the best advice(s) I ever got about love

I was thinking earlier today about some of the love advice I've ever received...usually from women. Here's some of the best:

"Don't sulk. Women consider it a sign of emotional retardation."

"Infidelity is infidelity, gay or straight."

"Hold her to your standards, and expect to be held to hers."

"If she cheated on him, she'll cheat on you."

"A woman doesn't want to talk about herself, she wants to hear you talk about you, first. That way, she feels safe and trusted and warm."

"One deception can be a misundertanding. Two is a habit. Run."

"Find someone who can live in your world, and you in their's."

"A woman sees in your work everything she's everything she's ever wanted from life, and if you don't live up to every inch the fairy tale, they feel betrayed. It doesn't matter if you're better than everyone else, you're not better than the fantasy."

"A woman wants to know your secrets before she'll tell you hers."

"You're damned to spend your life with projects instead of paramours, trying to make godesses out of the debris of other people's follies. It's a noble endeavor, but lonely. In the end, they'll all hate you worse than the people who broke them, for having given them hope."

"Give a girl everything and she'll take it and leave. Give a woman everything and she'll give you back even more than you gave."

"I don't know if there is any woman out there capable of loving you as you love them, but it's interesting reading about the search."

"Forgive her and move on. Forgive yourself, first."

"Never expect forgiveness, even if you did nothing wrong."

"When she leaves, give her a shirt of yours, touched with your cologne, as a gift. If she refuses it, she's hiding a husband or a lover. If she takes it, she'll use it as a night shirt, to remember how it felt in your arms, every night."

"Don't go looking for love. It's already looking for you, and you might miss it when it comes to call."

"People will believe what they want to believe, what benefits them to believe. The truth is irrelevent to an agenda."

Some of the people who gave me these pearls are writers, poets, artists. Some are friends. Some are former lovers, some are those who wish they had been. But there is an essence of truth in all of them. Of course, the next time the chemistry is right, I'll forget every word of all of them, but for now I am open and pondering.

Some of this advice is decades old, some of it only days...I'd tell you the sexual advice I've received, but then you'd all be as good as me in bed (I vaguely remember sex...something about it...let me think....)