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

Carolyn Hax

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Carolyn Hax
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: December 5
Columnist
Journalist
Writer
Bridgeport
Connecticut
Carolyn Hanley Hax
Deals
Lives
Difficult
Comes
Make
People

More quotes by Carolyn Hax

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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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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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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.
Carolyn Hax
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Sometimes the pain outweighs the good things.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
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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It's okay to forgive yourself immediately and for good.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
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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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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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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People who make babies surrender their right to behave like them.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
Carolyn Hax
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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.
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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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.
Carolyn Hax