Will They Ever Say Sorry?

It is two years since the divorce. He has remarried. The photographs are everywhere, and she looks happy.

He has never once said he was sorry. Not for the affairs, and not for what he told my family about me. I am fine on most days. But I cannot stop thinking that he simply got away with it.

Kirti, I am going to pass on something hard, because I think it will free you sooner than sympathy would.

The song that is not coming

There is an old belief that a swan sings once, beautifully, as it dies. The psychologist Ramani Durvasula uses it for the thing you are waiting for. It is the full apology, the recognition of everything you did and everything you put up with.

Her advice is three words. Do not wait.

She says this wait undoes more people than anything else, because it turns the apology into a gate. You tell yourself you will move on when he admits it. But a real apology needs empathy, and that was the thing he never had. She asks why it would turn up now.

Got away with what?

This is where she is toughest. “It is not right that he got away with it,” people tell her. She asks: according to whom? And what, exactly, did he get away with?

Most of us carry a private belief that accounts are settled in the end. She says flatly that neither life nor karma works like that, and that giving up the idea is part of mourning. She goes further and says he does not owe you anything.

I found that line hard to read. I have come to think it is a kindness. A debt that will never be paid keeps you tied to the debtor. She suggests the only justice on offer may be that you have your life back.

Will he be different with her?

I suspect this fear is underneath the photographs. Perhaps he will get it right this time, and that will prove the fault was yours.

Durvasula quotes a woman who had spent seventeen years with a selfish, unfaithful husband. He left her for someone else, and for years she had to see them around the neighbourhood. She wondered whether he would be different with his new wife. He was not. He was the same man, and he was now somebody else’s problem. That marriage ended too.

A photograph shows the surface. You, of all people, know how good he is at surfaces.

“Maybe it was me”

Blaming yourself has a strange appeal. Durvasula explains it. If it was your fault, it was in your control.

She answers with a study of baboons. The Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky had watched one troop in Kenya for many years when its most aggressive males died after eating infected meat from a rubbish dump. Those males had bullied everyone else. You would expect the next rank to step up and do the same. They did not. The troop became more peaceable, with more grooming and less fighting. Stress hormone levels in the survivors fell.

Sapolsky’s team read this as a finding about culture. Durvasula reads it as a clinician. Take the bully out, and everyone who remains is healthier. The remaining baboons had not been the problem. Sometimes, she says, it is not you.

If you were the one who was left

She notes that it stings even when you are well rid of him. You are not short of ego either. She warns against fighting to get a marriage back out of pride, and asks you to be clear first about what you would be fighting for.

What to keep

Durvasula does not end on bitterness. She quotes Desmond Tutu’s view of forgiving. It is not forgetting. It is remembering, and choosing not to hit back.

That choice is available to you without a word from him. He never has to say it. You can stop listening for it.