Marriage Advice My Father Never Said Aloud
A note to young leaders.
Lessons from my father.
Dad rarely gave me marriage advice, not directly at least. But over the decades, I gleaned these three rules from him:
- A good marriage is the union of two great forgivers.
- Love keeps no record of wrongs.
- If ever one of you starts yelling, the other must immediately fall silent.
No talk here of love languages, emotional needs or date nights. Dad was concerned with three older, less glamorous virtues: forgiveness, forgetfulness and restraint.
Flowers and grand gestures make for better stories than small amnesties. They’re also cheaper. A grand gesture costs an hour of charm; small amnesties a lifetime of pride.
Forgiveness alone, though, is not enough. Some people forgive with the precision of accountants. They waive the debt but keep the ledger. An argument about the dishwasher in 2026 suddenly involves something said at a dinner party in 2009. Forgiveness without forgetfulness is merely a suspended sentence.
And when a row erupts, as it surely will, bear in mind that it takes two to keep an argument going and only one to end it.
You end it by holding your tongue. Not with a smug silence. That kind of silence is actually shouting with the volume turned off, and your spouse can lip-read it perfectly. I mean the genuine holding of the tongue, which is the hardest feat known to the species. We can split the atom. We cannot reliably decline to have the last word.
What strikes me about Dad’s rules is how little they ask of the other person. They are all instructions to oneself. There’s no fourth rule requiring your spouse to deserve any of these graces.
Dad never delivered any of this as a lecture. He lived it and left me to work out the theory for myself.
It’s taken me decades to appreciate that the best advice he gave me was the advice he never gave.