TYPICAL Last Tuesday I started counting. By nine in the morning I had said sorry eleven times. To my son, because his waffle was still frozen in the middle. To the barista, for wanting oat milk. To a man on the train who stepped on my foot. To my husband, for using the last of the hot water, which I did not know was the last until I was standing in it.
I wrote the number on a sticky note and stuck it inside the cabinet with the coffee filters. Every morning since, I open that cabinet and feel a little ridiculous.
There is a second list, kept nowhere but my head: the apologies I never got. The dinner I held for forty minutes while my phone stayed dark. The weekend his mother stayed four days instead of two and nobody asked me. The story he told about me at a party, the funny version, while I laughed along. I don't say these out loud. I keep them the way you keep receipts in a drawer you never open.
Reading his side
This month the magazine ran a composite essay from a husband who wasn't sure he owed the apology. I am not the wife in that essay. I have held that dinner, though. I read it at the kitchen counter, irritated, with the uncomfortable sense that he had a point.
His point is that he has a high bar for what counts as hurting someone. When his wife says he hurt her, he checks the evidence against his bar, and it usually comes up short. My problem runs the other way. My bar is on the floor, and I trip over it all day. The waffle counts. The hot water counts. A stranger's shoe on my foot somehow counts against me.
The essay mentions a study, so I went looking. In a 2010 paper in Psychological Science, researchers had men and women keep daily diaries of the offenses they committed and the apologies they offered. The women reported more apologies. They also reported more offenses. And the share of offenses that got an apology did not differ between men and women.
If that holds in our house, my husband and I may not be such different people. We may just be counting different things. I apologize for most of what I count, and I count nearly everything. He apologizes for most of what he counts, and he counts a lot less. Neither of us is cheating. We're keeping books in different currencies and getting angry when the totals don't match.
What my sorry is actually doing
My side of the ledger isn't as tidy as it looks. Plenty of my sorries work more like grease than apology. I say sorry to get ahead of someone's bad mood, including my own. Some of it is a reflexive guilt I picked up long before I could drive, the feeling that if a room is tense, fixing it is probably my job.
And some of my sorries, I'm sorry to say, are invoices. I apologize first so that he'll apologize second. When he says "it's fine" and goes to change his shirt, the unreturned sorry goes on the second list. He has no idea the second list exists, because I've never shown it to him. That isn't fair to him. You can't be overdue on a bill nobody sent you.
The list does something to me, too. The items are small. Kept long enough, they turn into a mood, a low hum I carry into the room before he's said a word. Our page on resentment describes "cataloging past offenses like a ledger of debts that can never be fully settled." The wife in an earlier composite about poker night kept a ledger like mine and won the argument at a cost she hadn't seen coming.
The sentence, and the stop
His essay lands on a sentence he can say with a straight face: "I'm sorry that landed hard." I'd take it. But after reading that study, I think the sentence I want is smaller than an apology. I don't need him to agree that the forty minutes was a crime. I need to know he saw that I counted it.
So here is the one sentence I want from him: "I didn't count that one, but I can see that you did."
And here is the one thing I'm going to stop doing: paying in advance. When I feel a sorry coming that is really a request for one, I'll say the request instead. "That stung, and I'd like you to know it." Then I'll let him answer in his own currency. I practiced the line a few times in the car first, which felt silly and helped.
The sticky note is still in the cabinet. This morning I said sorry four times, and one of them was actually mine.
If you keep a second list, pick the smallest item on it this week and say it out loud, once, without an apology in front of it. If you're the one who never goes first, you don't have to agree it was a crime. You only have to say you saw it counted. Then add your answer at the Debate of the Month: who says sorry first in your house?