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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.

Carolyn Hax

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Carolyn Hax
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: December 5
Columnist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Carolyn Hanley Hax
Perceive
Conscience
Certainly
Circumstances
Best
Make
Like
Actively
People
Failures

More quotes by Carolyn Hax

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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.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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People who make babies surrender their right to behave like them.
Carolyn Hax
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Moving is hard. Staying is easy. Logistically speaking, at least. And this is true whether you're doing or undoing something.
Carolyn Hax
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The sudden death of a partner while expecting a child is so universally understood as awful that I don't think anyone with any other weight to carry is going to get to same kind of sympathy - except perhaps people who lose a child.
Carolyn Hax
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A lot of support gets withheld out of fear of awkwardness and misspeaking.
Carolyn Hax
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You need to make plans for your future, so plan your own future.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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There's nothing like a good family when you're really up a tree.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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When you are stuck in a group of people who merely trade turns at talking about themselves instead of actually conversing, it could be a matter of their not really knowing how to converse as opposed to being too small-minded or excessively Facebooked.
Carolyn Hax
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Separating is not divorcing. Please keep that in mind. It is, instead, the second step in seeing if there's a better way to manage your family.
Carolyn Hax
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You don't want to be with someone who is already not getting from you what he needs emotionally.
Carolyn Hax
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Separation is where you see if it works better with the adults in two different homes.
Carolyn Hax
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First group impressions can mask a lot of individual variations in the members.
Carolyn Hax
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Once given, a gift is yours to use, store or dispose of as you see fit.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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Sometimes the pain outweighs the good things.
Carolyn Hax