Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Carolyn Hax

Almost no one can take on an entire future in one step, much less while reeling emotionally.

There's nothing wrong with being happy somewhere, even if it's the little pond you grew up in, as long as you are in fact comfortable vs. bored.

When in doubt, respond to what you witness, not what you hear secondhand.

Instead of talking at each other about the non-business-related contact, talk to each other about your concerns about marriage. Listen a lot, too.

Attractions are things we all should be good at saying no to, because our Department of Attraction is arguably the least reliable and productive office in our entire brain.

Your job is to be you, which includes being the chief beneficiary of all things you do right, the chief victim of all you do wrong, and the one person on Earth who has to live with every choice you make. As gatekeeper to your life, you’re it.

Relationships are complicated, but happiness in a relationship isn't: It's just wanting exactly what you have. Wanting something else is dispiriting.

You can't make people like you under the best of circumstances, and you certainly can't make them like you while you're actively badgering them on what you perceive to be their failures of conscience.

The topic of sexual education makes me nuts, because kids are certainly not now and have rarely ever been "clueless" about what adults do and delude themselves about keeping from their kids. Especially now that so many of them are carrying the entire internet around in their pockets.

Plan your own vacations when you want to, and plan a suitable combined vacation with this other family when you want to. If they freak out at your planning your own vacations as you see fit, then let them. Bowing to unreasonable demands because someone will make you pay emotionally if you don't is not a healthy option.

I'm sure there are people who can toggle quickly from all-in caregiving to structured socializing, but I can't think of any offhand.

The most reliable ways to make oneself miserable are attempting to change people and not attempting to change circumstances.

I do crosswords when I have time to kill somewhere, and am 100 percent successful on filling in the spots I get stuck on - after I close up, do something else, and then go back to it.

If you are being shuffled around, then you should feel shuffled around.

All of us assign different values to things, and not all of those values are going to line up with others'.

One way to make tough decisions is to take incremental steps that don't commit you to anything yet.

For some people, the better route for finding like-minded parents is just to get out of your house with your baby and frequent baby-friendly places.

Moving is hard. Staying is easy. Logistically speaking, at least. And this is true whether you're doing or undoing something.

First group impressions can mask a lot of individual variations in the members.

Bodies and minds need breaks or the work suffers, this has been proven and reproven to the point where we don't even need to post links to support it.

It's probably good for your body and brain to get moving occasionally.

Some people can work amid chaos or conversations, and some can't - and while there's no doubt an element of brain wiring to it, there's also the possibility of acquiring skills that improve your focus.

Your friends will need you, too, someday. Maybe not in the same way, maybe not in cash and shelter, but they'll need you - to listen without judging, to invite them over when they're lonely, to show up for their events, to register in whatever way matters to them that they matter to you. Be on the lookout for these opportunities to give back, and do whatever is in your power not to miss many of them.

You don't want someone who can't tell the difference between having a different opinion and dismissing your opinion.

You can't make someone agree with you, not even when you're 100 percent sure you're right.

Minimizing exposure to miserable people is nothing short of a life strategy.

Of course the thoughts and awareness are there, but it's all incomplete and often fanciful - kids know there's something to know, and they fill in a bunch of the blanks with their imaginations if their parents haven't had the conversations and/or established themselves as sources of information. It's rare that the kids know nothing at all, and the somethings they do know are often only partially right or flat-out wrong.

If you take the time to listen to an upset child's story with empathy, and guide the child toward figuring out the root of the problem, then the result is often that the child not only calms down, but also in the future is less likely to get so upset.

Apparently you have ample proof from experience that you're not going to stop world evil by debating your in-laws into submission, so it's okay to choose not to try.

There is a difference between your parents' not reporting to you everything they do and keeping secrets from you.

It's okay to forgive yourself immediately and for good.

If the guests want to wrest the check away from the host, because the host is also the guest of honor, then the guest who volunteers has to cover the whole thing. A guest can't volunteer -all- of the guests to pay for the host/honoree.

When you fail to see something, that doesn't mean I'm hiding it.

Make sure you have legal cover for what you're doing.

