There’s an ex-classmate of mine who is mutual friends with several of my friends on Facebook. Back when we were in high school, he & I messed around a little - nothing major, we were both 15 and experimenting. I was new, and AFAIK, he decided to tell people that he had gone “all the way” with me when school started. This haunted me my whole high school career.
I have thought that maybe he did it because I dropped him - I was a pretty socially awkward 15 year old who hadn’t dated a lot, and I probably didn’t handle it very gracefully. I’ve thought about contacting him to see why he spread this rumor and to see if he would apologize - maybe I should apologize too. But I don’t know that anything would be gained by it now.
Some of these stories are pretty epic. Mine is not so much so.
I moved to a new town when I was 15, and had just started high school. I didn’t have much of a problem making friends, but there was this one guy who was always hassling me. Every day he threatened to beat me up, and he was usually with a couple of his tough guy friends. He made two of my three years of high school total hell.
A few years later, when I was in college, I was hanging out at a bar with a friend, an older guy. The bully guy happened to be there as well. He came up to me and apologized profusely for his behavior. His explanation was that he was usually stoned in school, and usually upset because his mother was dying of cancer. In fact, the friend I was with was the undertaker who buried the bully’s mother.
I accepted the apology and we spent the next few hours buying each other beers.
OMG. I contacted an ex a few years ago, and I apologized to him, well, basically for being young and foolish but definitely doing some things to hurt him. In turn it turned out he felt he needed to apologize to me! We both made up, moved on, etc.
All done, right? What a pretty package. Of course not.
He continued contacting me and I responded. I felt a little uncomfortable with it, since he was my EX and there was a reason he was that way, but I figured it was just me - after all, lots of people remain friends with their exes.
Then he mentioned a couple of times about how he and his wife have had LOTS of tough times BUT how they are oh-so-happy now. More than three times, and I started to get a weird vibe from it.
Then he started hinting that sometimes he was in my town, and did we want to meet? I put the kibosh on that and told him frankly I wasn’t interested.
For a while I had him friended on my LJ but I began to realize he was reading every entry - meaning all the way back to 2005, which is when I started writing it. I dropped him from my f-list soon after.
Then it got really weird. I have stories published on a certain site under a slightly different name. He found them and presumably read them. That doesn’t bother me, they are on an open forum and that’s fair. But then he up and wrote me about one of the stories and started asking me some accusatory questions about it!
Dude, not only do you cyber-stalk me, which I know I can’t do shit about, (because I never so much as mentioned that site to him or that I write or anything - he just googled all of the names I have gone by on the 'Net until he found something) but you actually let me know you are cyber-stalking me? Not bright.
That and a few other things caused me to evaluate our relationship. Was it providing anything good to my life? Did I even want to talk to him? Did I want all of this drama?
I decided no, and blocked him from my e-mail. And I haven’t talked to him since.
The way I did it is, his blog is open to everyone and he has a very unusual last name. I found it one day, and left a message on one of his posts with my e-mail addy and said he could write me if he wanted. I then let him make the next move, and only then I apologized.
And yes, I know that everything he did could have been construed as innocent. I never really let him get to a truly creepy point, if he was going there. However I just thought it would be better if it would be nipped in the bud.
I had a friend who (I believe) was suffering from untreated post partum depression go absolutely insane on me and threaten me with violence for some transgression she was convinced that I had committed (I hadn’t). I had to call the police to get her off my property. I had one abusive phone call from her weeks later, and bizarrely a Christmas card the following year with a picture of her daughter in it, but no other contact.
Ten years later she tracked me down on the internet and sent me a message apologising, taking the entire blame on herself. She said she knew I hadn’t done what she’d accused me of, that even if I had she’d been utterly out of line in how she reacted, and that she’d felt guilty for it every day since. She begged my forgiveness. I gave it, but didn’t resume our friendship - I prefer to keep her as a non-hostile acquaintence. It did feel good to know she was sorry, and that she recognised both that I hadn’t done what I was accused of and that she’d been completely out of line in her reaction.
On the flip side, I stumbled across the website of a high school friend I’d had a falling out with years earlier, and contacted her to apologise for being a jerk (that time, it was entirely my fault). She accepted my apology and now we’re good friends again.
I don’t know if apology is the right word but my first true love expressed sorrow for the pain she caused when she left me. It was 30 years ago and it meant a lot to me. After all these years there is still a strong bond between us.
You can read my earlier thread for a few more details if you really want.
Basically, my brother showed a few signs of being gay very young. I was pretty young at the time too, but I was (and am) capable of being a merciless bastard. So I taunted him a lot for being feminine, girly, gay, whatever.
Interestingly, as an adult, he is none of these things. Well, other than gay. Basically just a dude that’s very athletic, laid-back, with a nearly identical sense of humor to me, but he just happens to prefer the company of men.
Once we were both in our teens I realized, "Holy God, it might be true. What an asshole I am. I need to STFU immediately; tormenting my brother about what he is is like 10x worse than taunting him about something he isn’t.
Recently he just came out and I kinda felt like shit. I apologized sincerely about the past taunting when he told me. He just shrugged it off - “no big deal, I’ve heard it all” - which might either be good or bad. Time will tell. I really hope I wasn’t as bad as I remember. He seems fine with it so that’s good.
I ran into an old friend of my sister’s that used to be mean to me when we were teenagers and she took me aside and apologized profusely.
