Forgive for love: Replacing resentment with forgiveness
In this, the second of a four part series, Fred Luskin shares the importance of forgiveness in maintaining a loving relationship.
Practicing forgiveness is the simple understanding that love is what unfolds when we stop resenting the person we chose to live with. Simply put, as forgiveness replaces resentment, happiness grows in your intimate relationship. The less resentment you hold towards your partner the more love you will experience. Whether you resent them for leaving the toilet seat up or for snoring each evening, the cost in love and peace is the same. Whether you resent them for something they did yesterday or five years ago, the problems it causes you are the same. The cost is always a diminished love in your heart and a greater hurt in theirs. It is a huge cost we pay when we do not know how to forgive.
The attempt to make a strong romantic partnership is an experiment in one unique kind of love. And, the divorce statistics suggest it is difficult to do. Two people with different histories and painful experiences in their past commit to help each other and love each other in a sexually exclusive manner. Each couple is made up of two people from different cultures—whether it’s family culture, ethnic, religious, or geographic. One of the things that makes getting along so difficult is because of our differing backgrounds, our ideas of what makes sense are often wrong.
Too many of us come from homes where our parents did a poor job of getting along. They quarreled often or quarreled badly. They cheated on each other or committed other destructive acts. They might have been defensive or withdrawn with each other. We watched how they acted and when we were young their behavior seemed normal. We watched how they behaved and now a generation later we find ourselves acting in the same way. Too often it did not work for them and now it does not work for us. Or, another problem many of us had was to figure out how to deal with how our parents treated us. We created habits to deal with our parents that as we grow up are either problematic or unnecessary.
In either case, most of us enter into adult relationships with unskillful patterns we got from home and then wonder why we have problems with our lovers. While we are doing that, our partner is wondering the same thing about us. This happens with people who like each other and are relatively intact. It is much worse with people who have been abused or brutalized. Whatever the upbringing, when we become partners an important step is to understand how, even in a good relationship, we each have plenty to forgive in both ourselves and our partner.
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