Let It Go

 Hello Again,  

I usually don’t like to quote from Facebook, much less recommend it, but today I’m going to do both.  

I posted the following on my own FB site and was surprised at the comments that came back. It seems the message here really hits the nail on the head.

What do you think?

"A Harvard Study of 724 couples Who Made It Past 30 Years Revealed Something Surprising:

“It wasn’t love, s*x, or kids that kept them together. It was the ability to tolerate the same things in each other – over and over again.

The couples who divorced thought, “This habit drives me crazy, but I can fix it.’

The ones who stayed? ‘This is who they are. They’re not changing.’

Long marriages rarely resolve every conflict. That’s a myth.

 Couples who lasted 30+ years didn’t dig into every hurt feeling.

They learned to let go.

Not suppress – release.

‘You forgot again,’ ‘You said the wrong thing again’ – short-term couples turn that into a fight. Long-term couples let it slide.

Because they chose peace over being right.

And the biggest truth? Almost every long-term marriage had a moment where they were ready to call it quits. Almost all of them. 

But they didn’t.

Not because they couldn’t – but because they gave it more time. 

Most common answer: ‘I decided to do nothing. And six months later, things shifted.’

Turns out, most marriage crises die off – if you just stop feeding them.

The real skill of lasting couples? Quick emotional recovery. It’s not about never fighting. It’s about bouncing back fast.

He snapped two hours ago – now he’s hugging her. No pride. No ‘you go first.’

In marriages that last, the winner isn’t the one who’s right – it’s the one who comes back first.

The strongest couples weren’t bonded by ‘we have everything in common.’

They were bonded by ‘we face the world together.’ A shared struggle: poverty, toxic relatives, building a business, even a shared hatred for the system. Anything that puts you on the same team – us vs. the world – builds the bond.

Couples without external pressure? More likely to crack from the inside.”

(Now it’s me talking again). So many have texted me to agree with what was said. This is one comment I sent back to someone:

“Yeah so true. The night Trevor died, the social worker caught up with us in the hall as we were leaving the hospital and said, quite glibly, I thought, ‘You need to know that 4 out of 5 people who lose a child will divorce within the year’.”

Tony and I were dumbfounded. What else could she have said to make us feel worse?  And then we got mad. We probably made it thru that first year just to spite her, but I confess that we got a glimpse of what she was talking about. 

During that first year, we were both guilty of saying, “I’m sorry you’re having a bad time, but right now I’m just trying to survive. I can’t help you.”

When the year was over, we looked back and decided to give it another year for good measure! “Yeah, he’s being weird, but that’s just the grief talking. I’ll let it slide.” 

It turns out that people in general and us in particular grieve in radically different ways. I love to look at pictures of Trevor and smell the jacket he used to wear all the time. 

When I do that, Tony leaves the room.

Tony made an obsession of donating blood platelets (It takes ten donors to make enough for one dose). He even got an award from the hospital for top donor of the year.

I, on the other hand, couldn’t go near a donation centre as it brought back too many bad memories.  Even today antiseptic smell starts to bring back the horror. 

It took a long time, and even today we can laugh about our “weirdness”. But we’ve reached a place I thought we never would, a place where we don’t try to “fix” each other’s idiosyncrasies but just accept them and move on. We may have even come to love the little quirks.  

Still moving along after 56 years …

And so it goes. Thanks for letting me share.

Marsha