Finding Forgiveness By Embracing Imperfection

My husband taught me how to apologize, he also taught me to forgive.

When you go through life choosing toxic people, you get hurt. You live your life demanding apologies.

But what happens when you’re with someone you love, someone good and kind? Life still demands the occasional apology, but what about forgiveness?

I recently wrote a piece detailing how apologizing was always difficult for me. But when Keth Hoffman wrote in the responses: “My biggest issue is forgiving when my husband apologizes to me. I have a hard time letting go sometimes. Do you have any tips on that? I know I should, but I often feel like I want to keep holding onto the hurt and punish him with it.” I realized that forgiveness was something I’d also grappled with.

In long term relationships, apologies are often necessary, and forgiveness can be a complicated terrain to navigate.

Moving past a fight you have with your partner about something small, can feel more challenging than working through something significant that happened in the past.

The big picture stuff you’ve worked so hard to get over is done. You can choose to stay away from those people so they won’t re-offend. But what about the person who can’t help but hurt you now and again out of sheer proximity?

You’re going to have more fights with your significant other simply because you’re together more, it’s a numbers game, just like anything else.

Like you, they’re trying, unsuccessfully at times, not to step on toes or offend.

But your partner isn’t an archetype or ideal. They aren’t perfect, no matter how much you want to believe they are.

They’re also just a flawed, slightly broken person trying to share a home day after day with someone else.

So how do you learn to forgive in quantity as well as quality?

First, I must preface this with the fact that my husband and I both actively work on our marriage. When we have a problem, we root it out and bring it into the light so we can solve it. We’re both committed to loving each other, sharing the load, and making life easier for each other.

When you’re with someone who loves you and is committed to making a life worth sharing, forgiveness is an essential tool.

Here is a story about forgiveness that you may find useful.

Very early in our marriage, my husband and I were fighting a lot. Babies put unimaginable stress on marriages, that nobody tells you about. We had a new baby and multiple other stressors bearing down on us. One day we had yet another huge fight. Regrettable things were said and done, and it was at that point, our relationship could have easily fallen apart.

Since we both worked about an hour and a half away from our home, sometimes my husband would pick me up at the end of the subway line, and we’d drive home together. We called it a car date.

Driving home a few days after a particularly bad fight, I was still holding a grudge when we got talking, and I told him I didn’t know if I could forgive him.

I won’t describe the fight, but it boiled down to the fact that we have different fighting styles and I wasn’t used to his. I’ve since learned that his bark is worse than his bite, but when we first got together, I wasn’t used to his bark.

He thought for a moment, and then he said something that changed my life and gave me a new perspective.

He reminded me that I always say how much I love the strong, fierce part of him, and that’s true, it’s something about him I do love, it makes me feel safe. He asked me if I’d have fallen in love with him if he didn’t have that aspect of himself, and I knew I wouldn’t have.

So the question became, could I love all of him, even when that thing about him sometimes doesn’t present the way I want it to?

Could I love the whole of him, not just the parts that I like?

Could I love him for who he is, even the flawed parts? Could I forgive him for not living up to an ideal? For being human?

I’d lived so long, wrapped in the pain and triggers of my own experience that it never occurred to me that my emotional protections didn’t allow for forgiveness. My defenses held him to an impossible standard and didn’t let him be human.

I’d expected only to have the good and never have to take the bad and now I was demanding from him something quite impossible.

The truth ignited a boiling shame that filled my entire body with heat. With all of the baggage and emotional garbage I’d brought into our relationship, I realized he’d never once strayed from loving or forgiving me.

When I broke down in triggered sobs, he held me. The times I yelled at him when I was really screaming at my father, he didn’t run. When my family treated him like garbage, he was generous and kind to them. Their efforts didn’t dissuade him from fully committing to me, standing firm in the face of injustice, his loyalty and love never wavered. Through all of this and more, he continued to stand by me.

He loved me through layer after layer of my own inadequacies. Through it all, he continually forgave me, and here I was, unable to forgive him for a few rash words spoken in the heat of a stupid fight over something trivial. It was a lesson in humility, and something I desperately needed to ponder.

I was expecting him to be perfect. I was punishing him for not being able to fully control the aspect of his personality I loved the most. His fierceness. I wanted to have it both ways.

That realization shook me to the core and made me take a good hard look at myself. I’d never loved anyone long enough or deep enough to have to explore forgiveness in any real way.

It also taught me that if I wanted to be heard, I had to speak up. I had to learn to fight for myself; to not be a victim. I’ve since learned to speak my mind. When someone loves you, you’re safe to practice assertiveness.

That was my responsibility, though, not his.

His fierceness hasn’t beaten me down, it’s invited me to become a worthy opponent. It’s lifted me and challenged me, and after many years, I am a contender.

But that’s life.

If you’re going to be with someone, you have to take the bad with the good. You have to learn to work with all aspects of the other person to make things better. You can’t expect someone else to erase everything about themself that’s going to cause friction.

Forgiveness creates the breathing space you need to keep working and making things better. You can’t build a relationship on a grudge.

Because the thing about being human is that nobody is perfect. I can’t even count the ways I know I’ve hurt my husband. I can think back to things I’ve said and done, and I know I’m in the wrong.

I think about things I’ve said and done with my daughter, and I am filled with remorse.

It is almost impossible not to hurt people you love. If you live with someone long enough, you will do it, and it is unrealistic to think that they won’t do it to you.

It’s in that spirit, you need to evaluate your partner’s behavior. Especially if your relationship is in a time of stress. Think about the 99% of the time when they stand beside you and hold you up and then compare that to whatever you are fighting about and ask yourself if it’s really that important. Can you forgive and carry on loving that person in that light.

And if you can’t let something go and forgive, then you need to learn to talk about the things that bother you.

That’s another part of forgiveness, sometimes it has to be an active process.

If there is something I can’t get past, I make sure to talk to my husband about it. Even if I dread the conversation or know it’s going to get some push back. Sometimes you have to be committed to working past anger and defensiveness. If you can’t get to forgiveness without going through a minefield, you need to ask yourself if your relationship is worth the struggle. For me, the answer is always yes.

Learning to actively forgive and problem solve has opened the door for me to really retroactively forgive many people in my life who I felt wronged me. It’s opened my mind to what the nature of forgiveness really is and makes me a much more understanding person.

This is also why we don’t hide our fights from our daughter. There is so much that nobody tells you about marriage. So much that our parents hide from us thinking they’re doing us a favor.

I want my daughter to see us fight, to hear the conflict, to see us get mad at each other, and fight it out. I want her to know that it is okay for a wife to stand up to her husband and that two people who are equals in a relationship sometimes have big arguments.

I want her to hear us fight, apologize, work it out and ultimately forgive each other because that is the essence of a relationship. Those are the things you do when you are in it for the long haul, and to pretend any different would be giving her a false sense of what it means to stay together and work on keeping things healthy.

Relationships aren’t beautiful and static, like a watercolor of a perfect day. A relationship is fluid, always moving and changing like the ocean. Forgiveness is part of that fluidity.

Forgiving your partner can be hard when you live together with the stresses and pressures of everyday life. Still, when you love 99% of that person, you owe it to them to forgive the 1% that isn’t ideal.

When you start from a place of acceptance, forgiveness comes easier.

For some of us, it doesn’t come naturally, but it is something that can be learned and worked on like anything else.

Thanks for reading!

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