When you screw up, you know it. She knows it. Hell, five minutes after it happens, everyone knows it. (Thank you, Facebook.) But there’s always the chance for redemption, slim though it sometimes may be. Handling that delicate, and often flighty, opportunity to grovel at her dainty I-wear-$200-shoes-that-you-pay-for feet can be tricky, and one false step lands you couch surfing for a week. So what do you do?
Well, it’s different for every woman, but I’ll tell you what you don’t do. You don’t buy her flowers with a cute little note and expect that to take care of it, no sir. Flowers say I’m sorry, true enough, but over-usage of this method can do far more damage than good. If you give her flowers every time you screw up, she’s going to start thinking, pretty quickly, that this is a cop-out. That you’re buying flowers because it’s the simplest way to say I’m sorry; you don’t have to put much effort into it, therefore you don’t mean it as much as if you’d say, organized to have Cirque du Soleil preform in your backyard while her favorite band provides the background music during her very own private concert.
Now clearly flying acrobats and Bon Jovi are unrealistic expectations on her part, but the point is this; do something that will seem, in her mind, like it took a bit of effort. The amount of effort it appears to have taken is directly proportional to how quickly the water you’re in cools down. Whether your symbol of how incredibly sorry you are that you forgot to take out the trash took five seconds to coordinate or not is irrelevant, so long as she thinks it took five hours, and never finds out otherwise. (A good side note here would be cover your tracks. She finds a receipt that says your apology gift cost three bucks at your local Quicky Mart and she’ll hang you from the nearest flagpole allowing you to reveal your new status as a eunuch.)
Recap: No repeats, make it appear as long it took you a minute, and cover your tracks.
Most women prefer you not have a reason to apologize though, because it means you’ve already accepted their superiority and are no longer testing the length of your leash.
