Forgiveness isn’t a feeling.
It’s an act of consciousness, a decision to stop letting pain drive the story—your story.
The moment that you realize that is the moment forgiveness actually begins.
If you’ve been consuming all the right content—even mine—if you’ve been watching all the videos, I want to challenge you today.
Don’t watch another video until you have created, until you have done something.
Until you have created one small act of love or courage in your marriage.
Because whether we like it or not, that’s where change starts.
Everyone says compromise is the key to a good marriage, but that’s not always true.
In fact, sometimes compromise makes things worse.
Like the story from Never Split the Difference.
She wants him to wear black shoes.
He wants to wear brown.
They do a compromise.
He walks out with one shoe black and one shoe brown.
Nobody wins.
Everyone ends up looking ridiculous.
And that’s what happens when your spouse brings you pain and you aim for compromise instead of understanding.
Because when somebody is hurting, the goal isn’t to meet them halfway.
It’s to meet them where they are.
And that’s why this common belief doesn’t work.
If you’re a husband that says, “Well, I don’t want to start this conversation because I don’t know if it’s going to go well,” right?
Like, “I’ve tried so many other times, and it backfires every time,” right?
Here’s what I want you to remember.
Even if it backfires this time, guess what?
You’re going to know one more way, or one more timing, one more proof—one more thing that you learned in terms of when it’s actually working.
And you can add that to your list.
If you want to speed up the process for yourself, go check out this video.
I lay them all out—plain as day, easy to follow.
Go get it done faster.
You can do that tonight.
Ten minutes.
Save yourself a whole lot of headaches and a whole lot of frustration in the process.
Either way, whether you go or don’t watch it, stop thinking about this as something that you failed at.
Think of it as, “Here’s what I learned. Here’s what I’m taking away from this.”
And it’s going to inform the way that I treat my wife going forward.
It’s going to benefit the both of us in the end.
You’re welcome.
Has this ever happened to you?
You don’t feel like doing the thing, but you go and do it anyway.
I just went for a walk—9:00 p.m., cold, raining—as I realized once I got out of the house.
And honestly, I didn’t want to go, but I told myself, “I’m just going to do my minimum 30 minutes.”
But as I kept walking for 30 minutes, I got to 40.
Then I got to 45.
Then I got all the way to my four miles, and I finished that in a little over an hour.
Because once you start, there’s something that just changes.
Here’s the thing.
The same thing happens in a marriage.
You may not feel like talking to your spouse.
You may not feel like forgiving.
And you may not feel like you want to try one more time.
But if you just start—even a few minutes of effort—that motion turns into momentum.
And before you know it, you’ve covered a lot more ground than you thought possible.
One of the most honest and most brilliant declarations of intention that I heard a husband share with me the other day came during a conversation I had with someone.
He admitted that, going forward, now that it was fall, he wanted to work on his marriage because he was no longer going to be fully distracted by the tiny little white balls going into tiny little holes on a perfectly manicured lawn.
Golf season was out.
And so he said, “I’m going to be able to do more, show up more, be less distracted.”
Is that you?
Are you being distracted by something like that—something that doesn’t allow you to go the distance, something that’s getting in the way?
Are you one of those people who has the same thing going on, where something is getting in your way of giving your wife or your husband what they need and what they’ve been asking for?
Sit with that for a minute.
Then go find them and tell them what you’ve come up with.