It was actually kind of nice, considering that her bullying was pretty mild as such things go and I wasn’t damaged by it – I had pretty much forgotten about until I ran into Kim that day.
Saw the subject line and figured “I have something to contribute!” Saw the OP and thought “it’s just like that too!” Read the thread and I though “and I’m not alone!”
Basically similar to above, picked on at school. Flash forward 20 years to the reunion, having several people come up to me to apologize for dickish behaviour after the fact, and I’m touched by their apology and accept it.
Could very well be, but I wholeheartedly appreciated their apology. Doesn’t do much to erase what happened to me in high school, but the fact that they actually came up to me to apologize at the reunion meant a lot to me, even though it really accomplishes nothing.
I’m curious now why we always hear from those who were bullied, but seldom from those who were the bully in high school. Was talking with some friends earlier (tough guy types, at least as adults) and they mentioned that they were bullied as kids too, and also wonder why we never run into adults that were the bullies back then.
(Yes, my previous post mentioned that peopel apologized to me for bullying me, but I was a special case, everyone bullied on me in high school! No word of a lie, one of the main bullies I remember was on the Reach for the Top team (Canadian equivalent of Quiz bowl), on the chess team and was student council president. I’m so geeky my bullies were nerds!)
I’ve given two of these kinds of apologies and in hindsight I don’t think I needed to do so either time. But in brief, they went like this:
In college I apologized to an ex-girlfriend for being mean during high school. I say I didn’t need to apologize because while some of my friends went out of their way to be mean to her, I didn’t do that. I’d laugh when it was funny, which it often was, but that’s not the same thing. And she was a remarkably annoying person. What I would have liked to have said is that her own behavior contributed to a lot of that stuff, but which was true, but she never would have gotten the message. Oh well.
Some years later I apologized to my dad for being kind of a jerk at holiday gatherings when I was younger. I wanted to acknowledge own up to it. I say I didn’t need to apologize because, for one thing, everybody’s a jerk sometimes from 13 to 15, it’s part of how you figure out your own views. Two, I was not that bad. And three, my parents really did not handle it well when I decided that religion was not for me. I consider it one of their few real failures in parenting. They pretty much ignored the whole thing for years and tried to force me to go along with it. It looks stupider in hindsight because they later admitted they weren’t religious at all, so they were trying to make me go along with something they didn’t believe in either. I think they did it because they felt they’d be dropping the ball and disappointing their own parents. I’m sure they were better than many parents in that situation but they’ve never acknowledged how hard they made that for me.
I did receive one of these apologies once. When I was 13 a good friend not only dropped me, he (and a few friends) went out of his way to make my life hell for the whole school year, or maybe longer. I didn’t get a reason, it just happened and it didn’t go away for a long time. So in addition to not having any friends for a while, the people who I thought were my friends were tormenting me. It was bad. We went to different high schools. Sometime in our senior year (I think), I wound up at his school to see a play and we ran into each other afterward. That night he sent me an email saying it was good to see me and that he was sorry about everything that happened. I appreciated it. I don’t remember if he gave me an explanation. We talked every once in a while about getting together and jamming, but we never did get around to it.
I’ve apologized to a girl in high school I knew, I believe I did it at the end of senior year. I didn’t do anything to her, but she was always considered since she joined our class in the 8th grade as the “weird one”. She had memorized elvish and could fluently write in it, and actually she wrote beautiful poems (in English class and not in Elvish, though I did catch her sometimes writing them on the chalkboard in elvish during lunch hours) in 9th grade, and was a huge classics geek. She was always teased and picked on by others in our Latin class (because she was so far ahead of the rest of us that she was considered the Teacher’s pet- they’d discuss various themes and poems and works, while the rest of us slaved away just to try to translate the Aeneid). But yeah, in 12 grade, I went up to her and apologized for never sticking up for her and for also thinking she was weird back in the day. I realized she was actually a pretty cool person over the final year, though just REALLY passionate about the Classics, but that’s cool. And so I said sorry for not making it easier and for adding to the hard times in school.
It was kind of a relief to get that off my chest when I told her, and she actually smiled and accepted my apology. And though we were never super close friends, she became a good friend of mine through college, and we still catch up time to time to just say hello and reminisce about old times.
I’ve also had an apology given to me by my first ex-gf for all the stuff she’d put me through at the end of our relationship/afterwards, but I don’t really want to talk about that one. It was very odd, and about well 4 years later down the road from all the events, and I remember thinking, “Man, this would have been so nice to hear 1-2 years after these events when I was hung up on them.” At that point, I was okay with the situation, and had moved on. So I felt like the apology was more for her than for me. So I did the nice thing accepted it and told her not to worry about it, I had already forgiven her and moved on. We’re still good friends to this day now and the apology has grown on me. It was nice of her to do, and a big step for her to admit she made some mistakes.
So I think it was a good thing and it’s only brought us a better friendship.
In my experience bystanders either doing nothing or laughing along with bully hurt just as much as the bullying. After all you’re ‘powerless’ to make it stop so you’re sort of hoping for someone to say, “Hey, that’s not cool.” That apology was probably necessary.
My God, except for the ex-coming-out-as-gay part, I had the exact same experience. I was really angry at my ex for a very long time over the pain he’d put me through under the pretext of not hurting me, until sometime shortly after I graduated college, when I realized that we’d both been young and dumb. I was finally able to forgive him and move on.