TheBanyanTree: I was wrong

[JMoney]

"Three little words," he used to say.  "Three little words."

That was what he had learned in his family.  It is a weapon whose wounds can
only be self-inflicted.  Are you brave enough to acknowledge what we both
already know?  Do you have what it takes?  Or will you show yourself to be a
lesser person?

I had no such experience.  In my family an argument was usually to the
metaphorical death.  To be wrong was not something merely to be
acknowledged.  It was a humiliation.  It was to be stupid and immature.  It
was demeaning.  Therefore the right may crow but the wrong just turned away.
So I suppose it's no wonder that, twenty years ago, the first time my new
husband began teasing me with the, "three little words," mantra I found it
extremely difficult to say them.

I can't remember what mistake I'd made but I remember where we were; sitting
in the car at traffic lights at the shopping centre at Unanderra in 1984.
And I remember how it felt.  I really did not want to say those words.  The
stone of my unwillingness felt not just stuck in my throat but swelling
there.  It grew so large that my chest began to hurt.  But it was obvious
that there would be no letting up in his teasing and I knew that continued
silence would not only not make me right, it would also make me a fool in my
own eyes for refusing to admit what was blindingly obvious.  So I took the
plunge.  "I was wrong," I said.

Now he may have been momentarily gleefully triumphant then but I was awash
with a wonderful sense of freedom.  Those three little words are really very
easy to say.  And the more you say them the easier it gets until it seems
the most natural thing in the world to admit to error, which is, of course,
exactly what it would be but for pride or emotional investment.

So it was not hard at all, once the messages started coming in, to tell my
husband that I was wrong and he was right.  The Americans do have a two
dollar note.  He just said, "I thought they must.  It looks like a proper
bank note."  And that was that.

Thank you to everyone who so kindly took time out of their day to enlighten
me.

Janice