Forgiveness

Some people have expressed concern over my last post. Just to clarify, Steven and I (and Olivia, too) are good. My parents are good, his parents are good—we’re good. My sadness was for another family that we love, that is breaking apart.

I’ve dealt with divorce before—not in my immediate family, but with aunts and uncles, cousins, and friends. It’s horrible. In the past, though, it always seemed that the person I was closest to wasn’t as culpable a party in the divorce. Yes, there are always two sides to every story, and you never know the whole story, blah blah—but take, for example, my aunt Edith,* whose husband decided after two kids that he was gay. Or my extended family member Frank,* whose wife left him with 4 kids because she decided she didn’t love him after all. Or my friend Hyacinth,* whose husband developed an uncontrollable addiction to pornography. Yes, it was sad that their family was breaking up, but it was easy for me to just blame everything on Edith’s and Frank’s and Hyacinth’s spouses, since I knew I would never see them again, and I didn’t care too much for them, anyway. Being able to simply dismiss the opposing party and blame the divorce on them helped me to compartmentalize my feelings quite nicely.

With this new situation, however, I can’t do that. In this case, probably more than any of the others, one person is pretty indisputably more responsible than the other, and has done things that I find repulsive. Unfortunately, though, my ties to him are stronger than to his wronged wife—meaning that, while I feel defensive of her, I have a greater duty to be loyal to him.

For days, I seethed about this. I hurt for the wife. I hurt for their kids. I hurt for myself. I was indescribably angry at him. I couldn’t believe that he was doing this. I found his actions absolutely unjustifiable. I was angry and apprehensive in advance for when I knew I would see him again. I thought up angry things to say to him, angry ways to treat him. I justified my feelings by saying that what he had done was indisputably wrong, by anyone’s standards.

One night, while practicing angry snubs while I was getting ready for bed, the thought came to me: What is it going to take for you to forgive him?

I’m not going to write here all that happened after that. It would take paragraphs of things that I don’t have the ability to adequately describe, and things that are probably too personal to post anyway. But what I came to realize—not for the first time, probably—is that forgiving someone is not the same thing as condoning their actions. And loving someone does not mean rejecting the people they’ve hurt. And it’s possible to love people who are willfully imperfect.