Experience from a previous marriage can teach us that to achieve mutual understanding and resolve conflicts, it is essential to abandon the habit of spewing negativity and instead strive to listen to one’s counterpart and notice their positive sides.

Empathy Through Experience

Experience from a previous marriage can teach us that to achieve mutual understanding and resolve conflicts, it is essential to abandon the habit of spewing negativity and instead strive to listen to one’s counterpart and notice their positive sides.

For example, one source states: "But what’s the use if you pour your anger on him?

What will that cause? A scandal: you criticize him, he criticizes you. As a result—quarrels, fights, tears, separation. Well, start by simply staying silent—I’m not even suggesting that you love the person or forgive everything entirely. But can you stay silent? At least begin with that. And gradually you can train yourself to see the good in a person first and foremost." (source: link txt). This approach, acquired in marriage, not only helps resolve disputes in family life but also finds application in relationships with friends.

Another important lesson is that one should not carry old behavioral patterns and the negativity of past relationships into new interactions. As noted in another excerpt: "What will happen if spouses insist on transferring the entirety of their premarital experiences into their new family and start imposing that experience on one another? Nothing good—only constant quarrels and conflicts, with each trying to reshape both their own half and their family life according to that ideal image formed in their mind, which might be entirely incorrect. The wisest course is for a husband and wife not to try to impose the ways of their past family on one another, but rather to create something new by using the best parts of past experiences." (source: link txt). Such experience teaches us to extract the useful elements from previous relationships while leaving aside those aspects that led to quarrels and disagreements.

By applying these principles, one can strive for honest dialogue in relationships with friends, control emotional outbursts, and focus on finding the positive in every interaction. This helps avoid the escalation of conflicts, creating a basis for constructive resolution of differences and strengthening trust between people.