Paula

“It’s not the absence of fun, it’s the absence of fear.’ Keep this in mind when you are looking for someone to share your life with – someone who’ll bring fun without fear. Someone whose company you love. Someone who makes you feel alive and safe and understood. Those are the specifics you should be looking for. The rest doesn’t matter so much.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

“Within this Christian vision of marriage, here's what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of what God is creating, and to say, "I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, 'I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!”
― Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God

“Keep putting love out into the world and it will come back to you in one way or another.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly

“...romantics are, ironically, the worst culprits for being relationship avoidant. This is for two reasons. The first being that committing to someone would mean they would have to call off the search for love, and nothing is more romantic than longing. The second is that they spend a lot of time thinking about who their partner might be, so it's hard to find the 3D version that matches who they've invented in their mind. It's less about perfection, and more about prescriptivism. They write their own version of how they think love is going to pan out, then they find it perplexing that no one seems to know the specific plot and characters other than them.”
― Dolly Alderton, Dear Dolly