You have the choice to forgive or not to forgive, and no one can force you to do either. If you want to forgive your wife, no one can stop you, no matter how poorly she may have acted. The choice to forgive or not is similar to the choices you make about how much anger you will express and how long you will hold a grudge.
Let’s take this idea of choice one step further. If you have the option to forgive, then this suggests that you also have the option to take offense or not in the first place. One of the ways to hasten forgiveness is to take offenses less personally. I firmly believe that relationships would improve if people chose to take offense less often. Being more tolerant of your partner’s bad behavior would do a lot to make him or her feel more accepted and loved. This in turn would make your partner more likely to treat you with kindness. You have a choice in how you react to your partner’s bad behavior. Surely it makes sense to try to be more accepting and less prone to offense if doing so decreases the number of times you actually have to forgive your partner.
— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Love, p. 57