Stories About Getting or Giving Apologies Years Later

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Some of the recent threads about high school reunions, classmates.com, etc., got me thinking about some of the people I’ve known back in my high school and college days. We’ve all had run-ins with jerks (or have been the jerk) at school or old jobs, and then you don’t see or hear from them for years.

Have you ever been contacted (maybe at a HS reunion or something) by someone from your past, and received an apology for how they treated you? Or have you ever contacted someone to apologize for how you treated them? If so, how did it make you feel to be apologized to, or what prompted you to feel the need to apologize to them? Did you get a sense of relief in apologizing or being apologized to?

You see it in the movies and on TV sometimes, I was just wondering how often it really happens?

2

A friend and I apologized to each other for a rather bizarre “break up” when we were 18 or so. We never really dated officially, but we did have an on-again off-again physical relationship. Neither of us ever brought up actually dating. Anyways, some personal stuff in his life and the way he dealt with it at the time (cutting) freaked me out, and I got angry one evening and left. The closeness just ended there, although we remained friends and continued to hang out in the same group of friends, etc. We are still in contact today.

A couple of years ago a group of us met up in a pub, and somehow it came up in conversation between the two of us, and we both kind of apologized, me for handling it badly and him for dealing with his issues in such a destructive way. Turns out we both felt really badly about that night, but I guess we both felt that pursuing it would have completely driven us apart, and in the end, just being friends really was the better path for both of us.

Sorry, that reads kind of awkwardly but I don’t want to go into details. In the end, it was probably beer that prompted the apologies!

3

A long time ago a female friend and I fell out, and I couldn’t understand why or what the problem was. Tried all the usual options for peace, repair or reconciliation, no joy.

Got a written apology ten years later, in which she explained in factual terms how it all appeared from her point of view, why she did what she did, and why she felt apologetic now.

I thought she was a great person when we were friends, I felt the same way about her throughout the intervening years, and likewise when I received her apology. My opinion of her never changed. It was actually very interesting to hear her account, and to see how sometimes a lot of harmless and innocent ingredients can come together in such a way as to create something divisive and unpleasant.

The way I see it, no-one wakes up in the morning and decides to go and treat someone else badly or behave terribly. Everyone’s doing the best they can with the cards they get dealt, and everyone’s actions and decisions make perfect sense to them at the time. Some people learn good strategies that tend to get good results most of the time, some don’t. In this particular case, she just chose to get worried about something instead of talking to me about it, and if she had chosen to communicate then the problem would never have arisen. But that’s just the decision that seemed to work best for her at the time.

It wasn’t nice for me, but life isn’t a catalogue where you order what you want. Her apology was a long time coming, but at least it came, and her explanation shed a lot of light on the darkness. I think she learned a lot from it too.

These days we’re still in touch, just about, but we live very different lives in different parts of the world. She’s still a great, wonderful person. She just made a bad choice at the time that burned up a really good and happy friendship that I felt had plenty of value.

Lesson? Try talking instead of guessing and assuming. At least try this option once, before pressing the Destruct button. It might save a lot of unnecessary hurt.

4

About fifteen years ago, I wound up serving on a committee with my first girlfriend. On the last day the committee met, I walked her back to her office, and took the opportunity to apologize for being a jerk twenty years before. She accepted the apology gracefully, saying, “You were a seventeen year old boy - it sort of comes with the territory.”

5

There was this dude I was good friends with up until we were 12. We were in the “gifted and talented” program at school together, and Boy Scouts as well. In the seventh grade, I decided I didn’t want to be a “nerd” anymore, I wanted to be “cool” instead. So I adopted a “stoner” or “rocker” look (this was the early '80s), and decided this friend was too much of a dweeb to hang out with anymore. I cut off contact with him, started treating him like shit in public, made fun of him all the time, etc. And, of course, I didn’t have the balls to tell him why.

