I Didn't Know I Needed This: The New Rules for Flirting, Feeling, and Finding Yourself—An Unfiltered Relationship Manual with Candid Insights, Embrace the Chaos of Modern Dating

by Eli Rallo

But what hasn’t really changed, what is buried deep within the core of our happy families and manicured lawns and dinnertimes, is that our society still teaches women to aspire to partnership. Subconsciously, we feed girls the idea, from birth, that marriage = the end goal. Nobody really ever says it outright, but it’s learned in subliminal ways.

Read and read and read; you’ll never run out of things to read.

Human beings are human beings are human beings. Treat them how you want to be treated—with direct, gentle honesty.

All I know is I am showing up as I am, welcoming the possibility of a something.

We only have the capacity to love because we have the capacity to hurt.

We fear the end because the only thing that comes after it is a new unknown beginning. We lean into comfort and familiarity because it is easier than getting to know someone else, or, even scarier, ourselves. But that doesn’t make it right to move backward.

You’re the only person who can close your own door. You’re also the only person who can open up the next one. Other people are always going to disappoint us, to a fault. We cannot rely on them to close and lock our doors or open up the next. Unfortunately, they just don’t have the right keys.

There is no state of being more indispensable, more concrete, than to be, or to have, a friend.

There’s no wrong way to live your life to the fullest. To make it feel really fucking good for you, as often as it can. There’s no single story to anything. To anyone. To any place. Wow.

Time is like music except there’s no option to skip and no option to shuffle. It just throttles forward.

It never gets easier to hear through the clamor, it just becomes easier to be a little louder yourself.

It is in the moments we stop pressuring ourselves to be loved that we become loved.