The Art of the Apology
The perfect apology is one that apologizes without apologizing. There are typically two ways that most men react to getting caught red-handed amidst a moral crisis. The nice guy apologizes continuously; the jerk never bothers to address the situation. Both are beta responses because they rely on the fornication of fear and ignorance.
Ignoring a misstep runs the risk of saturating your relationship with resentment and cached animosity. Unless you’re coming from an extremely lopsided relationship with you holding all the cards, your woman will not find it easy to forget being duped or insulted.
Apologizing consistently or even once is a strategic blunder because it wins you no ground. All that stuff you read about “Real men aren’t afraid to apologize” is carnivalesque bullshit tactically engineered to get you to hand over your balls on a platter. Apologizing has nothing to do with being “a man,” chivalry is a dead art. A more accurate representation of masculinity would be; “real men take responsibility for their actions.”
Think about it logically. A mistake does not lower attraction, it lowers rapport. When you cheat on a girl or insult her, it never decreases her sexual interest in you, only her trust in you as a provider. The former can only be reduced through beta backsliding or acting like a bitch basket. The decreasing rate of marginal utility applies to apologizing as it does to almost everything else in this world. The 2nd time you apologize to a girl, it has much lower value than the 1st time. Each additional apology has a reduced effect on reconciliation and only decreases attraction, making you even worse off than before. You look like a pussy without the benefit of fixing the broken rapport.
The apology only reinforces the idea of your mistake. Every time you overtly communicate guilt or regret, you open up a new channel for audio liability. If a girl’s overriding prerogative is to maximize the amount of utility she can obtain from you, then by apologizing you’re only giving her more leverage to extract your soul. It’s a simple extension of cognitive dissonance; the more you’re “sorry,” the more both her mind and your mind feel that you have something to be sorry about.
Now think about the actual functional purpose of an apology. It’s a method to fix rapport. But is apologizing the only way to build rapport? Do you apologize to a girl you’re escalating with at a club as you’re building comfort and investment? I’m not saying apologizing itself is a masculine fallacy; I only want to point out that it’s clearly not the only way to fix a problem, and often not the best one.
Sometimes a guy can get away with shit without doing anything at all if attraction is kept at a high enough level. Remember all those relationships you heard about about where the girl kept going back to her jerk ex who refused to stop cheating on her? The answer is simpler than it sounds, a girl judges interest level on two scales, rapport and attraction. If attraction is high enough, it can cover for a low level of rapport. It doesn’t work the other way around because without attraction your image becomes desexualized. Again, this isn’t meant to be a chauvinistic justification for heinous crimes, only a thoughtful examination of why certain relationships work the way they do.
I had contended in an earlier post that if you cheat on a girl, you should say “I’m sorry” once, followed by “I will always love you,” and then disappear and go no contact. The absence distorts the emotional impact of betrayal by muddling it with the feeling of loss. Too many guys stick around after they make a mistake and continuously apologize, only highlighting the shortcomings of their relationship and making it easier for the girl to desexualize them.
And now, behold, the most masterful apologizer (yes, I just made that word up) in the entire universe:
Couple of things to take note of:
His 4 minute apology speech does not contain the words “sorry,” “I apologize,” “apology,” or “forgive me.”
Speaking in third person to evoke unified rather than specific guilt: “we’re all hurt by this”
Shifting the focus away from himself; “We must stop the pursuit of personal destruction”
Asserting that his answers were “legally correct” to weave around the gossamer thin line of moral ambiguity.
This man is a genius. Learn from him. Don’t apologize, EVADE EVADE EVADE.
Shark, could you do a list showing the main things that increase/decrease rapport/attraction please?
This article seriously fucked me over today. Maybe I misinterpreted it.
Bill is such a fucking boss.
What is the art of accepting apologies?
When I try to evade, my gf sees through it, she is determined to hear the words “I’m sorry”. I think she might be a bit alpha male herself. Any advice?