What I Do With Your Excuses

Men expect me to be irritated by excuses. They arrive with one already prepared, braced for it to be swept aside, and are frequently unsettled when I simply take it and set it down somewhere and continue.

I am not indifferent to them. I am interested in them, which is worse, and takes them a while to understand. An excuse is one of the most informative things a man produces, precisely because he has constructed it carefully and has not noticed what the construction reveals. He is trying to explain a gap. In choosing which explanation to reach for, he tells me exactly what he believes the gap means, and that belief is almost always the actual subject.

Consider the difference between a man who says he was busy and a man who says he did not think it was important enough to bother me with. Those are the same absence and two completely different men. The first is managing his time badly. The second has a view about his standing here that he has never said aloud, that is probably wrong, and that will quietly govern everything until it is addressed. Only one of those needs my attention, and the excuse is what told me which one I have.

So I do not sweep them aside. I let him finish. I am listening past the content, which is usually unremarkable and often true, to the shape underneath, and the shape is where the work is. Men who expect to be cut off in the middle of an explanation are frequently more disarmed by being allowed to complete one, because completing it requires them to hear it, and about a third of them hear it and stop halfway through of their own accord.

What I will not do is accept an excuse as a substitute for the thing. That is the distinction he tends to miss. Understanding why something did not happen is not the same as agreeing that it need not happen. Those are separate matters and I hold them separately, and it confuses a certain kind of man enormously that I can be entirely sympathetic about the reason and entirely unmoved about the requirement.

He thinks sympathy is a currency that buys exemption. It is not. It is just accuracy about his circumstances, which I would rather have than not have, and which changes how I ask rather than whether I ask. A man who has understood this stops offering excuses as payment and starts offering them as information, and the difference in tone is immediate. There is no pleading in it any more. He simply tells me what happened, and waits, because he already knows the requirement did not move.

That is the point at which excuses stop being a problem, and it does not arrive by my forbidding them. It arrives when he works out that I was never going to be angry, and that the explanation was going to be read closely, and that the version he was protecting himself from telling me was the one that would actually have been useful.

I would always rather have the real reason. It is invariably smaller and more human than the one he was going to give me, and I have never once thought less of a man for it.