THOSE WHO TELL ONLY ONE SIDE OF THE STORY
When you remove someone from your life, do not assume that you have also removed yourself from theirs. Sometimes you close the door, but the story told about you begins afterward. And in that story, you may hardly recognize yourself.
Ask yourself why the relationship ended, and then listen to how the other person tells it. You may have remained silent for months; they say, “One day, without saying anything, they cut me out of their life.” You may have tried repeatedly to talk things through; they say, “No matter what I did, I could never please them.” You may have decided after one final argument that you no longer wanted to continue; they remember only the last sentence you said.
They do not tell the rest of the story. Because when people tell their own stories, they often want to see themselves as the innocent party. This is very human. We all know the reasons behind our own actions. If we became angry, we know why. If we remained silent, we know why. If we walked away, we know what brought us to that point.
The other person, however, often sees only the outcome. That is why mistaking the final scene of a relationship for the whole film is a serious mistake. People often tell the result, not the process. They say that you closed the door, but they do not tell what happened before you reached that door. They say that you spoke harshly, but they do not mention the hurt that had been building behind that harshness. They say that you became silent, but they do not remember the conversations that made you stop speaking.
Then people around you hear the story and, naturally, form an opinion. Because all they have is the part that has been told. Meanwhile, you remain silent. Perhaps you simply do not want to talk about it. You may not think it is right to expose everything you experienced just to defend yourself.
And this is where a strange kind of injustice appears:
“The story of a silent person can seem less true simply because it is told less often.”
Yet silence is not always guilt. Sometimes a person simply does not want to put everything they have experienced on public display. Sometimes they want certain things to remain private. And sometimes they no longer have the strength to explain themselves to anyone.
Throughout my academic career, I had many opportunities to closely observe human relationships. One thing I learned is this:
“People remember what was done to them more easily than what they did to others. They know what happened before their own harsh words, but remember the other person’s harsh words in isolation. They may interpret their own silence as ‘maturity’ and someone else’s silence as ‘arrogance.’ They find a reason for their own mistake, but turn the other person’s mistake into a character flaw.”
That is why, at the end of a relationship, we should ask a question before asking, “Who was right?”
“How did we get to this point?”
That is the harder question. Because it forces us to confront our own share of responsibility. Thinking that the other person’s version of the story is incomplete does not mean that we are completely right. We may have made mistakes, too. We may have hurt someone. Something we said may have caused a wound in the other person that was much deeper than we realized.
Maturity means being able to acknowledge this, too. Being able to ask ourselves:
“Where did I go wrong in this relationship?”
The answer does not diminish us. On the contrary, it shows that we are honest with ourselves. But there is another truth we also have to accept:
“You cannot control what a person you have removed from your life will say about you.”
There will be people who misunderstand you. There will be people who know only part of who you are. And there will be people who judge you after hearing only the other person’s version of the story. If you try to correct all of them, eventually you will stop living your own life and start managing the image of yourself in other people’s minds.
It is not worth it.
You do not have to explain yourself to everyone. You do not have to correct every misunderstanding. And you certainly do not have to convince everyone.
Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is to honestly acknowledge your own part and then move on. Because the story told about you is not your entire life. The other person tells the story from their own window. You, however, lived the entire relationship, not just its final few minutes.
That is why I now believe this:
“The best way to correct some stories is not to tell your own version, but to live your life in such a way that, in time, the truth speaks for you.”