The infamous line from Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal in the 1970 weepy, Love Story, states -- "Love means never having to say you're sorry."
Once again we have sweeping advice about love and romance from Hollywood...advice that is just really terrible and only sustainable if your ill-fated "love story" ends before it really begins. Ali MacGraw's Jenny is dead at 25! Ryan's Oliver grieves for about twenty minutes or until Candice Bergen appears during Oliver's Story.
John Lennon, on the other hand, is quoted as saying, "Love means having to say you're sorry every five minutes."
I happen to agree with John on this one, but it's taken me a very long time to get here.
But I also realize that in order to actually have "loved ones" beside my bed at death, I need cultivate healthy, loving, long-term relationships that can survive life's ups and downs. It is easier to forgive certain people, because we love them. And we know deep down in our souls that they are more than just a catalogue of their past failures, mistakes, and missteps. We have seen the best of them, and so we excuse the worst.
Because we LOVE them.
However, love takes work, energy, and commitment. I have recently begun to see my own faults and missteps in love. For the longest time I never apologized for anything. I didn't know how. I was raised to defend my position to the death. No matter what I did, I would generally try to justify my action (or make excuses), rather than just end the argument with a simple, "I'm sorry."
I used to joke, "I may not always be right, but I'm never wrong." And in a sense, I was correct. We all see things differently and have our own points of view. What is right for us, may be wrong for another. But what good is it to be "right" if you hurt other people, or stomp on their feelings?
We're not perfect. We can be careless sometimes in our thoughts and deeds. But that doesn't make us bad people. Still our thoughts and deeds can alienate others if we aren't careful.
As long as we are alive and as long as we hope to maintain long-term, healthy relationships, we need to be able to humble ourselves to each other and recognize and OWN the ways in which our negative reactions or actions affect our loved ones and us. When we hurt others, we hurt ourselves and our relationships, and therefore, we should not only BE SORRY, we should freely accept responsibility for it.
And we shouldn't wait until we are at death's door before we have the courage to say it. Better yet, maybe like John Lennon, we should get used to saying it every five minutes.
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