1. A friend recently told us about a twenty-fifth-anniversary party where the husband gave a toast and said, "The key to our success is very simple. Within minutes after every fight, one of us says, 'I'm sorry, Sally'." ~Cokie & Steve Roberts
2. A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. ~Rainer Maria Rilke
3. A good marriage is the union of two good forgivers. ~Ruth Bell Graham
4. A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short. ~Andre Maurois
5. A happy wedlock is a long falling in love. ~Theodore Parker
6. A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person. ~Mignon McLaughlin
7. A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity. The order varies for any given year. ~Paul Sweeney
8. Adam and Eve had an ideal marriage. He didn't have to hear about all the men she could have married... and she didn't have to hear about how well his Mother cooked. ~Unknown
9. All those "and they lived happily ever after" fairy tale endings need to be changed to "and they began the very hard work of making their marriages happy." ~Linda Miles, coauthor of The New Marriage
10. An anniversary is a time to celebrate the joys of today, the memories of yesterday, and the hopes of tomorrow. ~Author Unknown
11. And You Wonder, "Why Didn't It Last?"
She married him because he was such a "strong man"
She divorced him because he was such a "dominating male."
He married her because she was so "fragile and cute."
He divorced her because she was so "weak and helpless."
She married him because "he is a good provider."
She divorced him because "all he thinks about is business."
He married her because "she reminds me of my mother."
He divorced her because "she's getting more like her mother every day."
She married him because he was "happy and romantic."
She divorced him because he was "shiftless and fun-loving."
He married her because she was "steady and sensible."
He divorced her because she was "boring and dull."
She married him because he was "the life of the party."
She divorced him because "he's a party boy." ~Unknown
12. Ann Meara of the comedy team Stiller and Meara observed awhile ago in a New York Times interview of her 30-plus year marriage, "Was it love at first sight? It wasn't then - but it sure is now." ~New York Times
13. As much as I would miss my wife if she were to die, I would miss what we are together even more. Our "we-ness" our "us-ness." ~Carl Whitaker, family therapy pioneer
14. Be on the lookout for strain in each other, and with compassion and understanding, lend a helping hand and a mature heart. Helping each other manage emotional strain can yield creative alternatives and build a new foundation for heart-based communication and hope. ~Doc Childre
15. Being married is like having somebody permanently in your corner, it feels limitless, not limited. ~Gloria Steinem, 2000, upon marrying for the first time at age 66
16. Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years. ~Simone Signoret
17. Dear Abby: Some months ago, you printed a letter from a reader who was disturbed that the spark was gone from her marriage. I asked my husband whether the spark is gone from our 18-year marriage.His response: "A spark lasts only a second. It lights a fire. When the flame burns down, we are left with the hottest part of the fire, the embers, which burn the longest and keep the fire alive." ~Betty in Capt May, N.J.
18. For wherever you go, I will go. And wherever you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people; and, your God, my God. ~Ruth 1:16
19. Getting married is the boldest and most idealistic thing that most of us will ever do. ~Maggie Gallagher, "The Case for Marriage"
20. Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be - the last of life for which the first was made. ~Robert Browning
21. Happy together, the gods themselves are helpless against them while they stand so. ~Maxwell Anderson
22. He who finds a wife finds what is good. ~Proverbs 18:22
23. I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them - it was that promise. ~Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth
24. I have no way of knowing whether or not you married the wrong person, but I do know that many people have a lot of wrong ideas about marriage and what it takes to make that marriage happy and successful. I'll be the first to admit that it's possible that you did marry the wrong person. However, if you treat the wrong person like the right person, you could well end up having married the right person after all. On the other hand, if you marry the right person, and treat that person wrong, you certainly will have ended up marrying the wrong person. I also know that it is far more important to be the right kind of person than it is to marry the right person. In short, whether you married the right or wrong person is primarily up to you. ~Zig Ziglar
