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"Your spouse does something you cannot believe. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter what it is, but it&amp;#039;s something you find selfish or thoughtless or petty or just very irritating. Something you wouldn&amp;#039;t do because you are such a nice person. Everyone always says what a nice person you are. Your neighbor Mrs. Lipkis always says what a nice person you are. Mrs. Lipkis is a Holocaust survivor. When you ask her why her horrible experiences haven&amp;#039;t made her lose faith in mankind, she says, as if you&amp;#039;ve just asked her why she doesn&amp;#039;t shoplift, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re not allowed!&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re too good,&amp;quot; she says to you when you go visit her for tea and petits fours that are so sweet they make your cavities ache. Mrs. Lipkis has perfect moral authority, so she must be right about you.  Anyway, your spouse does something objectionable. And you get angry. You say, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t believe you did that.&amp;quot; Here&amp;#039;s the thing: The angry part is always about you. It doesn&amp;#039;t matter how in the right you think you are, how in the right you may actually be. The fact that it bothers you so much \u2014 that&amp;#039;s your problem. I can&amp;#039;t tell you how much I wish it were otherwise, but it&amp;#039;s true.  The reason it&amp;#039;s a problem for you may even have to do with what a lovely person you are. You would never make yourself a ham sandwich and not ask the other person if he also wanted a ham sandwich. You would never book yourself to fly on a business trip on the other person&amp;#039;s birthday, forgetting it was the other person&amp;#039;s birthday. You&amp;#039;re such a careful parent, and he&amp;#039;s so \u2014 whooo, all you can say is, you would never leave a bunch of boys and girls from your daughter&amp;#039;s seventh-grade class in a bedroom with the door closed (what did he think they were going to do in there, play Scrabble?).  This may all be true about you, but if you&amp;#039;re always getting mad, you&amp;#039;re not the sensitive person or the thoughtful person or the careful person. You&amp;#039;re just the person who is yelling &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t believe you did that&amp;quot; all the time. And that, as I&amp;#039;ve said, is your problem. Even if it&amp;#039;s his problem, it&amp;#039;s your problem. Sometimes you just have to ignore the offensive or selfish or clueless thing. Or you have to decide it&amp;#039;s funny. I&amp;#039;m sorry to sound like Norman Cousins, but almost everything is, sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner.  Can&amp;#039;t you ever be irked? Can&amp;#039;t you ever be angry? Yes, but you have to get over it.  You have to lighten up.  You have to cut him some slack, and then more slack, and more. You knew whom you were dealing with. After all, you didn&amp;#039;t just meet him yesterday.  Unless you want to have a fight. But you don&amp;#039;t want to have a fight. You&amp;#039;ve had enough fights. You don&amp;#039;t want to turn into one of those couples who fight all the time, so wretched you wonder why any unattached person would ever get married after hearing them: &amp;quot;You shut up!&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, you shut up!&amp;quot;  That&amp;#039;s everything I know about getting along in a marriage, and it&amp;#039;s hardly anything. I tried to fit some other rules in here that I&amp;#039;ve always heard about, but I realized that I knew happily married people who&amp;#039;d broken each of them. I know couples who &amp;quot;talk things out&amp;quot; whose conversations seem to produce one sullen misunderstanding after another, and couples who would sooner die than express their feelings with anything approaching sincerity who nonetheless understand each other perfectly. I know couples who have been utterly faithful to each other \u2014 the better, it seems, to dedicate themselves to making each other&amp;#039;s life a living hell, and cheating spouses who \u2014 well, you get the idea.  So that&amp;#039;s the only rule to a long marriage, as I see it: You have to try not to get mad that much. It&amp;#039;s very hard, but you&amp;#039;re good \u2014 not too good, but good enough.  Jenny Allen is the author of The Long Chalkboard. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/relationships/advice/a17551/marriage-love-forgiveness/?src=shelter_footer>