“We had sex for the first time after Genie had been at L’Abri a week or two.”
Read More“If we cared about providing real choices, single motherhood as it presently stands in America would not lead (as all studies show) to risking impoverishment.”
Read More“The dirty little secret evangelicals and the religion of greed’s high priests in corporate America share is this: both of these brutal fundamentalist religions ask more of women than of anyone else.”
Read More“…the fake family-values right wing I was part of is actively and practically pro-abortion while also trying to prohibit access. That’s because the right wing has created a world in which actually having a child is discouraged at every turn. Again, this is misogyny, not pro-family, let alone pro-life.”
Read More“Covid aside, the United States is currently the only industrialized country with no guarantee of paid parental leave, for fathers or mothers, and no state-funded childcare.”
Read More“Somewhat prophetically, the pre-Covid pandemic studies on fatherhood seemed to predict the results of a 2020 midpandemic study, which showed that 45 percent of American fathers were spending more time on childcare than they did before the pandemic—and liking it.”
Read More“As the sociologist Jamie K. McCallum writes in ‘Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream’, Americans work too long and too hard, while others lack consistency in their hours and schedules.”
Read More“How to turn America into a pro-family, pro-love, and prorelationships country that also has room for other people who do not have or want kids? I think that we have a good practical model for the revolution I’m calling for here, dedicated to embracing love above career, connection ahead of money, and community before greed: the total acceptance, other-oriented sexuality, and deep love modeled in the LGBTQ and nonbinary communities.”
Read More“Having children is more about love than any kind of ‘traditional’ pair-bonding. If you can have a successful pair-bond, great. But if you take another path such as single motherhood, that’s fine too.“
Read MoreRead More“In a society that prizes individual achievement above most other things, ambition is often framed as an unambiguous virtue, akin to hard work or tenacity.”
“Even after my flight from (and repentance of) my involvement in far-right politics, my inglorious privileged White male legacy still shapes what I have experienced and what I have not experienced—i.e., what Black men undergo in our country’s criminal justice system daily, up to and including routinely being harassed and even murdered by White police officers.”
Read More“As biologist and political activist Ilyse Hogue illustrates in her book The Lie That Binds…”
Read More“Let’s fast-forward to some conclusions you might expect to find as a recap near the end of a book. I’m putting this list here because I want to lay my cards on the table upfront regarding the social, political, spiritual, and lifestyle changes I hope this book will help bring about.”
Read More“Let’s fast-forward to some conclusions you might expect to find as a recap near the end of a book. I’m putting this list here because I want to lay my cards on the table upfront regarding the social, political, spiritual, and lifestyle changes I hope this book will help bring about.”
Read More“The only winners have been corporations’ shareholders and billionaires. Period. So the rest of this book is about why and how we can change this reality and claw our lives back from our wealthy masters. It is a how-to on giving love the best chance to win and defeat greed. It is a how to on forging good personal and romantic relationships that can last, and how to raise happy fulfilled children, in spite of what we face in our love-less and brutalized consumerist culture.”
Read More“As you will read in the chapters to follow, I believe that evolution is on the side of love. So I am hopeful love can win. I’m hopeful because of my own lifetime experiences prove that even damaged goods like me can be at least partially healed and changed. I’m hopeful love can win because a series of national racial crises exposed our failings, and people who had previously stood on the sidelines stepped up to fight for fairness. I’m hopeful love can win because the desire for change in 2020 and in 2021 had a power that was made manifest as crowds flooded through American cities and small towns to protest the murder of George Floyd.
Read More“Why does Genie’s and my marriage work? We’re sometimes asked this question by people we meet who know we’ve been together fifty-one years and are (as they put it) “still happy.” Here are a few reasons (other than Genie serendipitously kicking my ass as I’ll describe later): We were lucky that we failed with our projects enough times to never become wealthy."
Read More“This book is for every parent fighting for more time with their children; every grandparent who cares about their grandchildren; anyone thinking about having children; gay, straight, and nonbinary people trying to balance career and family; high school and college students trying to figure out relationship strategies; anyone in love who wants a “how-to” on how to stay in love; feminists looking for an unlikely male ally; and legislators looking for support and ideas related to crafting family-friendly legislation.”
Read More“As we shall see, we evolved to love first and strive second. That’s because (as I’ll go into in more detail in Chapter 2) as we evolved, human babies’ brains got so big that they couldn’t complete their growth in utero. Unlike most other mammals, we humans had to birth babies with huge heads and still survive. Human babies’ skulls remained flexible in order not to kill their mothers, but that wasn’t enough.”
Read More“I’ve learned the hard way that a happy life is not about career success. It’s about using the time we have to experience the simple things that bring us joy. But we all have a problem: our society is designed to deny this joy. We have another problem, at least I do: I’ve made such big mistakes they haunt me. Everything I do is mostly second best compared to my ideal.”
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