Constructive Living, Session 8: Love Is Sustained Through Forgiveness
A key to a successful marriage is to avoid making deals.
From the beginning of our relationship, my wife and I have been exceptionally supportive of one another. We jokingly call it our platinum plan. Learning to love was the shared purpose we brought to our marriage.
A key to a successful marriage is to avoid making deals. We never negotiate the division of the labor; both of us use our comparative advantages each day and give 100%. We talk about our needs and don’t harbor resentments about how much each of us contributes. I have examples, but our particular situation is probably irrelevant to yours.
Throughout our sessions, Mindset Shifts U participants have made many rich observations. As I was writing this session, Neal added this relevant wisdom to Session 6:
We often only show gratitude when someone is doing us a favor, which can become reflexive and dismissed with a quick “thank you”. We rarely take the time to think about and appreciate the things in our life that we have come to expect to run orderly, and therefore evades our consciousness until they “fail” and our focus turns to, and can obsess on, what we perceive as “their failure”.
Of course, Neal is writing about more than just relationships. But a “their failure” way of viewing the world will quickly shrink our lives and strain relationships.
In the same Session 6 thread, Jennifer wisely observed that the goodness we’re not “paying attention to moves into the murky shadows. These things become dim and formless. We are more likely to focus on the hurt we experience in a given moment instead of all the blessings simultaneously revealing themselves.” We lose, Jennifer adds, “all that is good and beautiful in others and the world.”
Our unforgiving thoughts are purposeful. They are intended to obscure reality and block anything from our awareness that does not validate our distortions.