25. I knew couples who’d been married almost forever ? forty, fifty, sixty years. Seventy-two, in one case. They’d be tending each other’s illnesses, filling in each other’s faulty memories, dealing with the money troubles or the daughter’s suicide, or the grandson’s drug addiction. And I was beginning to suspect that it made no difference whether they’d married the right person. Finally, you’re just with who you’re with. You’ve signed on with her, put in a half century with her, grown to know her as well as you know yourself or even better, and she’s become the right person. Or the only person, might be more to the point. I wish someone had told me that earlier. I’d have hung on then; I swear I would.” ~Anne Tyler, "A Patchwork Planet"
26. I think a man and a woman should choose each other for life, for the simple reason that a long life with all its accidents is barely enough time for a man and a woman to understand each other and. . . To understand - is to love." ~William Butler Yeats
27. If a married couple with children has fifteen minutes of uninterrupted, nonlogistical, non-problem-solving talk every day, I would put them in the top 5% of all married couples. It's an extraordinary achievement. ~Bill Doherty, Take Back Your Marriage
28. If you made a list of reasons why any couple got married, and another list of the reasons for their divorce, you'd have a lot of overlapping. ~Mignon McLauglin
29. In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, the grounds for marriage. ~Robert Anderson
30. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love. ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer
31. Leo Tolstoy got married in 1862, and it was the best thing that ever happened to him. He wrote, "Domestic happiness has swallowed me completely." His wife had 13 children, and she helped him copy out and edit all his manuscripts. She copied by hand the huge manuscript for War and Peace (1868) four times. During the first years of his marriage, free love was becoming fashionable among the Russian upper classes, and everyone started to think of marriage as old fashioned and silly. Tolstoy was disgusted. In 1872, he heard about a woman who had thrown herself in front of a train after the end of an affair, and it gave him an idea for a novel about a woman whose life is destroyed by adultery. That novel was Anna Karenina (1875). He wrote it as a defense of marriage as the most important foundation of society. When it was published, most critics said it was inferior to War and Peace, but it is now considered one of the greatest novels ever written. ~Garrison Keillor
32. Let the wife make her husband glad to come home and let him make her sorry to see him leave. ~Martin Luther
33. Let there be spaces in your togetherness. ~Kahlil Gibran
34. Love doesn't commit suicide. We have to kill it. It often simply dies of our neglect. ~Diane Sollee,
35. Love is a feeling, Marriage is a contract, and a Relationship is work. ~Lori Gordon,
36. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush. I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love,” which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away….Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from the branches, we found that we were one tree and not two. ~- De Bernières, a widowed father to his daughter in the novel Corelli’s Mandolin (1994)
37. Love is what makes two people sit in the middle of a bench when there is plenty of room at both ends.. ~unknown
38. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. ~I Corinthians 13:7
39. Love the family! Defend and promote it as the basic cell of human society; nurture it as the prime sanctuary of life. Give great care to the preparation of engaged couples and be close to young married couples, so that they will be for their children and the whole community an eloquent testimony of God's love. ~Pope John Paul II, 2001
40. Many marriages would be better if the husband and the wife clearly understood that they are on the same side. ~Zig Ziglar
41. Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose. ~Beverly Nichols
42. Marriage is a public good, not just a private relationship. We have a public stake in healthy marriages and two-parent families. Our society suffers with the collapse of the relationship of the couple who brings a child into the world. ~Bill Doherty
43. Marriage is not just spiritual communion, it is also remembering to take out the trash. ~Joyce Brothers
44. Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up. ~Joseph Barth
45. Marriage is our society's most pro-child institution. If you want kids to do well, then you want marriage to do well. ~David Blankenhorn
46. Marriage is the foundation of the family and the family is the foundation of society: if we strengthen marriage, we strengthen the family, we strengthen the children and we strengthen the community. If your goal is to help improve the world, marriage is as good a place as any to start. ~Diane Sollee, Grand Rapids Family Summit, 1998
47. Marriage, families, all relationships are more a process of learning the dance rather than finding the right dancer. ~Paul Pearsall
