The Golden Condom Quotes

“People are more likely to fall intensely in love when they are anxious and their self-esteem is lowest.... Feeling inadequate, unhappy, and empty are virtual prerequisites for falling and staying desperately in love; at least temporarily, the ecstasy of desire seems to cure everything that ails you. There is a connection between aversive states of mind -- loneliness, shame, even grief and horror -- and a propensity to feel overwhelming passion; this is one reason why romances blossom in times of war or natural disasters, as well as during the private disasters of our everyday lives.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“Even though it inspires some of the world's greatest literature, music, and art, obsessive love is one of the most potent and compelling of tortures and one of the most difficult to overcome -- especially because it feels beyond conscious control. Tormented lovers try the patience even of those who truly love them, because they sufferers do not desire help extricating themselves though they claim to be seeking it; this is an illness from which no one wants to be cured.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“Exercising will builds esteem from within through action on one's own behalf; it disproves the premise that only another person can provide it. The result, long in coming and always worth the effort, is the experience of authentic agency in your own life, a sense of self that cannot be destroyed because it is not dependent on anyone else.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“The world shrinks to include only two people, only one of whom -- the beloved -- has power. This inequitable distribution naturally breeds resentment and feelings of hopelessness that the dependent person dare not express for fear of alienating the necessary person even more.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“I said it grieved me to part from anything that mattered to me, yet I welcomed the grief because it meant I had felt deeply and needed to express it. 'I even had trouble leaving the Parthenon,' I told him ... 'because it was so beautiful and I knew I'd never see it again.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“What ultimately got me through was my single-minded determination, voiced aloud to myself and recorded in my diary, to discover the causes of my blindness and never to repeat them. Fearlessly pursuing insight was my badge of honor, my route back to self-respect.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“Defining your own truth and then living according to it ... changes your sense of self and sets you free; it makes you fearless -- or at least more courageous -- with every significant person in your life. When you're not so insecure, there are things -- offhand cruelties, insensitivities large and small -- you don't tolerate, things you don't have to deny.... Once you are the one who determines the meaning of your life, nobody can gainsay it. This act of self-assertive defiance immunizes you -- at least to a certain extent -- from ever allowing someone else to control your destiny ever again.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“The longing to belong and to be prized by one's peers permeates childhood and adolescence and can be compelling and anxiety provoking at any time in life, as the common dread of cocktail parties in adulthood attests. This need -- as old and as potent as erotic desire -- is a fundamental part of being human; according to object relations theory, we become ourselves by being recognized and loved by others.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“Trauma is as subjective as desire, and the meanings we attribute to experiences, as well as the context in which they occur, determine their ultimate effect on our lives.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“Will is underrated as a therapeutic agent, an instrument of transformation and self-determination – sometimes the only tool a person can call upon in extremis. There is nothing natural or spontaneous about it. To make a blessing out of a curse is a genuine triumph of will, and transforming shame into pride a rare form of alchemy.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one's fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call 'the Affirmative No.' The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim.... Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“One of my teachers at the psychoanalytic institute where I trained used to say, only half humorously, that 'the most important prerequisite for a vocation as a psychotherapist is a depressed mother'; based on my history, I think that a suffering but inaccessible father and a damaged sibling should be added to the list of qualifications.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“What ultimately got me through was my single-minded determination, voiced aloud to myself and recorded in my diary, to discover the causes of my blindness and never to repeat them. Fearlessly pursuing insight was my badge of honor, my route back to self-respect. […] There are many ways to become mistress (or master) of one’s fate after a betrayal, but they all have things in common: conscious effort and a fighting spirit, embodied in what I call ‘the Affirmative No.’ The Affirmative No incorporates self-enhancing outrage, independence, and courage. It is a stance through which a traumatized person actively proclaims her will by rejecting the role of victim. This is not an act of negation or rebellion; it is an act of self-assertion, subjectively defined. […] Unable to change our predicaments, we actively changed their meaning and our relationship to them, and in the process, we discovered that we could exert power when we thought we had none.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“When he described their actual interactions, I got only the most superficial impression of what she was actually like and a great deal of information about how he felt when he was with her – a sure sign of self-absorption masked as love.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“Some never escape from the imprisoning conviction that a cold or unattainable lover can be persuaded to become warm or attainable if they only discover the key.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“He talked about her in a way that only the obsessed do. It was always a pressured monologue, and it was always the same. He had to relate every detail, interpreting and seeking meaning in her every utterance or action, like a fundamentalist minutely analyzing a biblical text.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“Obsessive love is built on a tissue of illusions: that by having sex with someone you can possess that person's soul; that you can transmute past defeats into present triumphs without understanding or mourning; that you make the unloving love you by constancy, uncomplaining availability, and molding yourself into what you thing that person wants.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found

“Taking a solemn oath and sticking to it casts everything in a different light and infuses the ordinary with significance. It can change a person more radically than any drug or many years of therapy.”
― Jeanne Safer, The Golden Condom: And Other Essays on Love Lost and Found