The Second Apology

There are two apologies in every real repair. Most of us only ever offer the first.

The first apology is the one we all know. It comes soon after the fight, sometimes within hours. It is composed while there is still heat in the room. It sounds like this: 'I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. It came out wrong. I was tired.' It is delivered honestly. It is received gratefully. Both parties feel a little better. Life continues.

The first apology stops the bleeding. It is important and necessary and I do not want to dismiss it. But it is not the apology that changes anything. It is the emergency room. It gets you to the point where you can walk out of the building.

The second apology is different. It comes days later, sometimes weeks. It arrives after you have sat with the thing. After you have understood, on your own, without the other person insisting, why what you did actually hurt. Not why it looked hurtful. Not why it was received as hurtful. Why it hurt.

The second apology does not defend itself. It does not explain that you were tired. It does not remind the other person of what they said first. It says something like: 'I have been thinking about what I said. I understand now why it landed the way it did. Here is what I saw that I did not see before. I am sorry — not for the phrasing, but for the thing itself. I am going to try to do differently.'

This apology is much harder to give. It requires you to have actually changed your mind about something, which is uncomfortable. It requires you to admit that your first apology was, in part, a performance to end the fight. It requires you to sit, for real, with the possibility that you were wrong in a way you had not previously understood.

Because it is hard, most relationships are made almost entirely of first apologies. They accumulate. Nothing is ever really settled. The same fight surfaces in slightly different clothes, month after month, because no one has done the work of the second apology. Everyone is very sorry and no one has actually changed.

If you want a relationship — with a spouse, a friend, a colleague, a child — to be able to survive real disagreement, learn to give the second apology. Give it days later. Give it without being asked. Give it without a request for a matching one in return.

You will be startled how much a relationship can heal when someone finally offers the apology that was never actually the emergency.