48. Married life teaches one invaluable lesson: to think of things far enough ahead not to say them. ~Jefferson Machamer
49. Motto for the bride and groom: We are a work in progress with a lifetime contract. ~Phyllis Koss
50. My wife says I never listen to her. At least I think that's what she said. ~Unknown
51. My wife uses fabric softener. I never knew what that stuff was for. Then I noticed women coming up to me, sniffing, then saying under their breath, "Married!" and walking away. Fabric Softeners are how our wives mark their territory. We can take off the ring, but it's hard to get that April fresh scent out of your clothes. ~Andy Rooney
52. My wife, the star I steer by. ~David McCullough
53. New love is the brightest, and long love is the greatest; but revived love is the tenderest thing known on earth. ~Thomas Hardy
54. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. ~Mark Twain
55. Once it's established that we are a team, I can demand of you and expect you to demand of me. Life without pain is an addiction and the fantasy of perpetual happiness is like the "delusion of fusion." ~Carl Whitaker
56. One advantage of marriage, it seems to me, is that when you fall out of love with each other, it keeps you together until maybe you fall in again. ~Judith Viorst
57. One man by himself is nothing. Two people who belong together make a world. ~Hans Margolius
58. Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. ~Thomas Edison
59. Our wedding was many years ago. The celebration continues to this day. ~Gene Perret
60. People are often enamored with my Super Bowl ring. But it's my wedding ring that I'm most proud of. And having a good marriage takes even more work than winning a Super Bowl. ~Trent Dilfer, Seattle Seahawks quarterback
61. People change and forget to tell each other. ~Lillian Hellman
62. People think they have to find their soulmate to have a good marriage. You're not going to "find" your soulmate. Anyone you meet already has soulmates. Their mother. Their father. Their lifelong friends. You get married, and after 20 years of loving, bearing and raising children, meeting challenges - then you'll have "created" your soulmate. ~Diane Sollee,
63. Real giving is when we give to our spouses what's important to them, whether we understand it, like it, agree with it, or not. ~Michele Weiner-Davis, Divorce Busting
64. Sheila and I just celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary. Somebody asked her, what was our secret? She answered, “On my wedding day, I decided to make a list of ten of Tim’s faults which, for the sake of our marriage, I would always overlook. I figured I could live with at least ten!” When she was asked which faults she had listed, Shelia replied, “I never did get around to listing them. Instead, every time he does something that makes me mad, I simply say to myself, ‘Lucky for him, it’s one of the ten!’” ~Tim Hudson, Chicken Soup for the Romantic Soul,
65. Society should try to help more children grow up with their two biological, married parents in a reasonably healthy, stable relationship - not to pay homage to a Victorian notion of propriety, but because the overwhelming consensus of research shows that's the very best way to raise children. ~Theodora Ooms, Center for Law and Social Policy
66. Spoil your spouse. —.not your children. ~Unknown
67. The Beauty of Love
The question is asked, "Is there anything more beautiful in life than a young couple clasping hands and pure hearts in the path of marriage? Can there be anything more beautiful than young love?"
And the answer is given: "Yes, there is a more beautiful thing. It is the spectacle of an old man and an old woman finishing their journey together on that path. Their hands are gnarled, but still clasped; their faces are seamed, but still radiant; their hearts are physically bowed and tired, but still strong with love and devotion for one another. Yes, there is a more beautiful thing than young love. Old love." ~Unknown
68. The challenge is to help couples turn "I Do" into "We Can." ~Scott Stanley
69. The development of a really good marriage is not a natural process. It is an achievement. ~David and Vera Mace
70. The divorce rate would be lower if instead of marrying for better or worse people would marry for good. ~Ruby Dee
71. The Eight-Cow Wife
Johnny Lingo lived in the South Pacific. The islanders all spoke highly of this man, but when it came time for him to find a wife the people shook their heads in disbelief. In order to obtain a wife you paid for her by giving her father cows. Four to six cows was considered a high price. But the woman Johnny Lingo chose was plain, skinny and walked with her shoulders hunched and her head down. She was very hesitant and shy. What surprised everyone was Johnny's offer -- he gave eight cows for her! Everyone chuckled about it, since they believed his father-in-law put one over on him.
