You can’t ever take it back
You ever have an argument with someone (like your wife or a co-worker) and end up saying something nasty like “ You are so stupid !” or worse?. I know I have heard this a multitude of times and always thought to myself, “Boy, they will regret saying that later”. In the middle of a spirited discussion we sometimes forget who we are talking to or maybe we just don’t care at the moment. You build relationships and friendships and alliances out of blocks just like LEGO toys and we take them apart about the same way. The blocks are many, many things and can be called by a lot of names, but the concepts are pretty simple to understand and most difficult to live out loud. The problem is that ugly stays ugly, no matter what you say after the fact. You can apologize and attempt to make amends all you want, but you rarely can replace what you destroyed.
In order for someone to be called your friend or something like it, I think you have to have a mutual understanding. Along with that is a sense of self that admits that the person we reference here is worthy of your attention and is compatible with your hopes, dreams desires and thoughts. Somewhere along the way we develop traits we assign to these people like trust, forgiveness, truth, compassion and so forth. We tell our wives they are beautiful (even if they aren’t) we tell our friends they are funny (even if they are offensive sometimes), we tell ourselves we can tolerate certain things to make allowances for someone’s character (even if we really don’t like it).
Then along comes an argument that starts out with a discussion of ideas and ends up being a rant against concepts. We trash the other persons character, ideas, thoughts, desires or dreams. We forget that we can just agree to disagree and move on. We want to be right. We want to have the last word. We have to exert control and we have to dominate. We want our ideas to be the standard of what things should be and not the oppositions ideas. We say something mean or hurtful or embarrassing or belittling or just downright stupid. We curse. We slam doors and throw things at each other. It ceases to be a discussion of ideas and turns into open warfare designed to inflict pain. We call each other vile names in the heat of battle. Alls fair in love and war is what we think.
Until the next argument.
When the cycle repeats itself, we hear about what we said the last time we fought. In this endless cycle of argument Armageddon we continue to lob word bombs until we hit our targets and then we retreat into our bunkers of silence until we calm down and can be more rationale.
What happens next?
We either repudiate the other person (and their ideas) altogether and split from their company (divorce etc) or we call a truce and think our hateful speech but don’t say it or we try to apologize and take back the ignorant things we said in the first place. It is an endless cycle of build, destroy, rebuild that takes a whole lot of work to maintain and is difficult to keep up with because the load just gets heavier and heavier.
Very rarely have I ever heard of anything positive coming from total destruction except in a very large global sense. It may have been absolutely right to stop Tojo and Hitler, however a lot of damage was done along the way to make it happen. Sometimes, even in modern warfare there is no value in trying to rebuild.
Fighting and spraying verbal shrapnel at each other is a choice. It is a hard choice, but a choice nonetheless. You can at every opportunity choose to engage in linguistic warfare or not. I told my wife something when we first started going out 2 years before we got married that is true to this day and I hope is true to the end of our lives.
I told her I don’t fight. I choose not to , not because I cannot, but because I know myself. I know I can’t fight fair and won’t fight fair. I do not have the ability be civil during an argument. I have to either keep the discussion below storm level or leave the premises if a fight erupts around me because I know I will be “in it to win it”, so to speak. At least I know my limitations, I guess.
Instead of fighting, I promised her that if her opinion ( opinions are not facts) on a subject were different than mine, that I would agree that she had her own opinions and we could just agree to disagree, on whatever the subject was. So far it has worked pretty well. I know she doesn’t agree with me sometimes, yet because we have the ability to peacefully coexist we can be two humans with two different sensibilities and still love each like we did when we got started more than 12 years ago. She is a Democrat (for example) and I am a Republican. Love transcends difference ?
What you cannot really do (in my own humble personal opinion) is ever successfully take back a stupid, mean, hurtful, spiteful thing you say during an argument. Sure you can buy flowers and apologize your butt off, but I think somewhere deep in the recesses of the other parties mind their will always be the nagging doubt that wonders if you really meant what you said when you were mad and were engaged in your "warfare with the enemy". I don’t think you can take it back any easier than you could take back an exploded bomb. You may be able to fill in the hole, but the bomb was still dropped and it still exploded. There was carnage associated with it.
Once you say it, it belongs to you.
Forever.
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