After junior high school, his family moved away. Once I got into high school, and started to grow up a little bit, I realized what an asshole I’d been, and started feeling remorseful for the way I’d acted… but it was too late.

We’re now 38 years old. Just a couple of months ago, I was going through some old pictures and came across one of this guy. It occurred to me I could look him up on Facebook, so I did so, and found him. I wrote him, apologizing for being a complete dickhead when we were kids. Much to my surprise and pleasure, he accepted my apology.

We’ve done some catching up with what’s been going on in the last 26 years, but obviously we aren’t going to become good friends again. I can’t help but wonder how things might have turned out if I hadn’t been such a shit at 12 years old.

6

I GOT APOLOGIES AT MY HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

I was picked on A LOT in grade school. I finally got a peer group with friends at the end of 10th grade.
I went to the reunion “The class of 1971 turns 50” in 2003.
Three different people, 2 guys and a woman, came up to me and apologized to me for their bullying in grade school.
It felt good.

12-step recovery programs talk about becoming willing to, and then making amends.
I have done my share of this, too. Making amends are CHANGES rather than apologies.
Think of amendments to the Constitution. Changes.
It has been a healing journey for me.

David

7

I had my best friend drop me at age 17 without any explanation whatsoever. This was very painful to me, like a death. He was still loosely associated with my social circle for several years thereafter, and I kept running into him at parties and he would ignore me and it was all awkward.

So I wrote him an e-mail (this is six years after he dropped me) telling him I cared about him. And he spit back so much vitriol it was really shocking. I’m pretty sure he is the only person who has ever truly hated me, and I still have no idea why. My best guess is that he perceived my severe depression at the time as some kind of personal rejection, and also he hated the guy I was dating. This still bothers me, but it bothers me less now because our conversation revealed to me that he has a lot of irrational perceptions about what happened that year. It also bothers me less because I’m not seventeen years old any more.

Interestingly, I was shortly thereafter contacted by a high school former best friend who I dropped with no explanation, and I promptly apologized to her for not talking to her first. We’d been close since the fourth grade until a series of tragedies in her life turned her into a really difficult person to be around, always complaining, lying, and doing passive-aggressive shit for attention. She was one of those people who refused to change her situation or her attitude. I told her I had recently had a friend drop me without explanation and if I had known how bad it hurt I would never have done that to her. She said, ‘‘Don’t worry, I figured it was you and not me.’’ And of course I was thinking, ‘‘No, it was definitely you, but I at least owed you an explanation for why your friendship wasn’t worth my time,’’ but instead I just thanked her for her understanding and left it at that. At the time we spoke, her father had been imprisoned for the murder of her stepsister, so I didn’t feel it was necessary to detail the ways she had failed as a friend.

In my experience, apologies that come long after the damage is done are worthless. I’ve had people hurt me deeply and by the time they realized it, it didn’t matter anymore because I’d already made peace with it and moved on. At that point they are more for the person apologizing than the one being apologized to.

8

That’s sad. Do you think that maybe it was because he had feelings other than friendship towards you that obviously weren’t reciprocated? This seems like the most obvious explanation to me.

9

Erm. I have to say, I think you’re the one who failed as a friend here. Not that I blame you, because when you’re 17 you kind of feel entitled to quite a few things, including friends that don’t have personal tragedies that make them difficult to be around.

Really though, if your father had murdered your sister, and whatever else crap had happened that was tragic and you posted on here about your friend that wouldn’t talk to you anymore because of your dead sister angst, you have to know everyone would talk about what a douche your friend was for showing a total lack of support for your crap situation.

Anyhoo,

A few years ago I was contacted by an ex who apologized for being a dick when we were dating. Then he told me he was recently married, (4 months) and having marital trouble with his wife and did I want to get together.

Uhhh, well, nice to know that a) you’re still a dick and b) you’re someone else’s problem.

