Eight Dates Quotes

“Successful long-term relationships are created through small words, small gestures, and small acts.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“taking responsibility—even for a small part of the problem in communication—presents the opportunity for great repair.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“Make dedicated, nonnegotiable time for each other a priority, and never stop being curious about your partner. Don’t assume you know who they are today, just because you went to bed with them the night before. In short, never stop asking questions. But ask the right kind of questions.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“You can spend a lifetime being curious about the inner world of your partner, and being brave enough to share your own inner world, and never be done discovering all there is to know about each other. It’s exciting.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“Happily ever after simply means that both partners are known, valued, accepted for who they are and who they are becoming. The goal is to be able to love your partner more deeply each and every year you’re together.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“Our partners don’t always have to think like we think. That’s what makes life interesting—it would be boring to be married to yourself. In fact, that’s called being single.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“The early part of a relationship, besides the fun and infatuation, is about establishing trust and a shared future.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“If my wife is in pain, my world stops so I can listen to her.” In a committed relationship, you will both stop the world to try to understand and ease each other’s pain. This is partly why we get married, and this is partly why we love. We need each other and we need to be needed by each other. True commitment is choosing each other over and over again,”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“great relationships—the masters—are built on respect, empathy, and a profound understanding of each other. Relationships don’t last without talk, even for the strong and silent type.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“Perfection is not the price of love. Practice is. We practice how to express our love and how to receive our partner’s love. Love is an action even more than a feeling. It requires intention and attention, a practice we call attunement.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“most couples don’t get any training in relationships, and often they don’t learn how to communicate with each other until they go to therapy, and that’s often too late.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“Create a plan together to minimize hurt feelings and avoid an incident in the future.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“When we fall in love we are often on our very best behavior. We lead with the healthiest side of ourselves. But as relationships progress, each person gets more real, more transparent, and therefore more vulnerable.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“Alice doesn’t look back and doesn’t question the adventure she’s chosen. That’s commitment”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“I have a commitment to myself to grow from my failures.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“Prerequisites for sex: Men in general like to have sex to feel emotionally connected, and women need to feel emotionally connected to have sex. Almost 90 percent of the couples we interviewed agreed with that last sentence. We refer to this as women having more prerequisites for sex than men do. Women’s prerequisites aren’t always limited to emotional closeness; sometimes they are about feeling exhausted, distracted, not rested, or not good about herself or her body. Interestingly, the data shows that gay men have the most sex of any type of couple—two people with the fewest prerequisites—and lesbians have the least sex of any type of couple—two people with the most prerequisites. Sexual desire for women is a barometer for how the rest of her world is going. If she’s not rested, or happy, or healthy, or feeling supported or loved, she’s not going to feel like having sex.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“The opposite of play is not work—it’s depression.” When our lives are infused with play, we’re able to see the absurd in the serious and find excitement in the mundane. A relationship without play is a relationship without humor, without flirting, without games, and without fantasy. We all need humor, laughter, and play. Romance is play. Banter is play.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“There is no question that committing to a person can be a terrifying prospect. It means putting all our eggs in one basket.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“Of all the people in the world, what led you to decide that this was the person you wanted to marry (or commit to)? Was it an easy decision or a difficult decision? What was it like to fall in love?”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“differences attract us at first, and yet we can find ourselves in relationship trouble when we try to change these differences later. Learning to understand and accept the ways in which you’re different is key to creating lasting connection and enduring love.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“have the conversations that lead to intimacy, to awareness, and to a deep and meaningful understanding of one another—the ways you’re the same and the ways you’re different.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“I would like you to respect me” isn’t as good as, “I would like you to turn off your electronic devices at dinner so we can just talk to each other.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“keep it positive—what you do need as opposed to what you don’t need or want.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“triggers." They are old, enduring vulnerabilities that occurred before this relationship began and have left emotional scars that can get activated. When you feel triggered, search your memory for a point in your history or childhood when you had a similar set of feelings. Triggers never go away, they endure.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“If you discuss your values around trust and make a commitment together to respect those values with your actions, your relationship will flourish.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“the more honest we are, the more we can discover that our partner really loves us for who we are, and not the idealized version of us that shows up when we first begin to date. Vulnerability creates trust, and trust is the oxygen your relationship needs to breathe.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“When you negotiate with each other, it’s always from a point of self-interest, not mutual benefit. You haven’t built trust, or commitment, or a foundation of loyalty to each other because you’re not really in this relationship.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“Negative Comps.” Rather than nurturing gratitude for what we have with our partner, we nurture resentment for what’s missing. When something is bothering us about our partner, rather than talking this over to get our needs met within the relationship, we fantasize about another relationship and how we might receive what is missing from our current relationship with this fantasy partner.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“When we make our relationship a priority by showing that it’s a priority, we build trust and demonstrate our loyalty far beyond any words we say in our wedding vows.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love

“commitment is a choice we make every single day, over and over again. We choose it even when we are tired and overworked and stressed out.”
― John M. Gottman, Eight Dates: Essential Conversations for a Lifetime of Love