All right, this is a simple question, and I bet you all can answer it. Okay, maybe there's one or two of a thousand of you that can't, but most of you will be able to. Have you ever failed in a relationship or have you ever had a failed relationship? And whose fault was it?
And we'll gratitude help. We'll talk about that in just a minute. And welcome to the Daily Grateful. I am Michael Croes.
And today on Monday, we're going to start the week out, right? We're going to talk about failed relationship. You have you ever had any? I have.
I've had, how can I say this delicately without using a bad word? I've had a shit ton of them. Yeah. I mean, I let's, and let's talk about them.
And I'm going to talk about responsibility here. Okay. And I'm going to see if I can, and I've printed up some talking points here, and I don't know, and I haven't even read them yet. But we'll maybe get into those.
We'll see what we will, we will see. But let's start with my first girlfriend. Such a wonderful young lady. A wonderful young lady.
I mean, you know, just wonderful young lady. Everything I wanted in a girlfriend. I was 17. Everything I wanted in a girlfriend.
And then I blew it. I left her for the young lady that would become my first wife. Another wonderful young lady. And now she's a wonderful old lady.
She's my age. And she very, you know, when she got rid of me, which was the smartest damn thing she'd ever could have done, she met a wonderful man, just a wonderful man. And they've been married for, I don't know, got to be close to 30 years. And he is just wonderful.
And she's wonderful. And I blew that. And in defense of myself, we never should have gotten married. We really didn't have an awful lot in common.
And you know, I shouldn't, I, it is what it is. I have two children from her who are now adults, and they're wonderful people, just wonderful people. She has two children from her current marriage. And they are wonderful people, wonderful people.
The fact that my two sons are wonderful people, I'm going to give the credit to her for that. Okay, I helped a little bit, but most of the credit goes to her. And I readily admit that. Let's move along to wife number two, Diane, favorite ex-wife.
All right. A lot can be said about that. And I could say a lot, but I'm going to say this. I blew it.
I actually blew it. And that was a big mistake. I just blew it. The fact that she's my best friend now, the fact that she loves me dearly now, and I love her dearly now, not romantically, but you know, we are just very close, very, very, very close.
And I trust her with everything in my life. But I blew it. And then there's the next one. And I'm not going to talk about it because I have, I adopted two of her children, and we had one together.
The one that we had together is my 29 year old son. But I'm not going to say anything about that other than to say this, about that. I did not fail that relationship. There, I'm just going to leave it at that.
So, and then after that, there was Debbie. Okay, there was Debbie after that. And she was my girlfriend for about five years. I knew Debbie a million years ago.
And as a matter of fact, she was dating my best friend. My best friend did not treat her well and threw her out of the house. And I was married to my first wife and we took her in until she could get organized. And my best friend from that moment on was not even my friend, because I just cannot believe the way he treated her.
And Debbie went off to live a life and get married and have a child and all of that. And we reconnected in 2010. And we were together for five years. And I really liked being with her.
She just since passed away, by the way. But I really like being with her. But she just decided she wanted to be single. So she was single.
Did I fail that relationship? I don't know. I'm sure a little bit, a little bit, but so did she. So I have nothing bad to say about her.
She's dead. But even if she wasn't dead, I wouldn't have anything bad to say about her because we had some lovely, lovely times and experiences together. And we just, you know, had adventures. She was fun.
So I will give that. So how does gratitude work into any of this? I don't know. According to what I downloaded, if you have a failed relationship, you want to reframe that failure, that failure, that fail where I can talk.
I don't edit. You're just going to hear that. Reframing the failure into growth. Okay, you can do that.
And I've tried to do that. I've been totally successful on it. Again, I haven't looked to get into a relationship since Debbie. I've just not.
Okay, not good at this. Just going to keep going where I am. The role of gratitude and healing. Yeah, I had a hard time with Debbie breaking up with me.
I did. That was bothersome. But I just found myself being very grateful for the time I spent with her and then went on from there. And then I used a lot of this gratitude to work on myself discovery.
And that was important too. And it did a good job. And when you do these sort of things, you can grow. And as you grow from a loss like that, a marriage and a relationship is a loss.
There are things that you can do. Oh, by the way, first girlfriend, we reconnected a couple of years ago. She's been married to this guy for 45 years. Something like that lives on a farm in North Florida.
Good for her. She'd have been better off with me. And I would have been better off with her. But good for her.
All right. And I got five kids and five grandkids. I am so damn grateful. All of those failures brought me that.
So there you go.