10

You’re making too many assumptions. Her stepsister was murdered in 7th grade, and I showed her unwavering and unconditional support until we were juniors in high school. I suffered her lying and betrayals for years before I made the decision not to be her friend any more. Second, you’re assuming I didn’t have hellacious shit of my own to deal with. If anything it should have been a time where we supported each other through our mutual pain, but she chose instead to screech about how horrible and awful her life was and how she didn’t want to hear about our problems because they couldn’t even begin to compare to her awful, horrible life. She had an excuse for every one of her problems, even the ones completely within her power to change, and she envied me so much that she made my life a living hell. She needed psychological help, for sure, and I hope she got it, but it wasn’t my responsibility to fix her, nor was it my responsibility to subject myself to her passive aggressive bullshit for the rest of my life.

I know all too well what it’s like to have friends drop you because of personal tragedies, which is why I apologized to her for not providing an explanation for ending our friendship. But nothing is ever going to make me regret ending the friendship. I may have dropped the ball with my other buddy due to my own life drama, but not with her. She’s lucky I supported her as long as I did.

11

Ok. You were there and I was not. I’ve just found that these things tend to have two sides and I’m sure her memory of what was going on doesn’t jibe with yours.

However, if you’re happy with the way things worked out, thats great. I’m just wondering if you really felt that she was totally wrong and you were totally right, why you’d bother to apologize at all - I wonder what you hoped to get out of it.

FWIW, I find these after-the-fact apologies tend to be rather self-serving.

12

I had a toxic friendship with a brother and sister. Yes, for a while I had a crush on the brother, but for the most part it was friendship.
She borrowed money from me, twice. Never paid it back. He told me later, she’d never paid any of her friends back and had severed many friendships over money.
I wrote it off to experience and we all remained friends.

Then he borrowed money too… never paid it back. He moved about 800 miles away, I moved 2000 miles away. We bother left stuff behind. We both had storage units. He asked if we could consolidate them and he’d pay half. Since I no longer trusted him, I said no.

His sister somehow talked the storage place into doing it anyway. I ended up paying for both of us for 6 months. When I went to pick up my stuff. I was livid. I dumped all of his stuff in her yard, and left.

For years after I got hang up calls from her.

Ten years later, I got a call form my accountant asking if it was alright to give the brother my number. He was in recovery and wanted to make amends.
I said sure.

I never heard from him.

She found out from a mutual friend I was getting married in the city where she lived, called to be invited to my wedding, but never showed up. :rolleyes:

So, while I got half-assed apologies, they didn’t make me feel any better and I’m still out $8000.

13

A while back I got the opportunity to apologise to my first long-term girlfriend for how I ended things.

I had treated her abominably, as only a selfish, naive, full-of-himself 21-year-old idiot could. Though I walked out of her life, she continued to be a friend of my family’s, and I saw her again, ten years on, at my sister’s place - she now happily married with kids. I had recently had my heart ripped out and stomped on, and felt a keen empathy towards what I’d put her through, all those years back.

My apology was natural, unforced, abject, and utterly genuine, and she accepted it with a kindness and good grace that I didn’t deserve. I’m sure it was more significant to me than it was to her - self serving if you like - but I’m still glad I got that opportunity.

14

That would make perfect sense if he weren’t gayer than a picnic basket.

As best I can understand what happened is this: I moved out of my house when I was 17 to escape an abusive and neglectful home life. First I had to deal with the court system and legal emancipation, then I had to get a full time job on top of school and all my other extra-curricular activities. Then a social worker revealed a family secret I had told her and because I had just run away from home, almost everyone in my family assumed I was lying for revenge and suddenly I had cops showing up at my door and social services were involved and it was a complete nightmare. I went into a deep depression and lost a lot of friends since all drama made me too much of a ‘‘downer.’’

