He never said sorry the way other people did. Years into the relationship, Greta had finally understood why: his family had used the word as currency, tossed around so casually growing up that it had lost all weight by the time he reached adulthood. He didn’t trust the word. He trusted actions instead.
So when he’d been short with her that morning — distracted, irritable, snapping over something small that wasn’t really about her at all — he didn’t apologize when he got home.
He made her favorite dinner instead, the complicated one that took two hours. He didn’t mention the morning. He simply set the table properly, lit the one candle they owned, and waited for her to notice.
She noticed.
“This is a lot of effort for a Tuesday,” Greta said, sitting down.
“I was unfair to you this morning,” Soren said. Not *sorry*. Just the plain fact of it, stated clearly. “I wanted to do something that showed it, instead of just saying a word that wouldn’t have meant anything to either of us.”
She considered this. It would have been easy, early in their relationship, to want the word regardless — to feel that without it, something was incomplete. But she’d learned, over the years, to listen for his actual language instead of expecting her own.
“I forgive you,” she said. “Even though you didn’t ask for it in the usual way.”
“I know you understand the request anyway.”
She did. That was the thing about loving someone long enough — you learned to read the dialect they actually spoke, instead of waiting for them to translate themselves into yours.
The dinner was excellent. The apology, unspoken, landed completely.
✦ Today’s Reflection
Does your partner apologize in a different language than you do — through actions rather than words, or vice versa? Have you learned to recognize it?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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