Marriage lessons Quotes

Having someone to share not only the joy of life, but the pain of life... that's been sort of the biggest lesson of marriage. I can never get angry or upset with my partner because they're just a part of me.

I was gone so much in my first marriage. I love the moments when I engage with my youngest daughter now. It's not my thing to sit on the ground and play tea party, but I'll do it because it's a moment that will stick with me forever.

My readers often say to me, 'If we lived next door to each other, we'd be best friends.' That is precisely what I wanted to say to smart, funny, self-effacing Ellen McCarthy after I finished reading The Real Thing. I loved every lesson laid out in a book that wouldn't dare to call itself a field guide to marriage but amounts to as much on every page. This is a deeply useful little book.

Marriage requires searing honesty at all costs. I learned that from my third wife.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself – either through some genetic inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for parents to ensure their children have happy marriages would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the answer?

Both of my marriages have taught me the same lesson twice over really harsh: listen to your instincts. Don't be a people pleaser.

I like to joke that I already married a 26-year-old and divorced a 29-year-old, so I wasn't going to do that again when I got remarried.