Dennis Prager advises newlyweds to be easy to live with, while caller Orit from Los Angeles argues forgiveness is marriage's cornerstone. She explains that forgiveness can happen without an apology, and Prager adds a "moral bank account" metaphor: good deeds are deposits, wrongs are withdrawals, and forgiveness depends on whether the account is positive or in the red.
Anyway, this hour is not political. I'm just identifying who she is. So on my weekly fireside chat, I get a video question, almost always from a young person somewhere in the world. They say their name, their age, and where they're from. To my pleasant surprise, the young person in the latest. It's Candace Owens, and I'm gonna play it for you. This is, this is her question. Here it goes.
Hi Dennis, my name is Candace Owens. My age is none of your business, and I live pretty much everywhere but mostly on a plane. My question for you is this: you attended my wedding but you forgot to leave sage advice. What would be your advice for newlyweds, especially in such a crazy culture?
Well, so I had to come up with something because this is all spontaneous, basically. I, I, the first time I hear the question is 5 minutes before I sit down to do the broadcast. So it's, it's basically as new to me as it is to you. And I said, be as easy to live with as possible. That was the, my, my immediate response. And I would, I would still offer it even on, on Further thought, it's a good one. There are a lot of good ones. So I'm asking you, what would you answer Candace Owens? All right, so next, where were we just, uh, we were in, I guess we were both in New York and California. All right, here we go. Uh, Orit in Los Angeles, hello.
Hi Dennis, how are you?
Good, thank you.
So the advice I would give a newlywed couple is that they must have forgiveness. I don't think any marriage would last without forgiveness.
Does the, uh, I think that's excellent. Uh, does the person whom you're forgiving need to ask forgiveness?
Sometimes, depending on the circumstances.
Um, well, so, so what I'm asking is, you want us to forgive the other, and obviously the, the other to forgive us. Do they do that even if the, the person has not apologized? Is it sort of unearned forgiveness.
Yes. And I'll tell you why. Sometimes people realize the wrong that they have done or the extent of how they have wronged a person only after the person who was hurt actually approaches and tries to bring closure to the situation. You see, sometimes people wrong us But they don't realize how much they've hurt us by wronging us in such a way.
So you have to tell them.
You do, but you also have to forgive in order to have a constructive conversation. You see, I was listening to the other advice and I agree we should be civil and we should try to be as easy as we can, but the truth is that we're human and we're married to other humans and we're going to mess it up one way or another. And we hurt each other sometimes unintentionally and sometimes intentionally, and if forgiveness is not in the picture, then either the marriage is not gonna last or we're going to be two unhappy people in a marriage.
I think that's very, very intelligent. My view is, as in all of life, that people have moral bank accounts. And moral bank account is you make a deposit every time you do something good and you make a withdrawal every time you do something bad. If there's money in that bank account, in other words, it's not in the red, then the person has a moral bank account with you, which is positive. So why not forgive them? It's when they're in the red, and if you really believe that they're in the red, let's put it that way, that, uh, it's a very— it's a much different story, I think.
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