The Best Piece of Marriage Advice I Ever Received
I can’t even remember who said it, for some reason, a grocery store comes to mind. But it comes as no surprise to me that an elderly face was the genesis of the best piece of marriage advice I ever received.
Like my father, I have no problem initiating random conversations with random people in random places. These moments usually render some of the soundest, wisest statements I’ve ever heard, and I’ve long believed that God humors himself/herself by operating in the realm of random. On this particular day, I think I was standing in a long line at the local grocery store, when I happened to start a conversation with an old white guy behind me.
I cracked a joke about the food I was carrying in my small basket, saying that I would be cooking for my wife. He laughed and said that was a lesson he wished he’d learned 20 years prior. We began to exchange the pleasantries of how long we had been married, and how much we enjoyed it.
And then he dropped the pearls on me.
“You know, forgiveness is the best thing you can ever give and receive in a marriage. Mistakes are going to happen, but if you believe that your wife does things on purpose, you made the wrong choice in a wife.”
Since then, I’ve always carried the philosophy that people I love never do things on purpose; the moment can sometimes drive them into a poor decision or an emotional reaction, but no one sets out to hurt the people they love. If you remember that, and your spouse can remember that, you’ve probably happened upon the key to true happiness in a marriage.
And you didn’t have to go to the grocery store to find it.
