I know there is a school of thought that says I should have forgiven him — that harboring nothing, releasing it all, would have been the higher and healthier road, that my refusal makes me hard.

I have thought about it honestly, and I have come to disagree, and I want to say why, because I think the confusion around forgiveness does real harm to people in the position I was in.

We are taught that forgiveness and healing are the same thing, that you cannot have the second without the first.

It is not true.

Forgiveness is a transaction between two people, and it requires the other person to have become someone worth forgiving — to have looked squarely at what they did, owned it, and changed.

Ian’s letter did none of that.