I met a complete dumbass of a man who was willing to listen to my sob story for hours and tell me how wonderful I was. All of my friends hated this guy, and he was openly hostile to my male friend, but the guy was hot and I was lonely so I made the choice to be with him at the expense of further alienating my friends. It wasn’t a conscious choice, I just felt like I needed an ally. And this is a guy who cooked me a steak dinner and heated water on the stove for a bath when the cold water ran out. I’d never been given that kind of attention before.

So I guess the moment of truth was high school graduation. My friend drove down to see me on this day, but I didn’t realize he was there for me because at that point all of my friends routinely visited with the aunt I was living with. I had such a low opinion of myself and distinterest in my life in general that it never occurred to me my friends were there to see me. And frankly, I didn’t really care what other people wanted at that time. My life was a mess and I was just trying to make it from day to day without killing myself.

But in my defense–there were also enormous misunderstandings. A lot of my friends assumed I was with my boyfriend when most of the time I was at work until 11pm at night and then doing homework until 2 or 3am. I just didn’t have time for a social life. It’s not like I always had a choice on whether or not to be there.

Apparently I was too miserable on my graduation night to go back and party so I spent the night at my boyfriend’s house. And according to those in the know, that was viewed as some kind of ultimate betrayal on my friend’s part and he stopped having any interest in my life whatsoever. But he didn’t tell me that he was feeling left out, he just stopped talking to me altogether. He isn’t the only one who stopped talking to me, just the most painful one. Even friends that I have now kept their distance during that time because they said my personality really changed, a lot.

So yeah, I was completely absent and nonexistent as a friend that year, because I was working full-time, going to school full-time, and committed to a ton of other extra-curriculars, and when I wasn’t doing that I was completely depressed and wanted to die. What I most needed was for people to give me some space and what I got instead was people talking behind my back because I wasn’t interested in partying. It’s hard for me to defend myself because I don’t remember so much of that year. I don’t know how I behaved because I don’t remember.

So maybe my miserable friend with the murdered sister was just overwhelmed like I was, and maybe that’s why she wasn’t a good friend. I thought about it and that, alice-in-wonderland, is why I apologized. I might have been impossible to be around that year, but I couldn’t help it, and maybe neither could she.

15

I received an apology from an abusive ex-boyfriend, about ten years after the fact - he tracked me down through the Internet, before social networking sites made that common. I felt pretty freaked out, to be honest. He said he’d been doing a lot of work on himself and wanted to apologize for how he’d treated me, but I felt like if he’d had any true concept of how I felt, he’d have known I never wanted to hear from him again.

The apology felt like it had much more to do with him than me.

16

I apologized to my Mother a while back and it has brought us closer. I was a pain in the ass teenager and not my Mom’s favorite. I was doing some soul work on myself and decided to make things right with people I had wronged in my life. My Mom was on the list… Like in, “My name Is Earl”.

When she came to visit I just told her I was sorry for x,y and z. She put her hand on mine and said you are already forgiven. After that our relationship got a lot better and as I whittled down my list I felt better!

To forgive myself I had to be forgiven for the wrongs I had done. What they did to me was between them and their higher power but I wanted to clean up my side of the street. If they never clean up theirs is none of my business. Today I am much quicker to say I’m sorry and mean it. I am sometimes wrong and say or do the wrong things but I make an effort to apologize and free myself.

If you ever want to do some soul work take a piece of paper and write on top ‘resentment list’. Write the persons name and why you resent them. Then write out where were you ‘selfish’, ‘self seeking’, ‘dishonest’ and ‘afraid’. Only writing out any that may apply. It was a real eye opener to me that with most of the people I had a resentment against (I had also hurt) them in some way. I just blocked it out by blaming them.

17

When I was a teenage boy, I had a friend who I, for some reason, wished to impress. I wasn’t attracted to her, I wasn’t trying to get into her pants, I just felt compelled to make up lies about myself when talking to her. She just affected me that way for reasons I never did understand and still don’t.

She went overseas and we lost touch, and whenever I remembered her I felt ashamed of myself for talking such complete bollocks to her.

