‘I’M Sorry’ Experts Says Men, Women Tend To Approach The Phrase Differently

The phrase “I’m sorry” so often rolled off MaryAnn Adams’ tongue when she was waitressing at a Wallingford, Conn., restaurant that it ended up on her goodbye cake when she left the job.

“It was a great big cake, and they put ‘I’m sorry’ right on top of it,” Adams remembered with a laugh.

Her co-workers were ribbing her, but at the same time they were delivering her a message about how often she peppered her speech with the phrase.

“I use it all the time,” she said.

Adams is not the only sorry-aholic, especially among women.

Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, cites research showing women are more likely than men to apologize and that they utter the most apologies to other women.

Men, she wrote in her 1994 book, “Talking From 9 to 5,” (Avon paperback, $12.50) utter very few apologies to other men and slightly more to women.

Consider this recent example:

When Chicago Bulls forward Dennis Rodman was ordered to sit out 11 games, undergo counseling and pay a $25,000 fine for kicking a TV cameraman during a January game in Minneapolis, he was unapologetic. He blamed the cameraman for exaggerating his injuries.

When figure skater and Olympic gold medalist Oksana Baiul was arrested for drunken driving, the first public statement she issued was an apology. She did the same thing later on national television.

Why is there such a gender gap in this sorry situation?

Experts suggest men feel apologizing puts them in a one-down position, a spot they are not happy or at all comfortable in, but a spot some women may be accustomed to.

Often, men will do anything to avoid saying they are sorry, which in their view, is accepting blame, said Leslie Beebe, professor of linguistics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Instead, she said, men will say, “Let’s just fix it,” or, “A mistake was made.”

Men do not say they are sorry for much the same reason that they do not ask directions when they are driving. They see communications as competition and they do not want to seem vulnerable, Beebe said.

For Adams the expression is a reflex.

“My husband says, ‘If there’s a cloud in the sky, you would say you put it there,”’ Adams said. “Sometimes I get so mad at myself, because I’ll say I’m sorry to my kids for something like not putting out a glass of milk.”

The apology is quick to come out especially when she’s feeling burdened and the demands of everyday life are slipping out of control. Still, Adams said she’d rather be someone who is overly considerate “or meeker” than someone who is inconsiderate.

Indeed, “I’m sorrys” can be viewed as “automatic conversational smoothers,” Tannen said.

“For many women and a fair number of men, saying ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t literally an apology. It is a ritual way of restoring balance to a conversation,” wrote Tannen. “I’m sorry can be an expression of understanding and caring about the other person’s feelings, rather than an apology.”

Experts say there may be a danger in saying “I’m sorry” too often.

“It’s saying, ‘I’m not good enough,’ and sometimes it’s an apology for existing. Depending on how often someone uses it, it can be a sign of how badly they feel about themselves,” said Zsuzsa Simandy, a psychotherapist.

Women, she said, are raised to put their own needs after everyone else’s, to be the caretakers.

“We walk around with a lot of unrealistic expectations,” Simandy said.

“This leads to continuous feelings of not having done enough for those needing us, hence overidentifying with them to the extent our own needs are not met, and feeling guilty and apologizing for our ‘inadequacies’ and for sometimes actually putting our own needs first.”

Apologizing can be seen as synonymous with putting oneself down.

“People who utter frequent ritual apologies when others don’t may end up seeming to be taking blame for mishaps that are not their fault,” wrote Tannen. “When they are partly at fault, they come out looking entirely so.”

But Sharon Lamb, associate professor of psychology at St. Michael’s College in Vermont, said women should be credited for their linguistic manners. She said ritual apologies are displaying a “hyperinterrelatedness, a caring about the other person one’s interacting with.”