On Apologising

Men apologise to me constantly, and most of it is not apology at all. It is a request for reassurance dressed as one, and the distinction is worth drawing carefully, because a man who has never had it drawn for him will keep offering the wrong thing and wondering why it settles nothing.

The usual version arrives fast and at length. It is elaborate, it repeats itself, and it is unmistakably waiting for something. Underneath the words there is a question, and the question is whether I am still pleased with him. That is what the volume is for. He is not describing what he did, he is trying to produce a response in me, and the response he wants is the one that ends his discomfort.

I do not give it. Not out of coldness, and not to prolong anything, but because handing it over teaches him that the apology worked, and what worked was the performance rather than the correction. Do that a few times and you have a man who is genuinely sorry every week and has changed nothing, because the ritual has quietly become the resolution.

The useful kind is much shorter and noticeably harder to say. It names the thing, it does not explain it, and it does not ask me for anything. There is no softening clause about how tired he has been, no account of what he intended, and crucially no question at the end. It simply sits there. A man saying it is often uncomfortable in the silence afterwards, because he has offered something without being told immediately that it was accepted, and that is precisely the part he has spent his life avoiding.

What he is avoiding is the possibility that it was not enough. The long apology protects against that by making the distress so visible that somebody usually intervenes to stop it. Sympathy arrives, the subject changes, and he never finds out. The short one leaves the verdict with me, and living for a moment inside another person's judgement is far more exposing than any amount of self reproach.

I answer it plainly when it comes. Not warmly, because warmth would be a reward and would put us straight back into the old shape, but clearly, and then we continue. There is no probationary period, no cooling, no reference to it a week later. The matter is closed because I have closed it, and that is the thing he was actually afraid he could not secure.

The men who learn this become much easier to be around, and easier for themselves too. The apology stops being an event requiring management and becomes a sentence. Something goes wrong, he says so, I acknowledge it, and the evening carries on. He no longer has to decide how sorry to appear, which is a calculation he was making constantly and did not know he was making.

I am not interested in his remorse. Remorse is a feeling he is having about himself, and while he is having it he is entirely occupied with his own interior. I am interested in the correction, which is a much smaller and duller thing, and the only part of the exchange that ever changes what happens next.