Why can't women get along? Because we're afraid. We're afraid to be vulnerable. We're afraid to be soft. We're afraid to be hurt. But most of all, we're afraid of our power. So we become controlling and aggressive and vicious.
In the process of planning and having a wedding, I forgot there would actually be a marriage, a union of minds, bodies, souls, and issues that would come together as soon as the ceremony was over.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Planning a wedding is easy, but the true commitment of marriage involves deeper connections and challenges.
This quote highlights the common oversight where individuals focus extensively on the details of planning a wedding ceremony, neglecting the deeper and more complex nature of marriage itself. A wedding is merely the beginning of a lifelong partnership, which encompasses not only love and joy but also the merging of two lives, including their strengths, weaknesses, and inevitable challenges that arise together after the vows are exchanged.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared at a marriage counseling session to emphasize the importance of focusing on the relationship beyond the wedding day.
More from Iyanla Vanzant
All quotes →Challenges come so we can grow and be prepared for things we are not equipped to handle now. When we face our challenges with faith, prepared to learn, willing to make changes, and if necessary, to let go, we are demanding our power be turned on.
Feminine power is silent, dark, mysterious, healing, nurturing. A woman can walk into a room and control it. She doesn't even have to open her mouth if she knows where her power is.
You know when I was 20 and 30, they were insecurities. Now they're just a new normal. I'm 60 years old, so my expectations of who I am and how I look and how I show up in the world had to shift. Not because I couldn't help it, or not because I did anything wrong, but because I had to get into the natural flow of my being as a woman.
Your greatest adversary is also your greatest teacher. Like it or not, it is the job of certain people to bring out the worst in you. What they trigger is already in you. They are here to reveal the sore, tender wounded places in your heart and mind, and they are providing you with a wonderful and divine opportunity for healing.
You have a right to say no. Most of us have very weak and flaccid 'no' muscles. We feel guilty for saying no. We get ostracized and challenged for saying no, so we forget it's our choice. Your 'no' muscle has to be built up to get to a place where you can say, 'I don't care if that's what you want. I don't want that. No.'
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I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.
The less you demand total fulfillment from relationships, the more you can appreciate them for the beautiful tapestries they are, in which absolute and relative, perfect and imperfect, infinite and finite are marvelously interwoven. You can stop fighting the shifting tides of relative love and learn to ride them instead. And you come to appreciate more fully the simple, ordinary heroism involved in opening to another person and forging real intimacy.
I'd been told of all the things you're meant to feel when your father dies. Sudden freedom, growing up, the end of dependence, the step into the sunlight when no one is taller than you and you're in no one's shadow. I know what I felt. Lonely.
And if you see me, smile and maybe give me a hug. That's important to me too.
She had not wanted him to but had let him have his way because ever since she was a child she had generally yielded before anyone with strong willpower, especially if it was a man, not because she was naturally submissive, but because strong male willpower gave her a feeling of safety and trust, together with acceptance and a desire to give in.
I'm a mirror. If you're cool with me, I'm cool with you, and the exchange starts. What you see is what you reflect. If you don't like what you see, then you've done something. If I'm standoffish, that's because you are.