Apologies

Sometimes when a person tells me about a difficulty they are having, I tell them that I’m sorry. And they respond, “What for? You didn’t do anything wrong!” So I say, “I’m not apologizing; I’m expressing sympathy. I’m sorrowful because of your hardship.”

Occasionally the opposite thing happens. I am supposed to be apologizing, and I’ll say something like, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”

That’s actually not the best way to apologize. If I do something wrong, I should apologize for the thing itself, not just the hurt feelings. Apologizing for hurting someone’s feelings stops just short of a real admission of guilt.

In many cases, it might amount to the same thing from the perspective of the apologizer. They really are repenting, they just aren’t being very specific. But I suspect that other times, it’s a semi-conscious way of justifying oneself. There’s an ambiguity to it, so that it could easily be interpreted as an “I’m sorry” in the first sense. “I didn’t do anything wrong, but I feel sympathetic about your hurt feelings.”

So, when we apologize, it would be better to be very specific. Better both for us and for those to whom we apologize.