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There Can Be No Unity Without Truth
It’s tempting, because it’s easier, to resolve a fight with calls for coming together. But a desire for healing is not enough.
To stay together over the long haul, couples must learn how to fight. How to argue, how to air grievances, how to repair and come back together.
The first step is to stop and listen to the other person — and have them explain their perspective. What just happened, in their eyes. Literally, what did they hear, what did they do, what did their partner say, what did their partner do.
Then the other person speaks.
And it’s surprising to hear the same event from two different perspectives. What you realize, ideally, is that you agree fairly quickly on what happened — but vary widely on how you and your partner felt about them, or how they made you each of you feel and how you both internalized them.
And therein lies the lesson. There is a difference between what happened, the truth — and how you feel or perceive it.
Your feelings are yours, authentic simply by being. But there can be no repair, there can be no coming together, without a shared and mutual understanding of what happened.
It takes an agreed upon truth in order to keep going together.
