Lauren > Lauren's Quotes

“I'm about to make a wild, extreme and severe relationship rule: the word busy is a load of crap and is most often used by assholes. The word "busy" is the relationship Weapon of Mass Destruction. It seems like a good excuse, but in fact in every silo you uncover, all you're going to find is a man who didn't care enough to call. Remember men are never to busy to get what they want.”
― Greg Behrendt

“Don’t be flattered that he misses you. He should miss you. You are deeply missable. However, he’s still the same person who just broke up with you. Remember, the only reason he can miss you is because he’s choosing, every day, not to be with you.”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

“If the guy you’re dating doesn’t seem to be completely into you, or you feel the need to start ‘figuring him out,’ please consider the glorious thought that he might just not be that into you. And then free yourself to go find someone that is.”
― Greg Behrendt

“We have become a sloppy bunch of people. We say things we don't mean. We make promises we don't keep. "I'll call you." "Let's get together." We know we won't. On the Human Interaction Stock Exchange, our words have lost almost all their value. And the spiral continues, as we now don't even expect people to keep their word; in fact we might even be embarrassed to point out to the dirty liar that they never did what they said they'd do. So if a guy you're dating doesn't call when he says he's doing to, why should that be such a big deal? Because you should be dating a man who's at least as good as his word.”
― Greg Behrendt

“But what I can do is paint you a picture of what you’ll never see when you’re with a guy who’s really into you: You’ll never see you staring maniacally at your phone, willing it to ring. You’ll never see you ruining an evening with friends because you’re calling for your messages every fifteen seconds. You’ll never see you hating yourself for calling him when you know you shouldn’t have. What you will see is you being treated so well that no phone antics will be necessary. You’ll be too busy being adored.”
― Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

“We're taught that in life, we should try to look on the bright side. Not in this case. In this case, assume rejection first. Assume you're the rule, not the exception. It's liberating. But we also know it's not an easy concept. -He's not just into you”
― Greg Behrendt

“Always be classy. Never be crazy.”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

“When it comes to men, deal with them as they are, not how you’d like them to be.”
― Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

“But he was so great!' Yes, and the people who got on the Titanic thought they were going on a vacation”
― Greg Behrendt

“Don't you want the guy who'll forget about all the other things in his life before he forgets about you?”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

“A friend of mine told a story about a date with a guy she was really excited about: He stood her up. He then called her, begging her forgiveness and giving some excuse. She told him to get lost, telling him that he only gets one shot with her, and he blew it.”
― Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo

“I don't know" means "NO!"
"I don't know" means "I'm too cowardly to tell you the truth because I can't deal with confrontation."
"I don't know" means please do the dirty work for me because I don't want to hurt your feelings even more then I already have.”
― Greg Behrendt

“He doesn't need to be reminded you're great.”
― Greg Behrendt, He's Just Not That Into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

“Feeling in love (or lust) and fear feel a lot alike. They both give you that anxious butterfly feeling in your stomach, a sense of excitement, and a general unease physically and mentally. It's easy to confuse love with fear.”
― Greg Behrendt, It's Called a Breakup Because It's Broken: The Smart Girl's Break-Up Buddy

“Maybe this is just me, because my priorities have changed as I’ve gotten older. But now I don’t want to be ‘sort of dating’ someone. I don’t want to be ‘kinda hanging out’ with someone. I don’t want to spend a lot of energy suppressing all my feelings so I appear uninvolved. I want to be involved.”
― Greg Behrendt

“First of all, never buy a man a plasma TV until you're married. A lot of men once they have a plasma TV they don't need a girlfriend”
― Greg Behrendt, Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt

“The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue, I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked.

Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only… and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes.

So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect, as if I’m the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man – the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine. And your life is a long line of fine.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.

It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“A lot of people lacked that gift: knowing when to fuck off.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me?'

He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you.

But he said, 'Because I feel sorry for you.'

'Why?'

'Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I feel myself trying to be charming, and then I realize I’m obviously trying to be charming, and then I try to be even more charming to make up for the fake charm, and then I’ve basically turned into Liza Minnelli: I’m dancing in tights and sequins, begging you to love me. There’s a bowler and jazz hands and lots of teeth.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I don't understand the point of being together if you're not the happiest.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I was told love should be unconditional. That's the rule, everyone says so. But if love has no boundaries, no limits, no conditions, why should anyone try to do the right thing ever? If I know I am loved no matter what, where is the challenge? I am supposed to love Nick despite all his shortcomings. And Nick is supposed to love me despite my quirks. But clearly, neither of us does. It makes me think that everyone is very wrong, that love should have many conditions. Love should require both partners to be their very best at all times.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Because you can't be as in love as we were and not have it invade your bone marrow. Our kind of love can go into remission, but it's always waiting to return. Like the world's sweetest cancer.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“We weren’t ourselves when we fell in love, and when we became ourselves – surprise! – we were poison. We complete each other in the nastiest, ugliest possible way.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“I felt a queasy mixture of relief and horror: when you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“He did apologize profusely. (Does anyone do anything profusely except apologize? Sweat, I guess.)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“It is a do-it-yourself era: health care, real estate, police investigation. Go online and f*ing figure it out for yourself because everyone’s overworked and understaffed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl