Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.
Interpretation
Passion can ignite suddenly but is transient; intimacy and commitment take time to build.
This quote by Robert Sternberg highlights the different dynamics of relationships, emphasizing that while passion can spark quickly, it often diminishes just as fast. In contrast, intimacy and commitment require patience and nurturing, suggesting that lasting relationships are built on deeper emotional connections that develop over time.
In practice
This quote can be used in relationship workshops to explain the evolution of love.
In other words, if a teacher only teaches in one way, then they conclude that the kids who can't learn well that way don't have the ability, when, in fact, it may be that the way the teacher's teaching is not a particularly good match to the way those kids learn.
If you're not adapting to the very rapidly changing environment, if you can't think creatively, you lose big in this society because there are very few jobs for you left.
Current intelligence-testing practices require examinees to answer but not to pose questions. In requiring only the answering of questions, these tests are missing a vital half of intelligence- the asking of questions.
I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we're complicated, that we are indeed messy, that we do our best with what we've been given. We come into the world exactly like you. It's just that there are circumstances in the culture that are dictated and put on our lives that we have to fight against.
It really is the relationship you have with your self that presents the key to the “kingdom”, so to speak... Fighting is good, but not when it is fighting yourself. Changing the world is good but first one has to start inside and concurrently make that place right. The strife and the ugliness in the world is the outward manifestation of this troubled relationship we have within on a whole.
I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
I believe in being fully present. That means you should be with the person you’re with.
Part of the puzzle, surely, lies in the disconnect between official rhetoric and lived realities. Americans are constantly extolling “traditions”; litanies to family values are at the center of every politician’s discourse. And yet the culture of America is extremely corrosive of family life, indeed of all traditions except those redefined as “identities” that fit in the larger patterns of distinctiveness, cooperation, and openness to innovation.
We gave up everything just to sit at your table.
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