I had two friends who fell out with each other. It wasn’t a big deal really, but it took them months to make up afterwards. For one simple reason: they each insisted that the other one apologised. And neither wanted to lose face, especially when they felt it was the other one who should apologise. Over time they were civil when they couldn’t avoid seeing each other, and in the end things got back to normal – without the falling-out ever really being discussed – because actually they liked each other and wanted to be friends. They just wasted several months over the ‘sorry’ thing.

Look, it really doesn’t matter whether the other person says sorry when there’s a falling-out. What matters is how they feel and how they act, not the words they say. Words are cheap. Personally I don’t like the practice of making kids say sorry to each other when they behave badly. It’s meaningless. We should be helping our kids to feel sorry, not simply mouth the word.

One of my kids was once berated by a teacher for not saying sorry as if he meant it. He told me, ‘It wasn’t true! I apologised as sincerely as I would have done if I’d actually been sorry.’ See? The teacher achieved nothing. Whereas if she’d sat my child down and explained why his behaviour had upset his friend, he might have felt genuinely repentant.

The word sorry isn’t the important bit. When you fall out with a colleague, a friend, a partner, let them save face by making their regret clear without being forced to go through the process of saying ‘sorry’, which can feel humiliating. Their genuine concern for you and desire to make things OK is surely more important than that one silly word.

If someone makes an effort to smile and say good morning when you come in to work, that’s their way of letting you know that they don’t like the unpleasantness between you. Maybe – at some point – you might need a friendly chat about what went wrong, why it upset you, how to avoid it happening again. But the friendly smile is there to let you know the other person is OK with that.

You know, maybe they feel that they were the injured party, and that your behaviour warranted an apology. But the smile lets you know they’re prepared to overlook it. So maybe that smile says they’re (genuinely) sorry, and they forgive you too. All you have to do is smile back, by way of apology and forgiveness yourself, and the whole thing is practically sorted with no need for anyone to say sorry. Alternatively you could both grunt ‘sorry’ at each other like naughty children and not actually feel sorry at all. Now which makes most sense to you?

Having said all that – if you recognise that you’re out of order in any way, and you’re big enough, you could just say sorry anyway.