it is just enough to know they're standing by."

Sam Reviews "Some Men Are More Perfect Than Others" by Merle Shain

It's kind of amazing to read something written in the 70s that seems so relevant today. We are living in the future she was hoping for (though we've still got some improving to do). This feels somewhat self-help style but in a very casual and easy to read way. Can't wait to dive into more of her writing.

"Men are supposed to fear loving because they fear dependency and truly loving always involves surrender of power. ... So most men opt for security in lieu of feeling and call their decision maturity."

"Loving someone because you failed to love someone else isn't the same as loving them for themselves."

"Loving can cost a lot but not loving always costs more, and those who fear to love often find that want of love is an emptiness that robs the joy from life."

"The value of a man is the sum of his commitments ... and men who are loving make their women bloom.  And because one of the best reasons for loving anyone is that they love you, men who understand that love is like the kind of flowers that grow more the more one gives away, are loved a lot, and men who do not water their gardens do not have roses to love."

"Women need men to love them so they can love them back."

"Our times are obsessed with finding fulfillment, so there are times when people try too hard, and there are people who want to have the newest feelings just as there are those who want to have the latest model car.  You can't play at love any more than you can be proud of your humility, or add water to your perfume and expect it to smell the same."

"One can get obsessions about people who give and then take away.  Then what the lover doesn't have he seeks for obsessively until the seeking becomes a replacement for the loved object and is more satisfying still."

"There are men who are addicted to the magic of falling in love, and the ego-aggrandizing, intoxicating splendor of it s all, and never learn that loving is better still.  For them there is no help for a love that is losing its excitement but to fall in love again, with someone else - and when that too loses it's intensity with someone else again."

"Loving acknowledges the differences between people and helps each person to grow, and while it's unpredictable, and sporadic, because it's a process of exchange, generally lovers who are loving are more self-approving, yet less selfish, and happier in themselves.  Romantic love seeks to possess the other person out of fear of loss, and romantic lovers want to give up everything for each other, merging themselves in the ones they love, until they have nothing left to give and their partners nothing left to love."

"Women are often trapped by their own romantic natures into believing that love means surrender, not recognizing that men who demand a woman's surrender are protecting themselves against her."

"Girls gave sex to get love and boys have love to get sex and conning girls was the favorite indoor sport."

"Men found their bodies through women but women sometimes didn't find there's at all, and women who didn't find their bodies often didn't find themselves, so they didn't love back much either, which was everybody's tragedy and still very often is."

"Pleasure is not the same as joy."

"Once we couldn't speak of sex and now we can't speak of love."

"Love is lonely and poetic and mysterious and whether we recognize it or not we climb into bed wrapping our identities closely around us, not knowing what we want from each other, and fearing both that it might be too much and not enough."

"When we love more than one person at the same time, we are expressing various sides of ourselves, so men with mistresses as well as wives come to their mistresses to find themselves, not the woman they seek."

"Women need men to believe in because that's how they've been raised, and when they no longer believe in the one they've got they feel abandoned and terribly in need."

"Women who've been raised to believe they will find fulfillment through a man think the man has failed when he doesn't give them what they think he should."

"Nobody loves anybody like anybody wants to be loved."  -Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook

"'In every marriage there is the one who loves and the one who lets himself be loved,' Somerset Maugham wrote.  And there are people who prefer to have someone to hurl themselves against than to have someone who is on their side."

"Marriage doesn't work when it cuts us off from finding who we are and defining ourselves for ourselves."

"...so [marriages] based on the premise that a wife's needs are met by meeting her husband's are doomed before they start.  And whether the worst offender is the woman who rushes to give up her needs hoping to please the man, or the man who accepts her sacrificial gifts, they both pay for it a thousand times."

"Men often want to have children, like writers who want to have written more than they want to write, so after they father children, they leave them at home while they go elsewhere for their lives."

"There is a difference between wanting and needing and loving, and both partners have a right to what they need, although not always what they want.  Each partner has a right to one life and to that life he has the sole right.  He hasn't a right to his spouse's life, and he hasn't a right to his child's, but he has a right to his life, and no one should interfere with that."

"It is not possible for one person to meet all of another's needs and marriage partners who expect this soon find each other wanting.  When people don't meet all of our needs, they are not always rejecting us - more often, they are saving themselves - and in a good marriage this is perfectly all right."

"The happy hungry man believes in food.  The happy homeless man believes in home.  The happy unloved man believes in love.  I wouldn't mind believing in something myself."  - George Jonas

"Loving someone means helping them to be more themselves, which can often be different from being what you'd like them to be, although often they turn out the same.  When you ask someone to live through you and for you, they warp like a Japanese tree to suit the relationship which you are, and cease to be what you chose them for, that is, cease to be themselves."

"A woman who marries a man to give herself an identity tends to choose the most powerful man she can find, so she often marries an over-achiever, thinking that his success will make her a success as well.  One always things that very successful men will be more generous and kind, but over-achievers of either sex are driven people, hoping to win love from every source, and a woman who chooses that kind of man is usually neglected for his work, and ends up with less identity than she had to start."

"If women have to ve small so men can be big in their own eyes, nobody much us fooled, and men who require this lose out in other ways "

"I'm not sure there can be loving without commitment, although commitment takes all kinds of forms, and there can be commitment for the moment as well as commitment for all time.  The kind that is essential for loving marriages - and love affairs, as well - is a commitment to preserving the essential quality of your partner's soul, adding to them as a person rather than taking away.  And if you haven't got that you haven't got loving, though you might have something else.  You could have adventure or a postgraduate course, you might have rehabilitation, or a bit of gossamer to highlight an otherwise somber life, but you haven't got loving, and of that you should be sure."

"I've learned not to ask for everything, just to make sure I get what I must have.  It doesn't matter who else gets what - it only matters if youre deprived."

"Being faithful means not costing people you love more than they can afford to pay."

"Women who hoped their husbands would take care of everything and then turned cool when they found that he could not, would be wiser if they parted with their illusions instead of with their husbands.  Because after you're divorced, you're still left with yourself."

"No marriage is one person's failure any more than it's one person's success, so it works best to see a marriage that has ended simply as something that didn't work out."

"It is not necessary to devalue the past and find it spurious because it doesn't last forever, it is possible to simply go on to what's next."

"If there are no endings, there are no beginnings and you see no new lands, so for everything that's lost, there is usually something gained."

"It is more difficult to plan when you're alone and your whole world could change twice before tomorrow."

"Single life looks exciting to those who are quietly settled, and contentment looms large and elusive to those who've had a lot more emotion than they can take but very little quiet joy."