I’m Sorry, but I Don’t Really Mean It

If I say sorry then they can’t dislike me. Right? Right? Just say sorry. Even if you didn’t do anything wrong, even if you don’t know what you might have said or done to upset them, even if you simply can’t think of anything else to say. I’m sorry. If something goes wrong, like the café is closed or their phone runs out of battery, or they get a bad mark on a test. Say I’m sorry and then they won’t think you’re rude. Or that you don’t care.

 But then someone says ‘why do you say sorry so much?’. Not just someone – a child. ‘Nadia, you don’t need to say sorry all the time. Everything isn’t your fault’. No one had ever said that to me before. Maybe I apologise more to kids than to anyone else, or maybe an adult wouldn’t think to say something so honest. I’ve thought about that conversation a lot since then. How often should you say sorry? I definitely use it as an easy, inoffensive response to many things. How can anyone get annoyed with me, how can it be the wrong thing to say? I’m just saying sorry.

 A quick Google of over-apologising reveals a myriad of reasons for this habit. Most of the answers relate to unresolved childhood issues (fear of abandonment, growing up in a violent household, among others). One other almost universal issue is low self-esteem. Saying sorry to make someone like you, or to try desperately to stop them from disliking. Who knows if any of my actions or words are pissing them off, but if I say sorry regularly enough then I can protect myself in case I’ve done something wrong. If I say sorry, then I’m taking responsibility in case I’ve done anything, or in case they blame me for anything.

 I’m telling them I have empathy. Isn’t it just a very obvious, blunt way of saying ‘I empathise’? Maybe not. Maybe it comes across as pity, or simply sounds pathetic. Examining it now, it has become such a compulsive habit that there is probably a notable lack of sincerity. If children are the ones who call it out, then a lack of sincerity may be a good enough reason. As a child, its harder to understand why someone may say something out of social convention, insincerely but with good intentions. As we reach adulthood we accept that a large amount of what other people say to us is said not out of sincerity but out of habit or because we feel compelled by social convention. It would almost be rude to point out when someone is being insincere in such a normalised context. It seems harmless, and maybe it is.

 Another reason for over-apologising is to seem easy going. If you just say sorry, you’re choosing to let something go – you would rather enjoy life than address something tricky or uncomfortable or that might even make you angry. You’re accepting something rather than engaging with it. Having an easy conversation, not risking a relationship or a friendship, and skipping past the harder (but very much real) parts of life is important to you. So you just say sorry, and then we can move on.

 But there is another side to this story. Women. Women apologise more than men (which goes against that lovely commonly held belief that women think they are always right and refuse to acknowledge and apologise when they are wrong). I, a woman, apologise far more than my brother or father do. My mum  has also admitted to over apologising, and has also had to be told ‘hey, you don’t need to say sorry so much’. We aren’t nicer people than the men in our family. Saying sorry isn’t evidence of our good nature, our kind hearts or any kind of favourable quality. My brother and my father are not at all lacking anything by not saying sorry excessively.

 Psychology offers us lots of reasons why women (and girls) apologise more than men (and boys). If you think about it for more than a few minutes, you can probably guess some of them based on what we know about the societal conditioning of men and women. Men are encouraged to be confident, clever, ambitious and assertive. Women are told to be all those things, but with conditions. Confident but not cocky. Clever, but not to the point that other people feel stupid. Ambitious but only within reason (don’t try too hard, in case you fail and look stupid). Assertive as long as you don’t upset anyone else. These qualities need to come from within, and they are about the self – helping yourself be the best, most successful version of you. But when it comes to girls and women, these qualities are undermined by conditions which put other people’s feelings, and other people’s opinions of you, first. So we add the ‘sorry’. It’s an easy, failsafe, quick way to make sure we are still considering the other person, and to make sure they know we are considering them.

The word ‘bossy’ is thrown around so frequently when discussing both girls and women. It is so easy for a girl to be branded ‘bossy’ on the playground (myself and my mother included), and it is equally easy for a woman who possesses the aforementioned qualities (confidence, intelligence, ambition, assertiveness) to be called bossy. Saying sorry can again feel like an easy way to avoid this label, which women are brought up being told to avoid. Sorry is a qualifying word, enabling girls and women to set themselves apart from this image of a pushy, overly confident, ‘bossy’ girl: we assert ourselves because we are told to be assertive and confident, but then we apologise just in case we have been too assertive, too confident.

 Another reason is empathy. One of my initial observations when examining my own personal brand of over-apologising was that it is linked to empathy, or a desire to appear empathetic. I pride myself on my empathy, and bend over backwards in conversations to demonstrate that I understand, I feel compassion, I empathise I apologise when someone suffers in a small way, or in a big way – when they mess up the food they’re cooking, they don’t do well in a test, when their home life is bad and they’re struggling. But I also say sorry when I do well – when I get a position someone else wanted to get, when I win at a game of cards against the kids I babysit for, when I get one mark more than someone else on an essay. I think it’s right to apologise if someone is sad, if someone loses something or is disappointed or has bad luck. You aren’t a bad person if you don’t – sorry isn’t always the best word and there’s probably hundreds of better things to say – but you aren’t doing anything wrong if you do. Like many other people, sorry is a fall-back word when we empathise with someone’s misfortune, and often when we don’t know how else to communicate it.

 But I don’t think we should apologise when we do well. Maybe it is because I was raised as a girl, taught that empathy is the most important quality and expected to think about how all my actions affect others. Maybe that’s why my instinct is often to think about how someone else might feel who didn’t do as well, who isn’t as happy with the result. Or maybe it comes back to our confidence. Apologising when we do well, because we don’t always think we deserve it.  

 When we over-apologise, the word ‘sorry’ loses meaning. And the things we are saying and doing, they lose meaning too. We are undermining ourselves and losing our confidence and sense of self. We think it can't hurt to apologise, and it might just make the conversation easier or make someone like us more or protect our reputation.

 There are a few common themes, or common traits that recur when exploring the problem of over-apologising. Compassion is one, which settled my anxiety as I read about them. I can take solace in my compassion, I can blame this bad habit on being too compassionate. Although no, I can’t. Submissiveness in relationships? Maybe. Not with my close friends and family I’m sure, but with acquaintances, co-workers, peers and less solid friends. I’d rather accept bad treatment from others (messing up at work so I have to cover, turning up late or cancelling last minute, failing to fulfil an obligation to me) than cause a fuss, which maybe means I do have a problem with submissiveness. Which is an unfortunate thing to realise, as a person who always prided themselves in a confidence and sense of self-worth that should make assertion easy.

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Photography by Maddie Chambers (@wibble_wobller)