Ada Calhoun > Quotes

“By staying married, we give something to ourselves and to others: hope. Hope that in steadfastly loving someone, we ourselves, for all our faults, will be loved; that the broken world will be made whole. To hitch your rickety wagon to the flickering star of another fallible human being -- what an insane thing to do. What a burden, and what a gift.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“So what's the secret to staying together?" I asked her. "Be nice?" she offered. I laughed, but that may be it, the way a secret to losing weight is to eat less. Be nice. Don't leave. That's all.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“(Personally, I have avoided many fights by going to bed angry and waking up to realize that I'd just been tired.)”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“The word "slut" has been invoked in the public discourse as an ugly slur. But Langella's book celebrates sluttiness as a worthy -- even noble -- way of life... When Bette Davis wants to have "racy phone conversations...rife with foreplay," he agrees because how could you not? When Elizabeth Taylor says, "Come on up, baby, and put me to sleep," who is he to resist? (He does make her chase him first.) By his cheerful debauchery, Langella reveals something certain ommmentators have obscured: sluts are the best---hungry for experience and generous wih themselves in its pursuit.”
― Ada Calhoun

“Dating is poetry. Marriage is a novel. There are times, maybe years, that are all exposition.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“One of the main problems in making dreams come true? They cost money.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“We’re the first women raised from birth hearing the tired cliché “having it all” — then discovering as adults that it is very hard to have even some of it.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“Gen Xers are in 'the prime of their lives' at a particularly dangerous and divisive moment,' Boomer marketing expert Faith Popcorn told me. 'They have been hit hard financially and dismissed culturally. They have tons of debt. They're squeezed on both sides by children and aging parents. The grim state of adulthood is hitting them hard. If they're exhausted and bewildered, they have every reason to feel that way.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“To love somebody is not just a strong feeling -- it is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise," writes psychologist Erich Fromm. "If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“...there is so much beauty in the trying, and in the failing, and in the trying again.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“...that's part of what marriage means: sometimes hating this other person but staying together because you promised you would.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“All the couples therapy and communication seminars in the world won't save you if you aren't prepared to close your eyes and hug the mainmast through a storm.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“My expectations are way lower. I no longer believe that at this age I should have rock-hard abs, a perfectly calm disposition, or a million dollars in the bank. It helps to surround myself with women my age who speak honestly about their lives.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“We kept hearing again and again that we could be anything we wanted to be. We had supportive mothers insisting we would accomplish more than they had. Title IX made sure our after-school classes were as good as the boys’. We saw women on television who had families and fun careers. So, if we happened to fail, why was that? The only thing left to blame was ourselves.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“The romantic fairy tales we grew up with -- where marriage is the happy ending rather than the opening scene -- are not useful for grown-ups.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“I want to say that at various points in your marriage, may it last forever, you will look at this person and feel only rage.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“You have to ask: If this was my last year alive, how would I want to spend it? If I had thirty years? If you’re saying ‘Things are good enough—why should I blow them up?’The answer is because ‘good enough’should not be the goal,”she said. “We didn’t work this hard”—by “we”I sensed she meant women—“to be fine.”
― Ada Calhoun, Crush

“Generation X marks the end of the American dream of ever-increasing prosperity. We are downwardly mobile, with declining job stability. It used to be that each generation could expect to do better than their parents. New research confirms that Generation X won’t.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“The boring parts don't last forever. In retrospect, they aren't even boring.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

“Generation X women, who as children lacked cell phones and helicopter parents, came up relying on our own wits. To keep ourselves safe, we took control. We worked hard and made lists and tried to do everything all at once for a very long time without much help. We took responsibility for ourselves--and later we also took responsibility for our work or partners or children or parents. We should be proud of ourselves.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“In my experience, Gen X women spend lots
of time minimizing the importance of their uncomfortable or confusing feelings. They often tell me that they are embarrassed to even bring them up. Some of the unhappiest women I spoke with, no matter how depressed or exhausted they were, apologized for “whining.” Almost every one of them also described herself as “lucky.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“Generation X women keep many lists: grocery lists, chore lists, deadline lists, schools-to-apply-to lists, holiday-card lists. Some are on paper and some on smartphones or sticky notes or whiteboards, but they can also seem to loop on a scroll behind the women’s eyes.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“Taking your seat at the table doesn’t work out so well when no one wants you there and you are vastly outnumbered.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“I craved a connection to the eternal, an undeniable encounter with the ineffable. Something was calling me, but I couldn't name what it was. I thought perhaps I was looking for someone or something to love with my whole heart. Whether that meant religion or romantic love, surely God or men would take me out of myself; either one would do.”
― Ada Calhoun, Crush

“He mailed me a little copy of Michel de Montaigne's On Friendship (1580): "In the friendship which I am talking about, sounds are mingled and confounded in so universal a blessing that they effaced the seam which joins them together so that it cannot be found. If you press me to say why I love him, I feel that it cannot be expressed except by replying: 'Because it was him: because it was me.”
― Ada Calhoun, Crush

“Maybe the Generation X story need not be: We're broke. We're unstable. We're alone. Maybe it can be: We've had a hard row to hoe. We've been one big experiment. And yet, look at us: we've accomplished so much.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“Crushes had always made me feel powerful. This was the opposite. I was lit up, but I wasn't in control. None of my old tricks worked anymore. I was rich in a defunct currency. A trillion zloty and I couldn't buy a stick of gum.”
― Ada Calhoun, Crush

“It should be plenty to raise children or to have a career- or, frankly, just not to become a serial killer. Yet somehow for this generation of women, the belief that girls could do anything morphed into a directive that they must do everything.”
― Ada Calhoun, Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

“Sometimes we can thank our feelings for sharing and ignore them. Maybe wanting doesn’t have to perfectly coincide with getting. Maybe sometimes not-getting has a value of its own.”
― Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give