A World Where “I’m Sorry” Matters

It's Where I Want to Live

Imagine a world where, when a person realized they had done something wrong to another person, they apologized for it because they were sorry.

No matter who it was they had wronged, or what it was they had done.

And imagine that the person who was harmed accepted the apology, because they believed the apology was genuine. They knew it was genuine because the offender did some things that proved their I’m sorry was sincere.

That’s the kind of world I want to live in.

That’s what happened for my wife and me. 

We’re so much better today than we were before.

I’m in the middle of reading You Could Make this Place Beautiful, by

Maggie Smith

. Joining a group of thousands of others I’m sure, I bought it because I thought it was written by the English actress, Maggie Smith. It was not. The author is American, lives in Ohio, and is a poet somewhere around my age. 

The book is wonderful and quickly jumped to the top of my list of books which inspire me to want to be a better writer. I’ve said I’m not a “poetry guy,” but the more I read quality writing, the more I value the skill it takes to use poetry in prose. 

In Beautiful, Smith writes about her divorce experience. She begins by telling us how she discovered her husband an extra-marital, female confidant. It’s clear the relationship has with the other woman is emotionally intimate, and while there’s no mention of a physical relationship, physicality isn’t the point. I’d argue it rarely is. (I’ll just not argue it here, at least not today.) The pain, anger, and resilience she experiences throughout the personal trial is palpable through her storytelling.

A good memoir is one in which the author is able to elicit sympathy from the reader. A great memoir elicits not only sympathy, but also its deeper, more meaningful sister: empathy.

The target audience is the empathetic one. The audience who’s most likely to think to themself, I know exactly what the author felt. I’ve experienced that too. I wonder how it turned out for them. Did they find healing? I want to find healing…or at least experience some relief because of theirs.

Or maybe they just need a person with whom they can be angry. An author—someone we’ve never met and likely never will—is the first person to validate a shared experience.

I’m not alone.

Maybe, in the hardest relationships memoirs can serve as an antidote to a gaslighting experience.

People who write about divorce have a large audience. Heck, my own blog post about my marriage falling apart was one of my most successful.

When

Elizabeth Gilbert

wrote Eat, Pray, Love, her failing marriage was the hook. It wasn’t just a hook, it was the impetus for change in her life journey, and one the reader could identify with, mostly.

I say mostly, because when I read Eat, Pray, Love a number of years ago my thought as I began too read was:

I hope my wife doesn’t read this book.

That’s not a joke. I didn’t want my wife to read it. While I sympathized for Gilbert, I empathized with her husband. He was unsuccessful. He was living off his wife’s career ( which was prior to writing one of the best known memoirs of the day.) Her husband seemed miserable and unsatisfied with himself. Gilbert was done with it. The marriage ended and then she went to Italy and a couple of other places and found herself. She found happiness and contentment, sans husband.

I really didn’t want my wife to read that book.

I didn’t want her to leave me.

It’s interesting to me that I read Eat, Pray, Love after our marriage had rebounded. We were doing better. But I still identified more with Gilbert’s husband than I did with Gilbert. And, as much as I really appreciate You Could Make This Place Beautiful, I found myself remembering the role I had played during difficult days my own marriage.

Both Smith and Gilbert experienced frustrations with their spouse. Honestly, I thought they both had legitimate complaints. I was sad for them because I knew I’d been somewhat similar to their own husbands, though in my own way.

I think marriage problems are like that. All unique and different, but also, similar to each other. That’s why women find their stories relatable. They hear echoes of their own marital challenges in the stories Smith, Gilbert and vast numbers of other women authors share with the world. As they read, they think, ME TOO! That’s what I’m experiencing in my marriage too!

As I read, I think, Yeah…My wife too. But also, I wonder why we’re still together and these other marriages ended.

There’s not a universal answer to my question. In fact, sometimes marriages need to end. People do grow and find they are different people than when they were married, and sometimes the healthiest thing is for people to go their separate ways. For Gilbert, it wasn’t just her husband. She didn’t want to be married at all. For Smith, well, the irreconcilable differences were substantial.

But I didn’t see our relationship that way. I wasn’t convinced the differences were irreconcilable. I liked and appreciated my wife as a person. I considered that if I was single, and I came upon a person with the personality traits and qualities that she had, I’d be interested in dating that person. What’s more, I didn’t think she was being unreasonable. I considered that outside of being a terrible husband, she thought I was a good person too. I thought there was a strong chance she’d be interested in dating me if we’d met as two people later in life.

So, all I had to do was learn what she wanted in a husband, and I thought I could do that. Besides, I had a head start. I already was her husband.

It started with dealing with the worst thing I’d done. From an emotional perspective, everything else was much easier than that.

Sometimes I wonder about us men. Are we filling our lives with business and such – or “accomplishing” things – as a way to distract us from addressing the hard parts of our relationships that need attention? As if the things we are currently doing in our life somehow outweigh the things we did in the past. I think that’s what it was for me. I thought that if I had a successful career, it would make me a good man and better husband. But again, I was mostly failing at the career part. Oddly, I have a sense this made it easier to address the problems in the relationship. I didn’t have the distraction of a big career to hide behind.

I think that’s what it might be for a lot of other guys out there too. I guess I air my dirty laundry, so to speak, because I want other men to hear a story where the laundry came clean. Life got better.

I’m hopeful that it can for other guys too, if they’re willing to do the emotional work.