To want women to stop saying sorry all the time?

[tryanotherone123]

There's just too much sorrying. Yes it is now a verb.

Sorry to bother you, sorry I want, sorry I need, sorry I've inconvenienced you with my breathing. Constantly all day in every interaction. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry.

If you drop an anvil on someones toe, fine, apologise. Otherwise this is not a good way to navigate the world.

Saying sorry when there is nothing to be sorry about is just apologising for existing. Who would do that. Why should we be so fucking sorry? And if we are not actually sorry why do we say it? I do know why - women aren't supposed to assert their own needs and wants and we have to try to manage other peoples behaviour towards us.

Maybe we could change that if we all just stopped being so bloody sorry. Please.

I also think this is a very British thing.

As many men as women say it in my experience.

I agree there are occasions when an apology is appropriate and I will say sorry if I know I have genuinely done something wrong. It actually feels a lot more meaningful now I'm not saying it because it's raining or the person I'm talking to got stuck on the bus

To me saying sorry can have different meanings. It can be a full on apology or it can be used as as an intro to explain a situation. It is certainly a softer approach than the 'Thanks for waiting line' which is doing the rounds at the moment. Everytime I've heard it, the person has either sounded rather arrogant or superior as if they knew that of course a person would still be their waiting for them.

I am the least sorry person ever and have been labelled difficult by men many times. I worked in a very male dominate environment for quite a few years, only 10% women.

Yes it is.
Nothing to do with being female.
I do it, Dp does it.
We can both be polite and assertive and even firm when we have to be.
I think walking into to someone with a trolley for instance its socially accepted behaviour apologise.

As little anecdotal evidence of how British this is. I live in Denmark near Lego. I went to a sewing day and one of the women kept saying (sorry) undskyld undskyld (with hands held up). I asked if she was British and she said no but she was the only one on her team at work who isn't.

In the same way that women are conditioned to keep saying sorry, I also think a hell of a lot of men are conditioned to expect women to apologise, even when it's them who are in the wrong! Just such an example of this happened to me a few months back. I am disabled and have mobility issues,I use a walking stick and certainly don't charge around not looking where I am going. I was just about to step out of the door of my local shop when a man came barging through, looking at his phone,nearly knocking straight into me. I stepped back to let him through,and instead of apologising for nearly running into me,he glared at me and said 'Don't worry about apologising!' or words to that effect. I was speechless.

Don’t say you’re sorry unless you really mean it was one of the best pieces of advice I was given in one job I had. The job was shit and I walked out in the end but that advice has stayed with me

I don't know, I think generally people don't say sorry enough. You ask why say sorry if you don't mean it but in work I say sorry all the time, even if the issue is not my fault, anything to do with me, or is out of my hands. It just smooths things over.

It annoys me when dealing with companies that people just don't stick their hands up and say 'yes, sorry,' acknowledges a problem and go on to say how they will fix it. It doesn't have to be a big deal or dwelt on beyond that. 99% of the time all people want is an acknowledgement and if they get it they calm down. When I see threads on here about bad customer service, neighbour issues, etc. I do wonder how many of the issues could have been solved with just a simple 'I'm sorry about that.'

People seem to see it as some sort of huge admission of guilt or culpability or liability, or equate someone expecting an apology as wanting them to throw themselves on the floor and beg for their forgiveness.

e.g. in the example someone gave above about saying 'thanks for waiting for me,' rather than 'sorry I was late' to a meeting - well I think if you were late you should say sorry! By all means say thanks for waiting as well but if you've held up the meeting, you should apologise! But people instead whine on about 'it wasn't my fault, my first meeting ran late/there was bad traffic' - I don't care! Most of the time you could have done something to be here on time if you'd cared enough, and even if it was completely out of your hands, all you're saying is you're sorry about that, not admitting fault. If someone just waltzed in saying 'thanks for waiting,' I'd be a bit annoyed and would be thinking 'thanks for showing up/' or 'well we didn't exactly have much choice, cheeky cow.' Whereas with a 'sorry' I'd think 'fair enough, let's move on.'

I'm always impressed on here when people put their hands up and say 'Oh sorry, I didn't read the full thread,' or 'sorry I misunderstood,' when they've misread something or it's been explained to them. Happens pretty rarely though.

I do understand why over-apologising is an issue for women, and I try and remove the extraneous 'pre-emptive' apologies and general faffiness from my emails to make them more 'manly'/direct - all the 'hope this is okay,' 'sorry to bother you,' etc.

But generally I think saying sorry is a good thing, and people do it too little rather than too much!

Im like this all the time i am working on it.
But for me it was because i was with a very abusive man and grew up in a abusive house hold so i was always saying sorry even if id done nothing wrong.
Sometimes we dont know peoples stories or past.
Maybe nothing but again she may have her reasons.
Please dont judge.

I am 60 and have spent all these years apologising. Thank you for this post, I am going to do something about it, never too late!

I once apologised (to a man 🙄) about the local road layout, which meant he would have a twenty minute drive to get to a location half a mile away.

strangely enough, I did not design the medieval road network.

I’m working on it 🫣

I'm not saying there's never such a thing as apologising too much but as others have said, there's a hidden (sexist) assumption that - if - there's a difference between male and female behaviour, e.g. in the workplace, then that means women should change to be more like men to be taken seriously. There are two alternative interpretations:
Women's behaviour is an adaptation to help them in an environment where they would be judged more harshly than men if they adopted typical 'male' behaviour.
The stereotypical male behaviour is actually a bit anti-social and men could do with being more like women.

Deborah Cameron's blog is good on this, e.g. https://debuk.wordpress.com/2015/12/30/crap-apps-and-female-email/

By the way, I frequently use 'Sorry' to mean 'Get out of my way, I need to get off the train'. It's all in the context!