I actually recommend as little actual counting as possible in a life partnership. But, when there's a sense of injustice brewing between you, some counting is inevitable, and so my advice is to count using as broad a scope as possible. It's not just hours worked or chores done, either, and it's not even just about the household - it's a system of Whole Marriage Thinking. It's about hours worked, chores done, goals supported, emotional needs met, everything. What it all takes out of you, what it all gives back. It all factors in.

Unfortunately, I think the expectation is that birthday girls don't pay.

Separation is where you see if it works better with the adults in two different homes.

Your parents' views are, by current standards, out there. Getting in their faces about it would be needlessly disrespectful, but there's no reason for you to tiptoe through their delusional little terrarium as if you can't bend even one blade of grass.

Sometimes the pain outweighs the good things.

I think a person who arranges the event and orders the food also picks up the check - even the birthday person, even when people at the table insist on paying for the birthday person.

I realize that people fly with small children all the time, and that babies are easier in some ways because all they do is sit/lie around anyway, but damn it's hard to keep a baby comfortable on any flight, much less a long one, particularly amid the looks of horror they will get from fellow passengers as it dawns on them that their 10- to 13-hour flight might come with a soundtrack of screaming baby.

For me, the greatest source of frustration was trying to work with a willful child when there was something else I wanted - say, to get the child to go to bed so I could have my own time. Just the promise of the time, and feeling that promise slip away, was enough to introduce a whole other element of stress into the encounter.

Once given, a gift is yours to use, store or dispose of as you see fit.

No matter what else comes, your courage will be your companion for life.

And if you're a parent who thinks you're okay because your kid doesn't have a phone or iPod yet, and/or you've used all the parent controls to filter out explicit material, you're not okay. The filters are tissue paper and your kid without a phone is on a school bus or in a locker room or at a public park with phone-equipped kids every day. And they're like all kids in exploring - by whatever means available to them - exactly what their parents are treating as too embarrassing or taboo to talk about.

One helpful thing to keep in mind as a retort-stopper is that you won't "win," you won't change anyone's mind, you won't change any votes, you won't make the atmosphere in the room any better, YOU won't feel any better.

You need to make plans for your future, so plan your own future.

It takes awareness that it's not only not a bad thing to let others do things their own way, it is in fact an improvement. It makes life richer and more interesting.

Awkwardness is when there's a risk of a perception gap between what you mean and what you appear to mean.

The only answer that has any chance against against the information saturation kids face these days is to talk openly with kids, early enough and often enough and unflinchingly enough that you set the precedent of being the safe place they can go to ask their difficult questions. It has to happen starting when they're 2 or 3, and they ask you where babies come from and instead of freaking out and deflecting, you give facts commensurate with their ability to understand.

We all make deals with ourselves when it comes to the difficult people in our lives.

There has been, for some reason (or more likely an unfortunate accumulation of reasons) a trend over the past several decades for parents to do the work of parenting in the isolation of their own homes - and not only that, this trend has overlapped with the other trend of much deeper parent involvement in raising kids. That you also represent trend No. 3, more people raising kids solo, has only exacerbated a close-to-no-win situation.

It's hard to send your baby off on a plane without you, though that's less reasonable, because sending him off in a car is statistically a bigger risk.

If you're not sure what you want, then hold back from making plans or responding to invitations until you have a chance to think about it.

Waiting for someone to propose to you only passes the "Really, it's tradition!" sniff test when both of you think it's the man's job to propose and both of you think that's awesome.

Being negative is easy. There will always be a downside to everything good, a hurdle to everything desirable, a con to every pro. The real courage is in finding the good in what you have, the opportunities in every hurdle, the pros in every con.

Live in the moment, this moment, your moment. That is by far and without meaningful rival The Best Position to put yourself in to discover and delight in who your children turn out to be, whoever they turn out to be.

A lot of support gets withheld out of fear of awkwardness and misspeaking.

People who make babies surrender their right to behave like them.

There is a connection between environment and stress on both ends, with excessive clutter and excessive attention to detail both holding the power to distract us from our ability to love fully, work productively and relax effectively. So, what makes sense to me is for each of us to think this through on a few fronts: what constitutes a comfortable environment for us, how much effort we're willing to put into it relative to other priorities, and how well-matched we need our partners' preferences to be to ours.