Relationship Metaphors, Analogies and Similes

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point. That is a basic spelling everyone ought to know.

Love doesn't just sit there like a stone, it has to be remade, like bread, all the time, made new.

The young guy circled the dance floor like a bull around a herd of cows.

Every cross word, sideways look and imagined put-down is felt and remembered like the lash of a cane.

The awkward silence formed a cartoon bubble between the couple — waiting for an ice-breaking joke to be written on it.

Freda's love for her children was like medieval believers who so loved God they start to build a cathedral that could never be finished in their lifetime.

Flattery, like cologne water, should be smelt but not swallowed.

If grass can grow through cement then love can find you at anytime in life.

Love is the crocodile in the river of desire.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world and that his heart is no island, cut off from other islands but a continent that joins them.

Francis Bacon

There are two things a real man likes — danger and play: so he likes women, the most dangerous of playthings.

When we are in love, we get a taste of what it feels like to be deranged.

Jealousy is a dragon that slays love under the pretence of keeping it alive.

The ability to have one's own way, while convincing others that they are having their own way, is a rare thing among men. Among women, it's as common as eyebrows.

For her, if love isn't blind, then it clearly needs an eye test.

Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you never can tell.

Joan Crawford

After she dumped him, Doug resisted the inevitable, flapping back and forth, like a fish on a deck.

Scratch a lover and you find a foe.

It's the same in love as war: the fortress that parleys is half taken.

All cruel people promote themselves as paragons of frankness, but in human relations, kindness and diplomacy are worth a thousand blunt truths.

He had carefully cased her photographs like holy relics preserved for future pilgrims.

She examined him as if he was a gallery portrait; hunting for flaws in the brush strokes.

A relationship is like a garden: when we cultivated gardens, two things are necessary — nutrients must be added and weeds must be picked.

Glances are the heavy artillery of the flirt; everything is conveyed in a look, however, the look can always be denied, and never quoted word for word.

The greatest romantics are those who have no one to kiss.

Family ties are like landscapes — a thousand acres per human heart; they erode but endure all weathers.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size.

Virginia Woolf

Jessie was hungry for love — not knowing where her next male was coming from.

He called it honesty but it felt like a mallet hitting a chisel into my heart.

All love with no friendship at its base, is like a mansion built upon sand.

Romantic love is a mental illness, but a pleasurable one. It is a drug that distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It is impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

These are recycled gaucheries resurrected from earlier decades like middle-aged divorcees returning to the dating game.

Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million-dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.

No father or mother think their own children ugly, and this self-deceit is stronger for the offspring of the mind.

Mother is the central switchboard of the family.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

Oscar Wilde

As welcome as finding out your mother-in-law has a twin sister.

By the end of our 'discussion' she was Muhammad Ali moving off the ropes and I was George Foreman in the eighth round — all the punches thrown and about to receive a knockout blow.

People’s admiration is fishy enough to fill the North Sea.

Love is more pleasant than marriage for the same reason that novels are more amusing than history.

Love is the child of illusion and parent of disillusion.

Miguel De Unamuno

To the family, that dear octopus from whose tentacles we never quite escape, nor in our inmost hearts ever wish to.

She understood, as women often do more than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.

It's been said that a pretty face is passport. It's not. It's a visa that runs out fast.

The divorce court papers left me feeling like a peach tossed off the top of Blackpool Tower.

Be courteous to all, but intimate with a few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

George Washington

He's harder to handle than plutonium.

When women kiss, it always reminds me of prizefighters shaking hands.

The women bitched selectively like queen bees who only ever use their stingers on other queen bees.

As final and gentle as returned love letters.

To fall in love is to create a religion with a fallible god.

No woman is all sweetness; even the rose has thorns.

When she carried a grudge: she planted it, nursed it, fostered it, watered it and watched it grow the size of a sequoia.

Don't smother each other. No one can grow in shade.

A woman is like your shadow — follow her, she flies: fly from her, she follows.

Women are like tricks by sleight of hand, which to admire, we should not understand.

A man has every season, while a woman has only spring.

Briony examined her date's motives with the stethoscope of her imagination.

A child, like your stomach, doesn't need all you can afford to give it.

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.

She constructed a detailed tale of infidelity out of a careless remark, like those palaeontologists who can map out an enormous dinosaur skeleton from a single fossilised tooth.

Parents teach in the toughest school in the world — The School For Making People. You are the board of governors, the headmaster, the classroom teacher and the janitor.

I never saw the need to marry. I have three pets at home that serve the same purpose as a husband: a dog that growls in the morning; a parrot that swears in the afternoon; and a cat that comes home late in the night.

She confided to each one that they were her only true friend, that way simultaneously playing ten games of chess.

All his life he poured vinegar on me; I am well pickled. How can I now be honey?

Love is not blind but visionary, seeing something more real and deeper in the loved one.

Love is like war: easy to start and hard to stop.

His laughter burst over her like being showered with warm water.

Absence lessens the minor passions and increases the great ones, as the wind douses a candle and kindles a fire.