Top 55 Emily V. Gordon Quotes

Cheating is very rarely about the actual act of being with another person.

Burlesque dancing didn’t solve all my post-divorce problems, but what it did do was force me to court myself for a little while.

As any daytime judge show can tell you, spending someone’s money or taking their stuff because they hurt your feelings is not justified.

Your life story is a gift, and it should be treated as such.

Ghosts of Marriages Past can haunt many aspects of a new relationship – your expectations of what a man should do, how you behave in conflict, your ideas of how commitment should look – they can even make your new man look untrustworthy when he’s really behaving normally.

I definitely think, when you’re a teenager, it’s more forgiving to talk to strangers and go up to people at a mall or whatever.

In high school, I decided that all of my female friends were stupid and traded them for guy friends. I loved horror movies and heavy metal and used these interests to become a ‘guys’ girl.’

That’s part of what a relationship is: you don’t experience things in the same way.

I think it’s lovely when people are more involved in local politics.

I have multiple tattoos.

I am somewhat grateful to the disintegration of my marriage for teaching me a lot about myself and about relationships, and though I wish it hadn’t been such a taxing lesson, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Don’t expect yourself to immediately love your stepchildren. In fact, you may hate them for a bit.

Often, when cheating happens, we rush to place blame solely on one person – either the person who did the cheating, or more insidiously, if it happened to us, we blame ourselves for not being ‘good enough’ to keep them around. But putting it all on one person doesn’t paint the entire picture.

If you don’t simply communicate with your spouse what household tasks you would like them to do, you are setting yourself up to be angry.

I always tell people, ‘Take a class or volunteer.’ It really helps you get out of your own little pocket of people you always see and gets you exposed to a new group of people.

A lot of new stepparents fall into the trap of letting children disobey household expectations in order to gain favor with them.

I don’t remember being put into the coma, but I do have a lot of weird memories from being under. This may be because I was in a coma via medicine rather than trauma. That time period played out for me as one long rambling dream where I was at a hospital to visit my boyfriend, who I thought was in an accident.

If a show is a critical success but a ratings flop, I assume that people are just championing the show because it looks cool to root for an underdog.

When I was young and less wise, I thought that being a feminist meant being independent. It meant not sacrificing your needs for anyone else’s and not relying on anyone else for even a smidgen of your happiness or well being.

I’m a mental-health advocate big time, so I think it’s great when depression is a thing that’s discussed out in the open, because it’s still way too stigmatized.

I thought of ‘The Big Sick’ as a placeholder title, to be completely honest. I’ve grown to love it.

I haven’t always been the best advocate for my own body. I was a too-tall, pudgy child who felt completely out of control of the genetic lottery ticket she’d been given, so in retaliation, I shut down. I ignored my body and hated it for not being tiny and cute like my friends’ bodies.

After my divorce, I took some time off from having a romantic life to begin the tough work of figuring out where I’d gone wrong and what on Earth I could do to understand how to be a whole person in a relationship.

Unequivocally, individual human beings who live together will always have different standards of what a ‘clean house’ looks like.

Sometimes we put so much effort into things we’re doing, like dating or wedding planning, that we don’t stop to think about whether or not we even want the results of that effort.

Don’t sacrifice alone time with your spouse just because the kids seem needy. A united front requires adult time alone, so put it in the calendar and make it a priority. A house cannot stand on a shaky foundation.

When someone insists that you watch a show that’s already been on for a few seasons, they’re basically saying, ‘Hey, you’re not doing anything for the next five weeks, are you? Because have I got a plan for you every single night! It’s ‘Weeds!”

Without knowing your own history, you are doomed to repeat it.

I grew up in a town where there were no Muslims whatsoever, and there was not a lot of exposure.

I’m not an actress. I’m a writer.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but I imagine a lot of married and divorced people have insights to share about how they felt during their engagement.

I’m tired of hearing about ‘Damages,’ I don’t care how life-changing ‘The Wire’ is, and I don’t want to hear another word about ‘Battlestar Galactica’ or its super-awesome ending.

Women compete, compare, undermine, and undercut one another – at least, that is the prevailing notion of how we interact.

I remember being a teenager and feeling like I could talk to anyone anywhere about anything.

There is no level of professional rejection that can compare to almost dying.

Stays at the in-laws’ aren’t inherently sexy.

Things can be tough even when surrounded by nice Pottery Barn stuff.

Your wedding day is supposed to be your big day, and yet a lot of engaged couples find that instead of creating an event that will be important to them, they’re dodging through a minefield of modern etiquette traps.

‘The Babadook,’ written and directed by a woman, is a gorgeously told female-focused story of grief, longing, loneliness, and what mourning can become.

If you’ve experienced cheating in a new marriage, the real work is not obsessively combing through all the details of what happened, but rather figuring out if your relationship is worth saving.

Get married wherever you like, make accommodations for the people you love so they can attend, and forget about the people who can’t.

Love is a good thing.

Dealing with wedding stuff is a bit of a double-edged sword – it seems that divorcees are expected to either burn it all on the front lawn, tears silently coursing down their faces, or keep the stuff, shrine-like, concealed somewhere in their homes.

Marriage, or any committed partnership, has become sacred to me, powerful and fragile all at the same time.

Divorce is one of the most destructive, emotionally traumatic experiences a human being can go through, no matter if you’re the instigator or the recipient. It’s hard, and it hurts, and it takes a long time to feel normal again.

In my professional and personal life, when I meet people who feel broken after a divorce, they can usually be divided into two categories: those who truly believe there’s something wrong with them, and those that are using their status as armor.

Not deciding is a decision. People don’t realize that not making a decision is a decision in itself.

When we each focus on being the dominant force in our own universe rather than invading other universes, we all win.

If a show is wickedly, hugely popular, like ‘Mad Men,’ I assume that the masses, in their infinite inferiority to me, don’t know what good TV is and that everyone is just brainwashed.

As my marriage was slowly dissolving into silent meals and awkward nights of avoiding conversation, I started pondering an unmarried future and wondered if I’d ever be able to hack being single again.

You’re not a victim of your divorce. What you decide to do with yourself and your personal life after your marriage ends is your decision, and completely under your control.

Awkward conversations are painful, but they’re way easier than divorce, resentment, and heartbreak.

There’s nothing like listening to the drone of QVC’s always-bubbly pitchwomen, as they try to move loose-fitting tunics with ‘just the right amount of sparkle,’ to soothe you into a healing slumber.

For so long, TV consisted of a limited number of shows a year, and those shows had to appeal to as many people as possible. The joy of TV now is that shows don’t have to be broad anymore – they can be small, weird, and niche.

Experiences don’t make us damaged goods; it’s what we do with those experiences that matters.