檳榔嶼

- Before I reached the age of forty, I never even considered that my relationships did not last because I did not know enough about love.
  - I assumed that love was a given.
  - All the philosophical ways of thinking about love in my life had come from books. Translating theory into practice was much harder than simply reading about it.
  - And like most women, I just assumed I was more loving than man in my life.
- Being alone and celibate gave me the psychic space to confront myself and examine my relationship to intimacy.
  - Working to be close with someone who is not interested in sustained closeness not only depresses the spirit, it makes you a perfect target for aggression.
  - As John Gray endlessly tells us in <<Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus>> : when withholding men do not want to be close, watch out, because they are likely to attack if you reach out to them seeking intimate interaction.
- Many women who are warm and openhearted choose men who are closed and shut down because we hope we can provide a catalyst for them to open up.
  - Our efforts usually fail, because these men have not made their own commitment to being more open.
  - Most of the marriages and relationships I saw were ones in which women were always the primary caregivers and had little time for self-development.
- The problem was not that a woman fell in love but that she fell into a relationship/marriage wherein their mutual growth and development was not their primary agenda.
  - There are still too few models of heterosexual relationships in which mutual growth is the foundational bonding principle.
- Too late I realized that men's lack of emotional demands was linked to a lack of interest in emotional openness or personal growth.
  - When we choose partners who enable us to grow in ways that are important to us, it is all the more difficult to see destructive behavior patterns when they arise.
- Since most of us have been raised to think care is the primary, if not the sole, ingredient of love, we are easily able to convince ourselves that we are "in love".
  - So many women have never been nurtured in any way by a male, and ad a consequence it can be quite enthralling to receive care, especially from a male partner.
    - The lack of mature emotional interaction helped retard my emotional growth
- Masses of women buy books, like those written by John Gray (男人來自火星，女人來自金星), Susan Jeffers, Barbara De Angelis (靈覺醒：活出生命質感的高振動訊息), Pat Love, and other self-help gurus on the subject of love. 
  - Importantly most of them offer strategies to help improve relationships without addressing the issue of love. Making a relationship "work" is not the same as "creating love".
- One of the best books on the subject of love is John Bradshaw's <<Creating Love: The Next Great Stage of Growth>>... Readers bought it, but they were not willing to break through their denial about the ways in which patriarchy prevents us from knowing love.
  - Linking that abuse to cultural acceptance of patriarchal domination as a founding narrative, he illuminates our nation's elevation of narratives of power over love in our culture and in our families.
- When females are taught to believe we are more capable of giving love than are our male counterparts, we are embracing patriarchal assumptions.
  - Women involved with men who believe that they are more able to love are predisposed to accept male emotional withholding.
  - They already expect men to be deficient.
  - The tragic irony here is patriarchal thinking has socialized males to believe that their manhood is affirmed when they are emotionally  withholding.
- Antipatriarchal thinking, which assumes that both women and men are equally capable of learning how to love, of giving and receiving love, is the only foundation on which to construct sustained, meaningful, mutual love.
  - Only when we approach love with a basic respect for men's emotional universe will we be able to recognize those men who are simply not ready to love and be loved.
- Indeed, more often than not it is maternal sadism that may be the early indoctrination that sets women up to confuse sadomasochistic intimate terrorism with love. Often the verbal shaming and humiliation that adult patriarchal men do to female partners mirror and reenact familiar forms of abuse females have experienced with dominating, punishing patriarchal mothers.
- It took awhile for me to see my mother as she really was, to recognize both ways in which she was victimized by a more powerful man and ways in which she colluded in that victimization because she also believed in patriarchy.
  - Her continued acceptance of patriarchal thinking, even when there was a new way to see and do things, helped me to see she had agency and made choices. It helped me to see that at times she was coercive and cruel toward the children she had power over.
- Our cultural idealization of women as caregivers is so powerful. It's really one of the few positive traits assigned women by patriarchy.
- Rather than reading more woman-blaming literature in the guise of self-help, we would be focusing our hearts and minds on what really matters.
- What woman does not hear the truth in Lerner's reminding us that as females searching for love "few of us evaluate a prospective partner with the same objectivity and clarity that we might use to select a household appliance or a car".
- While many women passionately desire to love and be loved see that desires as not worthy of serious attention and study.
- Let's not kid ourselves, we find mutual love only when we know how to love. And the best place to start practicing the art of loving is with the self - that body, mind, heart, and soul that we can most know and change.
  - The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself.
  - We begin this journey to love by examining the ideas and beliefs we have held about the nature of intimacy and true love.
  - Rather than embracing faulty thinking that encourage us to believe that females are inherently loving, we make the choice to become loving.
  - Choosing love, we affirm our agency, our commitment to personal growth, our emotional openness.