Ninety-nine per cent of partners say things in moments of storm that they do not mean. That is a statistic.
But ninety-nine per cent of us remember best, and give the greatest weight to, precisely those things that were not meant.
That is a tragedy.
If you love somebody, you are not obliged to take every word of theirs seriously.
Hollywood will not agree with me, and Hollywood can go hang. It will not manage your relationship better than you will.
Let me put the case properly, because he did not mean it can be used to excuse a great deal that ought not to be excused.
There is a real difference between a statement and an emission. A statement is something a person has arrived at and is putting to you. An emission is what pain does with a mouth. They are made of the same words and they mean entirely different things, and the person producing the second kind generally knows within about ninety seconds which one it was.
The practical error is not that we fail to make the distinction. It is that we make it in only one direction. We are perfectly capable of saying I did not mean it, I was upset about our own worst sentences, and almost incapable of extending the identical reading to the person opposite us — whose worst sentences we file, permanently, as revelations of what they truly think.
That asymmetry, repeated over a decade, is how two people end up with entirely different histories of the same marriage.
A sense of proportion. That is all this requires.