How Can I Get Through to You? Quotes

“Women are unhappy in their marriages because they want men to be more related than most men know how to be. And men are unhappy in their marriages because their women seem so unhappy with them.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“...strength is not the absence of vulnerability. Strength is knowing what your weaknesses are and working with them.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“The paradox of real love is that our capacity to sustain intimacy rests on our capacity to tolerate aloneness inside the relationship.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“As women shut down their needs, they also shut down their sense of pleasure.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“...changing one's own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“The difference between real acceptance and just backing away from an issue, or away from the whole relationship, is resentment.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“The bonds of silence and protection run deeper, for the moment, than his trust in me.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“The rule that surpasses all rules is that you must be connected, willing to see what's in front of you, and willing to move if what you're doing isn't working.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“...the most reliable predictor of long-term marital success was a pattern in which the wives, in nonoffensive, clear ways, communicated their needs, and husbands willingly altered their behaviors to meet them.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Sustaining relationships with others requires a good relationship to ourselves. Healthy self-esteem is an internal sense of worth that pulls one neither into 'better than' grandiosity nor 'less than' shame.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Love is not for the faint of heart.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Healthy self-esteem is an internal sense of worth that pulls one neither into “better than” grandiosity nor “less than” shame. But the essence of psychological patriarchy is the nonexistence of such middle ground.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“We are so busy attempting to manage the result that we fail simply to run the race.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Men are not raised to be intimate, they're raised to be competitive performers. Traditional socialization teaches young boys to filter their sense of self-worth through performance. The paradox for boys is that in order to be worthy of connection they must prove themselves invulnerable, button down warriors in the world's emotional marketplace. In the world of boys and men, you're either a winner or a loser, one up or one down, in control or controlled, man enough or a girl. Where in this set up is the capacity for love?”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“If a wife truly demands that her emotional needs be met, she may indeed put her marriage on the line. On the other hand, few women who back away from their needs manage to bury their resentment. Their unspoken anger spills out as occasional rage and everyday coolness. Feeling uncherished, many wives unwittingly shut down their own sense of pleasure, as well as their willingness to please their partners. And even if women try to accept and forgive, eventually passion drains away from the marriage along with their authenticity. It is impossible to maintain real connection and overaccommodate at the same time.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Learning to listen relationally, listen with cool heads and clear boundaries, listen with the quietness of the heart and the gentleness of the body, means having a self so developed it can afford to yield.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“The romantic vision promises 'shadowless' relationships, but it is precisely by wrestling with the relationship's shadow, with disillusionment, that deep intimacy is sustained.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Revenge is really a perverse form of communication, a twisted attempt at repair.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“One of the few stable statistics in our fast-changing world is our rate of divorce, which has hovered between 40 and 50 percent for the last thirty years. Any two people who marry face a grim 50 to 60 percent chance of survival. And if that weren’t sobering enough, one needs to ask further: Of those who remain together, how many do so happily, as opposed to those who stay for external reasons, like their children, finances, religion, or fatigue? Conservatively, we can estimate that at least one out of three, perhaps one out of two, of those couples left standing do not relish their lives together.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Women marry men hoping they will change. They don’t. Men marry women hoping they won’t change. They do.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“No generation in history has taken so seriously issues of health and well-being—both for ourselves and our children. And yet, nonetheless, we have never been lonelier. Our sense of community is breaking down, our sense of belonging has seldom felt weaker, and, silhouetted against this backdrop, couples that once loved one another have never had a more difficult time holding fast.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Where in this set up is the capacity for love?”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“In the world of boys and men you're either a winner or a loser, one up or one down in control or controlled, man enough or a girl.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“The paradox for boys is that in order to be worthy of connection they must prove themselves invulnerable, button down warriors in the world's emotional market place.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Traditional socialization teaches young boys to filter their sense of self-worth through performance.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Men are not raised to be intimate, they're raised to be competitive performers...”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Only after giving up 'the truth' can we learn to speak our truth.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Does tension exist between our perfect longings and the imperfect world?”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“The romantic love story is a paradoxical fusion of two extraordinarily potent messages. The first is that love, deep connection, is the most important, indeed the only truly important matter in the world. And the second is that true love cannot exist in this world.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women

“Despite all of their flaws and difficulties, these men don't want to walk out on their own lives, leave their wives and children. They want to come home.”
― Terrence Real, How Can I Get Through to You?: Closing the Intimacy Gap Between Men and Women