Two Day Magazine

...The Healing Power of "I'm Sorry"

Going to bed angry. Feeling exasperated and disgusted with your partner. Building resentment towards your lover. These are all feelings that most of us have been guilty of  harboring at one point or another towards our lover. The fight may have started small, but our reaction grew big, emotional, and irrational. Suddenly, that little argument over something trivial explodes into something it never was really about. All of your pent up frustrations seem to tumble out and you find yourself in a huge fight with the last person you would want to fight with. Your love.

So, now what? It is amazing to me how we, as a society, condone and promote unhealthy relationships. Whether it’s the beer commercial showcasing the annoyed girlfriend and the lunkhead boyfriend, to the prime time television show demonstrating the dysfunction of a marriage, or the reality show promoting unhealthy and unrealistic romances, we are bombarded with images of relationship abnormalities every day. And so, it becomes the norm in our own lives. We start to think that if we aren’t fighting with our partners, or if we aren’t creating drama in our love lives, then we must not really be doing it right. Passion creates this chaos, right? So, if we live a placid, peaceful existence with our partners, then we must not really like them. Or so the thinking goes.

Well, think again. It is not healthy or functional to always be in a no-win situation. One partner upsets the other. So, the other retaliates, and before you know it, you are in an all-out battle-of-the-resentments. You don’t even remember what you are fighting about, you just know that you want to win and you want to hurt the other person. It becomes a battle of wills. Who can harbor the anger the longest? Who will “cave” first?

In an attempt to change the way people look at arguing with their partner, I say, who cares who started it? Who cares who’s right? At some point, you have to get to the place where you remember what made you fall in love. What made you want to be with this person, nurture this person, accept this person. At some point, you have to let it go. And, the first step to letting go and moving forward in peace is to say, “I’m sorry.”

Put the ego aside for a moment and just think of how good it feels when someone you love apologizes to you. How the ice around your heart begins to slowly melt and you start to feel closer to where you were before the fighting began. Now, think of what it would do to the relationship if both people apologized (even if one didn’t really cause the fight.)

When you go up to your lover after an argument, and you take their hand and say, “I am so sorry that we fought. There has to be a better way to communicate so that we don’t start attacking each other. I love you and I don’t want to fight with you. I want us to communicate and grow closer, not further apart.”

You may be surprised how in doing this very mature, very honest expression of love will make your lover also reevaluate why they were upset in the first place. Fights are going to happen. No one is saying that they won’t or that it isn’t good to clear the air once in a while. But, it’s how you react post-fight that will really determine the strength of your union and the strength of your love for one another. Words can hurt, but “I’m sorry” always heals. In the end, it’s all about the love!