“Happiness requires a balance. If you feel rejected, you need to pursue love with dignity. If you feel put down you need to restore your dignity in an attractive fashion.”

“We are all hungry for love, acceptance and belonging. Rejection can still feel like death.”

“Once upon a time, loss of love, rejection, weakness and loss of territory all meant death. Now it just feels that way.”

“Feelings can have a life of their own and you have very little direct control over them, except perhaps to make them worse.”

“The poorer your self-esteem and the lower your self-confidence, the more easily negative feelings can overwhelm ordinary good sense.”

“You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the childof a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better thanaverage marriage yourself – either through some geneticinheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But itdoesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need theopposite example – to see mistakes in order not to makethem yourself. Except this would mean that the best way forparents to ensure their children have happy marriageswould be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s theanswer?”

“What counts in battle is what you do when the pain sets in.”