Terrence Real Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. The difference between real acceptance and just backing away from an issue, or away from the whole relationship, is resentment.

Terrence Real

#4. Love is not for the faint of heart.

Terrence Real

#5. 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

#6. ...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

#7. The paradox of real love is that our capacity to sustain intimacy rests on our capacity to tolerate aloneness inside the relationship.

Terrence Real

#8. Does tension exist between our perfect longings and the imperfect world?

Terrence Real

#9. We are so busy attempting to manage the result that we fail simply to run the race.

Terrence Real

#10. 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

#11. ...strength is not the absence of vulnerability. Strength is knowing what your weaknesses are and working with them.

Terrence Real

#12. Only after giving up 'the truth' can we learn to speak our truth.

Terrence Real

#13. 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

#14. Revenge is really a perverse form of communication, a twisted attempt at repair.

Terrence Real

#15. ...changing one's own behavior is a much more promising strategy than insisting on change from the other.

Terrence Real

#16. 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

#17. As women shut down their needs, they also shut down their sense of pleasure.

Terrence Real

#18. 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

#19. The bonds of silence and protection run deeper, for the moment, than his trust in me.

Terrence Real