So, Gordon Ramsay celebrated his 44th birthday by publishing an open letter to his mother-in-law in the Evening Standard. It implored her not to cut her daughter Tana out of her life following the increasingly bitter fall out between Ramsay and his father-in-law (and ex-business partner) Chris Hutcheson.
Meanwhile, Ronan Keating has made an apology to his wife, Yvonne, for cheating on her. His chosen method? The sleeve notes on his latest album. ‘For the mistakes I have made in my life I am sorry,’ he writes. ‘Guess you have to go there to come back. It was a dark place and you were the light to bring me back. I love you.’
Presumably both of these strange public declarations were well meant — but if I were Greta Hutcheson, Tana Ramsay or Yvonne Keating, I’d be furious. In both cases, they say far more about the man in question than the women they’re supposed to be appealing to. The majority of Ramsay’s letter is an attack on the husband of the woman he’s writing to (never a brilliant method of persuasion). And would you really be happy with a public apology blazoned on the inside of your husband’s latest product?
The first rule of a good apology — it’s not about you, it’s about making the other person feel better. ‘Get some perspective,’ says life coach Marilyn Devonish. ‘What does this look like from the other person’s point of view?’ If more of us took that into account, rather than worrying about protecting our own self image, we’d probably all be far better at apologising.
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