Several months after the wedding, a visitor from the U.S. came to the islands to trade and heard the story about Johnny Lingo and his eight-cow wife. Upon meeting Johnny and his wife the visitor was totally taken back, since this wasn't a shy, plain and hesitant woman but one who was beautiful, poised and confident. The visitor asked about the transformation, and Johnny Lingo's response was very simple. "I wanted an eight-cow woman, and when I paid that for her and treated her in that fashion, she began to believe that she was an eight-cow woman. She discovered she was worth more than any other woman in the islands. And what matters most is what a woman thinks about herself." ~Reader's Digest
72. The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one person. ~Vi Putnam
73. The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage, but to bring more love and truth into the world. ~Leo Tolstoy
74. The hardest-learned lesson: that people have only their kind of love to give, not our kind. ~Mignon McLauglin
75. The highest happiness on earth is marriage. ~William Lyon Phelps
76. The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. ~Ronald Reagan
77. The most important marriage skill is listening to your partner in a way that they can't possibly doubt that you love them. ~Diane Sollee
78. The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. ~Theodore Hesburgh
79. The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of another human being with whom one's relationship has a growing depth, beauty, and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two human beings is a most marvelous thing; it cannot be found by looking for it or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of divine accident, and the most wonderful of all things in life.
80. The secret to having a good marriage is to understand that marriage must be total, it must be permanent and it must be equal. ~Frank Pittman
81. The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
82. The Time is Now
If you are ever going to love me,
Love me now, while I can know
The sweet and tender feelings
Which from true affection flow.
Love me now
While I am living.
Do not wait until I'm gone
And then have it chiseled in marble,
Sweet words on ice-cold stone.
If you have tender thoughts of me,
Please tell me now. ~Unknown
83. Then there was the guy who loved his wife so much, he almost told her. ~Unknown
84. There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion or company than a good marriage. ~Martin Luther
85. There is nothing more admirable than two people who see eye-to-eye keeping house as man and wife, confounding their enemies, and delighting their friends. ~Homer, 9th century BC
86. To get divorced because love has died, is like selling your car because it's run out of gas. ~Diane Sollee, smartmarriages.com
87. To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the wedding cup, whenever you're wrong, admit it; whenever you're right, shut up. ~Ogden Nash
88. Try praising your wife, even if it does frighten her at first. ~Billy Sunday
89. Unto us all our days are love's anniversaries, each one In turn hath ripen'd something of our happiness. - Robert Bridges
90. We always hold hands. If I let go, she shops. ~Unknown
91. We have a group of very passionate, romantic couples. They sort of enjoy the bickering and the arguing... to them, it symbolizes real involvement and connection. ~John Gottman, PhD, on observations at his U. of Washington "Love Lab"
92. We learned how to love each other by loving together good things wholly outside each other. ~Donald Hall
93. What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility. ~Leo Tolstoy
94. What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other? ~George Eliot
95. What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting. ~George Elliott Adam Bede
96. What I've Learned about friendship, but clearly applies as well to marriage:
I've learned - that there are people who love you dearly, but just don't know how to show it.
I've learned - that just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to, doesn't mean they don't love you all they can.
I've learned - that we don't have to change friends if we understand that friends change.
I've learned - that two people can look at the exact same thing and see something totally different
I've learned - that just because two people argue, it doesn't mean they don't love each other. And just because they don't argue, it doesn't mean they do. ~Unknown
97. When asked his secret of love, being married fifty-four years to the same person, he said, "Ruth and I are happily incompatible. ~Billy Graham
98. When marrying, ask yourself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this person into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory. ~Friedrich Nietzsche
99. When you make a sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. ~Joseph Campbell
100. Why is it that people get married?
Because we need a witness to our lives.
There’s a billion people on the planet.
What does any one life really mean?
But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything…
The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things,
All of it… all the time, every day.
You’re saying “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it.
Your life will not go unwitnessed - because I will be your witness.”
Wife in the movie, "Shall We Dance?" 2004
101. Why would a couple that lives and sleeps together every night need dates and rituals? Precisely because they live and sleep together. ~Bill Doherty, Take Back Your Marriage