She found me on Facebook a while back, 21 years since I last had any contact with her. So after catching up a little, I wrote a great big explanation/apology. She accepted it gracefully and said that she’d thought I was probably bullshitting at the time, but it didn’t worry her either way, and she enjoyed my company anyway.

We’re still in touch, meet up for meals occasionally, and so on. We get along fine, and have the same kind of friendship we did back then, except now I’m honest. It felt good to apologise, I’m glad I got the chance.

18

A very wise man once told me, “Sometimes the best amends you can make to someone is to leave them alone.”

19

I was in college, in a long-distance relationship that had started in high school. It was the start of my sophomore year, and I was deeply unhappy with the relationship; it felt like I was putting in most of the effort. I rarely saw my boyfriend during the school year because he was a long distance away, so I felt like letters and (rare) off-hours phone calls were important. (This was before most people even knew what E-mail was, and in fact a couple years later I would get E-mail as part of my campus job, which was vaguely impressive to my friends yet useless as they didn’t have it.)

I had felt vaguely neglected for part of the previous year, and this new school year wasn’t starting off much better. He was almost never in when I tried to call. I felt like I did most of the letter writing. When I did speak with him, though, he was apologetic and sweet, but still felt distant emotionally.

I talked with friends about it, because I cared about him, and we had been friends first, but I was starting to doubt my “stand by your man” tendencies. Finally I gave up on it. Long-distance relationships are brutal normally, but this was really tearing me up.

I wanted to tell him in person, but I found out he wouldn’t be going back to our hometown the whole semester, even visiting his roommate’s parents (who were pretty near the college he attended) during a break or two. I wrote a breakup letter. I was not happy with him. There was a lot of grief in me, but I let out some anger and resentment too.

Some time later (might have been weeks or a few months, I no longer remember), I got a letter in response. He admitted he’d been “neglecting” me for quite a while to spur me to break up with him. He said it was a misguided attempt to make me feel better by being the one to do it, because he knew I loved him, and he didn’t want to hurt me by a breakup, and he later realized he hurt me by leaving me hang on for so long.

This did not help me. At this point, I would deeply have preferred to have been left alone, and I was a mix of angry and contemptful about the letter, but did nothing to communicate with him.

A few years later, I had gotten past this and wanted to let him know that I was OK, and I understood. I called his parents and spoke with his mom, told her my reasons for wanting to contact him, and got his number. I called him and told him why I was getting in contact, that I was past all of that, and was sorry for how I handled my end of things.

He then came out to me as gay. He had been raised in a very strict Catholic fashion, and had desperately pushed down any conflicting feelings from a very young age, to the point where he was in pretty much total denial. I was a very good friend, and he loved dearly me in that way, and hung onto that for as long as he could delude himself. When he set about trying to get me to break it off, he was still in deep denial about it, but with me away and him finding out more about life and himself while away at college, he realized he didn’t really love me like that. We were both very emotional on the phone with each other at that point, and I told him that the loss of him as a boyfriend would have hurt, but I would have understood if he told me he was gay. He said he couldn’t even understand it at that point, that it took a little longer for him to realize that he really was gay and wasn’t letting himself admit/realize it.

We had both changed a lot in that time, and so we had some further contact but not much, and I’m glad for the chance to very amicably end that drama-filled part of my life. I’d welcome further contact from him, but we both moved on and I’m good with that.

20

I worked in a Victorian House Museum for a while. One day we received a package in the mail. It contained an old doll dress and an anonymous letter.

The letter was from a woman explaining that she had stolen the dress from the museum 20 years ago, as a child, when her class had come to visit and security wasn’t as good. She had felt terrible about it ever since. She was now going through AA and wanted to make it right so she was mailing the dress back.

We displayed the dress prominently in the nursery so that if she ever decided to come back, she could see that the dress was back where it was supposed to be.