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mantic, huh? Then after 15 years of marriage I messed up. Amazing
I am admitting it here, isn t it? I know many of you will accuse me of
adultery, promiscuity, of being a sinner and any number of things
you can conjure up in your mind. That is fine; think what you want.
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Friendship, Marriage, and Other Calamities 157
However, I do not really care what you think of me. I did not do what
I did to you. I did it to Rose Mary. What did I do and why did I do it?
None of your business. It happened. And in the process of doing it, I
stopped taking care of her. I broke the promise I had inscribed in her
wedding ring.
We got past it. Barely. It was horrible. We got a good counselor
and put our marriage back together. It took years. We cried. We
screamed. At times, we hated each other. But we eventually agreed
that we loved each other too much to give up on our relationship so
we stuck it out.
When things were not going well for us, she took off her ring
and put it in a drawer. She just did not believe me any more. I had
broken the trust we had between us. She had discovered the hard
way that I was not going to always take care of her as her wedding
ring promised.
As a result, a major revelation happened for both of us. No one
can take care of you other than yourself. You are responsible for your
happiness. No one else can do it for you. Stop relying on any other
person to take care of you and learn to take care of yourself.
As we proceeded through our counseling sessions it became ap-
parent we had a real chance of salvaging our marriage. Even though
she hated what I did, we loved each other enough to work it out. At
the turning point in our counseling, I took her ring from the drawer
where she had been storing it and took it to the jeweler where I had
the lie removed from the inside of the ring. It would no longer say,
I ll always take care of you. This statement we both had learned
was both unrealistic and impossible. I had it replaced with Love.
Honor. Respect. What more can any person ask from any other per-
son? Marriage, friendship, parenting, family, co-workers, strangers
you name it any time people, countries, organizations, or entities
of any type come together those three words should be the basis of
the relationship.
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158 Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life
I love you enough to want the best for you and to give you my
very best in all our dealings.
I honor you enough to be honest with you, to share my time with
you and to make myself vulnerable to you by sharing the best
of who I am with you.
I respect you enough to hold you in the highest esteem to others,
never degrading who you are or what we have together.
What more could anyone want? What more could anyone
expect?
Forgiveness Is Not Easy. As I have just admitted, I messed up in
my marriage. I did the ultimate no-no in the eyes of many people.
Then in the midst of my wife s hurt she messed up, too. No details
here either. Now we were both hurt. But this was different. I had been
done wrong and I was pissed! There was no way I was going to forgive
her. I had cried and begged for her forgiveness and she gave it to me,
but now I could not bring myself to do the same for her. She had for-
given me of my transgressions so why could I not forgive her? I just
could not. I hated what had happened to me. I hated her for doing it
to me. Yes, I loved her, but I hated what she did. And I could not get
over it. I tried. I read several books on forgiveness. I had even written
and talked about it in some of my other works. It was very easy for me
to tell others about the freedom that comes through forgiveness. And
while I could counsel others on it, I would have nothing to do with
real forgiveness when it came to her. That stuff was for those who had
not been wronged as I had been. Their problems were trivial; mine
was personal! It is amazing what hypocrites we can all become when
it gets personal.
So while my wife and I stayed together and did our best to make it
work, it was not working. I brought up her mistake on a regular basis
in order to make her feel bad. I did my best to hurt her over and over
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Friendship, Marriage, and Other Calamities 159
again by reminding her how wrong she had been and how she had
hurt me. I justified every bad thing I was doing to her by comparing it
to what she had done to me. In summary, the unforgiveness was tear-
ing us apart.
But even more than that, it was tearing me apart. There is no way
to be happy in a relationship when you contain anger, resentment,
and unforgiveness toward the other person.
The problem was, I did not feel she deserved forgiveness. Yes, she
had apologized and I knew she was genuinely sorry. She did every-
thing a human being could be expected to do to let me know she had
messed up and felt horrible for it. But it still was not enough for me. I
wanted more. I wanted her to deserve forgiveness.
Finally while reading a little book called The Four Agreements by
Don Miguel Ruiz, I read a line that said sometimes the offending
party really does not deserve forgiveness. He pointed out you do not
forgive others because they deserve it; you forgive others because you
deserve it.
Bingo! That was it for me. I have always believed I deserved the
very best in life. I have convinced myself of it completely. However,
here I was in a relationship with a woman I genuinely loved and
adored and yet I was miserable all because I could not forgive her.
Plus, I was making her miserable and ruining our life together in the
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