When does “sorry” stop meaning what it used to?

We have all grown up learning that saying sorry will fix almost any mistake. But when does “saying sorry” stop meaning so much like it used to? When you were younger and would accidentally push someone on the playground, your mom would come up behind you, grab your hand, and tell you to apologize and to give them a hug. Does this same action of reassurance to another person, by saying sorry, mean the same thing when you’re older? How about when you break someone’s heart? When you cheat on someone? Or leave someone behind completely heart shattered? Does the intent to hurt someone’s heart deserve forgiveness from saying sorry?

I always liked to overuse the word; thinking everything I was doing, regardless if I needed to apologize, was wrong. Did you know that more women than men find a reason to say sorry? Women feel as if they’re constantly messing up and either one, need reassurance or two, need to feel less dominant to whomever they are apologizing to. In a study by researcher Karina Schumann, a doctoral student at the University of Waterloo. Schumann took a study to find if women really do say “sorry” more than men; she found that to be strangely correct. "Men aren't actively resisting apologizing because they think it will make them appear weak or because they don't want to take responsibility for their actions.” But why is this? “It seems to me that when they think they've done something wrong, they do apologize just as frequently as when women think they've done something wrong. It's just that they think they've done fewer things wrong.”http://www.livescience.com/8698-study-reveals-wome..

I remember the first time saying sorry didn’t work. It was my first time in a fight with a friend of mine, and words had been crossed back and forth, and feelings were hurt on both ends. We both, endless times, tried to get out the word “sorry”, but had no bone in our body that truly wanted to apologize to the other; we were both scared by the words already put on the table. We saw this apology as a way to brush everything to the side and forget anything happened, so we never did. About a year later, still talking and sharing clothes/making memories, we both never truly got what we wanted. Then, senior year, a week before graduation at a senior breakfast, we apologized…but it felt like nothing. That’s when I realized, saying sorry doesn’t mean the same thing as it did when I was younger. Spilling wine on someone’s white dress or being late to an appointment, are all reasons to apologize. They’re all reasons to let someone know that what you did, was wrong. I’m still trying to figure out why sorry, as we get older, stops meaning so much. When I was in high school, I used apologies as a way to get out of a lot of messes I would make; literally and emotionally. So what do you think…does sorry mean the same as it used to, to you?

My mom once told me “sorry doesn’t fix things sometimes, but showing someone how you’ll do better the next time, is what an apology really is.”