A Gift We Give Ourselves: Forgiveness in Marriage

"We are called to love. Marriage gives you an other to love deeply, to practice all the Christian virtues on: patience, kindness... if nothing else, your spouse will almost certainly be the only person you actually get to forgive seventy time seven."

Mark delivers some version of this line every year when he delivers the talk on the sacrament of marriage to catechumens prepare to enter the Church during the Office of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) sessions. It gets a laugh, but it touches on a crucial aspect of marriage: our power to forgive.

The power to forgive sins is one of the marks of the Church. In this Sunday's Gospel the risen Christ appears to his frightened apostles, breathes on them, and gives them the power to forgive sins. The Church has treasured that gift for two thousand years.

But in the domestic church of our marriages, each of us already holds a version of that same power. When your spouse sins against you, you have the ability to grant or withhold forgiveness. That is not a small thing.

Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus tells Peter to forgive not seven times but seventy times seven, a number that in the biblical imagination simply means without limit. Marriage is the one relationship in life that practically demands we take that seriously. No other bond asks so much of us for so long, in such close quarters. And no other relationship offers us so many chances to practice.

What Forgiveness Is, and Is Not

Forgiveness is not forgetting. It does not require you to pretend something did not happen, to trust immediately, or to absorb the same harm again. What it does require is that you release the right to punish, to nurse the wound, to let resentment shape the relationship going forward.

Forgiveness has different effects: Sometimes forgiveness carries a marriage back to where it was before. Sometimes it carries the marriage forward to a different place, one shaped by what happened but not imprisoned by it.

Both are genuine forms of healing.

What the Research Tells Us

When we started writing Climbing the Seven Story Mountain together, we discovered that there is a lot of research on how to give a good apology. There is much less on how to forgive. This is surprising because their is a lot of research that says forgiveness is good to us.

For example, a 2005 study in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine found that forgiving a specific person or offense produced measurable reductions in blood pressure and heart rate compared to rehearsing grievances. This health benefit goes to the person who forgave, not only to the one forgiven.

Holding onto resentment, the data showed, is physiologically costly. Choosing to forgive is, in a concrete biological sense, an act of care for yourself.

This finding matters because we often frame forgiveness as a gift we extend to our spouses. It is that. But it is also something we do for our own bodies, our own minds, our own souls. And these two purposes are not in competition; they work together as a kind of grace.

A Practice for Couples: The Forgiveness Conversation

Set aside thirty minutes in a calm, private setting. Each spouse takes a turn completing these three sentences aloud, without interruption:

1. "Something I am still carrying from our past is..."

2. "What I need from you to let it go is..."

3. "I am willing to offer you forgiveness for... starting today."

The listening spouse does not defend or explain. Instead, they must respond simply, accepting their spouse's forgiveness: "I hear you. Thank you for forgiving me."

Then switch roles. The goal is not to resolve everything in one sitting but to open a door that resentment tends to keep closed.

A Closing Thought

Christ did not commission his apostles to forgive because it was easy. He commissioned them because the world needed it.

Our marriages need it just as much. When you forgive your spouse, you are not only freeing them from the weight of what they did. You are freeing yourself. That is the gift. That is the power that is given to us.