Apologies Accepted

Because none of us acts the way we wish we would all of the time, there will always be a need for sincere apologies. And, here, sincerity is everything. Once you can fake that, you've got it made. By now, I think we have all realized that the notion of "love means never having to say you're sorry" is a load of crap when it comes to dealing with people outside of a sappy, yet romantic screenplay, so we'll just keep moving.

There are a lot of ways to say "I'm Sorry". There are also a lot of ways to sound like you're saying "I'm sorry", while never actually doing so. There are several very popular forms of the non-apology: "I'm sorry if I've hurt you in any way", which really amounts to "I'm sorry you're so overly sensitive", or "I'm sorry you can't take a joke". It also shows up as "I'm sorry, I only meant to say", which has the added feature of a subtle, yet arrogant, insult and is usually heard as "I'm so sorry that your brain and/or education failed you that you were so dense as to not understand what I, so obviously, meant". The non-apology has great appeal to many because it never once crosses into the realm of actually taking responsibility for having caused hurt to someone else. It's also appealing because it normally contains a certain amount of truth. In many cases the injured party did, in fact, simply misunderstand the intentions and meanings of the other person. The person apologizing just wants to explain this fact, thinking this is how it is best resolved. Unfortunately, it still comes out as a variation of "let me explain to you why I am right and you are wrong", or "allow me to show you why your feelings are invalid". What the non-apology does not take into account is that, at that moment, the injured party doesn't care about putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again. He/she just wants to be understood. The explanations can wait. No one, when hurting, wants to hear justifications from the one that did the hurting.

The educational apology has started to gain wider employment lately. It has a very special feature, custom made for people who grew up Catholic, Jewish or just about anyone who grew up with a mother. Its form is simple: "I'm sorry that happened to you, but you know, it would never have happened if you'd just been more _____". No pain is so terrible that it can't be made worse by adding a little guilt.

The manipulative non-apology is also starting to make a come back. This one is very cool, because it

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