Why Don’t Men Know How To Apologise?

When I made this point on Twitter last week, my inbox was inundated with women telling me about experiences they’ve had trying to teach men how to apologise. None wished to be named, but their stories all had a similar thread.

“I had to sit my Dad down, and show him on a piece of paper how to apologise, while I was in floods of tears because of a comment he made about me,” one told me. Another, who had been in a relationship for nearly seven years, said: “He always goes straight to defensive, and then tells me I’m overreacting. And that my ‘overreacting’ makes him feel inadequate and intimidated, so I end up having to apologise, and calm both of us down. I don’t think he’s aware that he does that, but it does mean that there are many things he’s done in the past, that I’m still upset about, that probably won’t get addressed.”

“My boyfriend is willing to apologise when he’s done something wrong,” another woman told me. “But he then gets irritated and angry when I don’t immediately respond to it in the way that he wants, which, for him, is to forget it happened. He finds it hard to understand that even though I will accept his apology, I need time to be able to understand my emotions.