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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The Puritan ethic of marriage was first to look not for a partner whom you do love passionately at this moment but rather for one whom you can love steadily as your best friend for life, then to proceed with God’s help to do just that.
The young girls of color that first encountered the 'me too' movement in community centers and classrooms and church basements were there not only because they needed a safe space, but because they needed their own space.
Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.
The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage develop.
It's a taboo that comes back over and over, to suggest that women can feel divided - that you can love your child and want to do everything for it, and at the same time want to put it away from you and reclaim something of yourself.
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.