How do I move forward in life? I worked with a fighter pilot once, and he was telling me that in training, they obviously talk about “getting shot down” scenarios. They’re taught that the faster you can accept that you’ve been shot down and what happens next, every second counts. He’s like, as you’re going down in that parachute, they’re looking for you, and if in your mind, you go, “Well, did I do this wrong? If I’d done that differently,” the past is irrelevant.
You’ve got to cut the faster you can cut the past off and start looking forward. Every second increases your chance of survival. I think marriage is a very good analogy for this. We can look at the past, and I always ask people when I start to work with them, did anybody beat anybody? Did anybody cheat on anybody? Are there any serious structural issues within the marriage? No? Okay, well, can we start from a point of view of, “If I’ve hurt you, I’m sorry, and if you’ve hurt me, I forgive you. Can we just say that to each other?” Because that’s like you’re coming down in a parachute right now, and every minute that passes by, your marriage is in perilous danger.
If we’ve got to go back into that aircraft and decide, “Should we have pressed this button? Should we have done that? Should…” It’s like, this is not helpful. Can we just get to a point of, “If I’ve hurt you, I’m sorry, and if you’ve hurt me, I forgive you,” and move forward and start to put a plan in place for how we’re going to resurrect this marriage, how we’re going to recover this marriage?
Unless there are serious structural issues from the past, can we just move forward and start to build from a solid foundation? I think that’s really important. We can spend a lot of time in the past, and couples will start talking to each other, it’s like, “Well, when it happened, you had a fight. Every time you bring it up, we have a fight.” What is the issue here? Does it…and a lot of times, I’m like, neither one of you even remembers or knows what happened.
This happened 20 years ago. All you have remaining that the facts have left you maybe a half of one percent of the facts remain, and the rest is the story that you’ve been telling yourself for 20 years about what happened. Can we ditch the story? Can we agree to ditch the story because we don’t know what happened 20 years ago anymore?
We simply don’t know. Right, there’s no way to get into the truth, so sometimes you have to release it, right? Just release it and let it go and move on with what you have. Absolutely. Do you want to be right, or do you want to be married Yeah?