Sorry About That, Chief

I had an awful fight with someone the other day. That's a pretty unusual occurrence. I'm pretty even-tempered and it's hard to get me beyond just being annoyed. Looking back on it now, it's hard for me to even see what we were fighting about. Who said something rude to someone else, I guess, but the fight itself is irrelevant.

The reason things got out of control was a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of apologies. A line sticks in my head from a book called Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. There's a character who's kind of a sage, and at one point he says, "It never hurts to apologize, even if you don't really mean it." This is (purposely, I assume) overly cynical, but the germ of truth in it is that your apology is not for you. Many arguments get needlessly extended because one of both parties feels, "I didn't do anything wrong, why should I apologize?"

Well here's why. Let's say that you do something that's clearly wrong, like forget a meeting and leave someone sitting and waiting for an hour. Of course, you apologize for that. But what does that do? Does it somehow undo the wrong? Does that person get his or her hour back? If you broke something of theirs does it get unbroken? Of course not. The purpose of the apology is to make them feel better. That's always what apologies are for. It has nothing to do with whether you were right or wrong, it's about how the other person feels.

So one of the skills I've picked up over the course of a lifetime is the understanding of how and when to apologize. Little apologies at the beginning of or arguments can help keep the argument small and short. The skill to it is to really understand what the other person is saying and why they're saying it. You need not actually feel sorry but you'd sure better know what it is you're apologizing for. You have to listen and to think about the other person. That's hard, and I didn't learn how to do that until I was around 40. But it's well worth learning.