RULE 93

Forgive

Relationships don’t work well if they’re inherently unequal. I mean this from a moral perspective. They can work fine if one person is more knowledgeable, or more skilled or more talented – and even better if the other one can balance this in another field. But if one person is indebted to the other in any way, the relationship will be damaged. It may take time, it may become bitter or simply distant, but it’s not sustainable in the long term.

So if you want any friendship to last, you have to be able to forgive your friend for any offence you feel. This can be little stuff – the irritation of always being late, or never remembering to ask how you’re feeling – or it can be bigger stuff: ruining the dress you lent them, not turning up to your wedding, borrowing money and not paying it back, refusing to spend time around your partner.

As ever, I’m not telling you what to do. You don’t have to forgive anyone. I’m just saying that all the friendships I’ve been in or witnessed have suffered if one person doesn’t forgive the other for some injury – small or large, real or imagined.

Of course you always have the option of breaking off the friendship. In a decent fashion of course. Sometimes that’s the best option. But if you did that every time, you’d end up with precious few friends.

So whatever your friend has done, forgive them. You don’t have to forget – it may be a good idea not to lend them large sums of money again, for example (at least not without a much better reason and/or security than last time). But if the friendship is worth having, you need to let the past go. Recognize that not everyone is perfect, but this friend is worth having despite their human frailties.

While forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting privately, it does mean forgetting as far as your friend is concerned. Don’t keep referring back to it, because that will keep reminding your friend that you consider them morally in your debt.

Forgiving isn’t always easy, of course. You may need to talk through the incident with your friend, but try to wait until you can do it without rancour. Real forgiveness is genuine, and it’s something you do for your sake, not for your friend’s. It makes you feel better, as well as preserving a friendship that you care about. The key to it lies in understanding your friend’s motives in doing whatever it was they did. If they’re a friend worth having they weren’t trying to upset or hurt you – it was unintentional. Get your head around why they behaved as they did, what attitudes and values underlie the behaviour and where those come from, and you’ll find that forgiveness comes much more easily.