David Wayne Stewart is a “professional Canadian” in California, USA, helping Canadian tech clusters and universities bridge into the Bay Area ecosystem. He is currently the Advisory Board Chair of Canadian Studies at UC Berkeley. His essays have won prizes at the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, and have appeared in Bewildering Stories.
Margaret and I were relaxing at the end of a long day in 2016. She was seated on our family room chesterfield, knitting, while I was in the easy chair doing a crossword. Our teenagers had retired to their rooms for the night, watching Netflix or FaceTiming their friends. All was still, except for the hum of our dishwasher and the snores of our golden retriever.
“Ow!” Margaret’s cry broke the calm. She gripped her right hand.
“What is it?” I asked, peering over my reading glasses.
“Ahh,” she winced. “I have a knitting cramp.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing? I didn’t say it was your fault.”
“Oh. Sorry,” I responded reflexively.
“Again? This isn’t about you.” Margaret was sounding a little annoyed.
“Oh, sor—” I started, then I checked myself and regrouped. “I wasn’t trying to take responsibility for your sore hand. I was trying to say that I regret that you have a sore hand.”
“Ah,” she nodded. “Canadian sorry. Why didn’t you say so?” Margaret smiled.
“Because I really did mean sorry. But since you understand that word differently than I do, then I’m sorry we had a misunderstanding.” I put on a Canadian accent so she’d know I was joking. Margaret laughed.
Phew. Conflict averted.
Margaret had recently started characterizing some of my apologies as “Canadian sorry,” since she’d noticed that Canadians are over-apologetic. She wasn’t wrong. Tourist shops in Canada sometimes feature T-shirts displaying a maple leaf and the word “SORRY”. In a 2017 article, “Why do Canadians Apologize So Much?”, writer Emily Keeler observes that Canadians often use “sorry” as a substitute for “excuse me”, as in: “Sorry, could you pass the salt?” Meanwhile, the Urban Dictionary defines “Canadian sorry” as an expression of sympathy “for something that isn’t your fault or you have no control over, such as a friend getting sick or stubbing their toe.” In 2009, the province of Ontario even enacted the Apology Act to clarify that saying sorry doesn’t constitute an “admission of fault or liability.”
Margaret and I hadn’t always been this nimble at diffusing our disagreements. Earlier in our marriage, Margaret would grow frustrated if I over-apologized, and I would retort by clanging the dishes around. And “sorry” wasn’t our only conflict either. Margaret wanted to acquire a weekend getaway near our home in Massachusetts, but I worried that owning a cottage might divert me from spending holidays in Canada. Margaret also worried about my on-again, off-again homesickness back then, and encouraged me to get out more. I suggested that she should acknowledge my nostalgia rather than try to fix it.
I began to notice that our disputes had something in common. Why did I always apologize? I’m Canadian. Why didn’t I want a cottage? I’d rather be in Canada. Why did I want Margaret to acknowledge my nostalgia? I missed my homeland. When it came to my marriage, I imagined that all roads lead to Canada.
Several years after I moved to America, I addressed my intermittent homesickness when I began working with immigrants in Charlotte, to try and help others who, like me, missed their home countries. It turned out to be a good idea, as my mood improved and my quarrels with Margaret gradually abated.
Five years later, I moved to California to start a job with the Canadian consulate in Silicon Valley. One of my responsibilities there was “expat Canadian affairs,” which involved meeting with Canadian entrepreneurs and scientists and supporting the local expat community. Although my new job was great, Margaret and I resumed our intermittent bickering in California for reasons neither of us fully understood. Our arguments featured familiar flashpoints. Should we buy a cottage? Will we make it to Canada this year? Can you please stop apologizing? The flair-ups would start small but quickly escalate, like this exchange over dinner one night:
“Sorry, can you pass the butter?”
“Sure…but why are you apologizing?” Margaret asked as she handed me the butter.
“Oh, right. Sorry.” I responded without thinking. Margaret sighed and glanced suspiciously at me, wondering if I was mocking her.
Margaret and I were keen to grasp the root causes of these renewed tensions when, as part of my job, I attended a 2010 lecture on American-Canadian cultural differences that offered a clue. A political scientist at UC Berkeley shared data showing that Americans and Canadians exhibit small but consistent differences across a range of cultural behaviors. And he emphasized that, in statistics, “consistency matters.”
Aha, I thought. Margaret’s and my cultural differences were small, but mighty. Perhaps the return of our disputes was due to my Canadian expat lifestyle in California, which—while a great fit for my professional interests—might be keeping me from being fully present in my American family life. If I could better integrate myself into the California community—as I’d managed to do in North Carolina—then the pieces of my family life would fall back into place.
Two years and several arguments later, Margaret suggested that we hire a marriage counselor to get to the bottom of our ongoing disagreements. Our counselor, Larry, insisted on being paid in cash and sat shoeless in his easy chair with stocking feet poking up from an ottoman. He dispensed advice in an off-putting manner, throwing out theories piecemeal as they popped into his head. Yet despite his flaws, Larry had a knack for reframing our disputes in ways that made us think.
When I shared my longtime worry that buying a cottage nearby might eat up vacation time that I could have used to visit Canada, Larry pushed back.
“You’re past oriented, while Margaret is future oriented,” he observed. “Maybe you’re not worried about losing Canada at all. Maybe you’re really worried about losing your past—and your father.”
Larry had a point. I did often dwell on the past, reading history books and researching genealogy. And recently I had been fretting about my dad, who had fallen ill with Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile, Margaret knit sweaters for babies who weren’t born yet and bought furniture for a vacation home that hadn’t yet been built. Larry helped me see that Margaret’s eye on the future and my lens on the past were complementary. My hindsight imbued our family with meaning, while Margaret’s foresight equipped us for an uncertain future. As my mom used to say, our family was better off with roots and wings.
Larry also set me straight when I shared my hunch that Margaret and I hadn’t been communicating as well in California because my immersion in an expat Canadian community had revived my Canadian nostalgia. Might our communication challenges improve if I socialized across a broader swath of the local community?
“You’re forgetting that Margaret was home with the kids in North Carolina, while you worked full time,” Larry offered. “Now she’s got the bigger job and you’re taking on more at home. Maybe you’re feeling more testy around Margaret now because you feel less in control of the relationship.”
Once again, Larry had a point. Over the past five years, Margaret had gone from being a stay-at-home mom to a globe-trotting executive. During her frequent business trips, I was picking up the slack at home, chauffeuring the kids around, walking the dog, or folding piles of laundry. Larry helped me see that this recent shift in our gender roles had likely introduced new strains in our relationship.
Indeed, Larry showed me that very few of our marital conflicts were caused by Canadian-American misunderstandings at all. Rather, Margaret and I were struggling with the same challenges that all married couples faced: how to meet each other’s needs, support each other’s dreams and keep the romance alive.
I was grateful to Larry for disabusing me of my Canadian reductionism and freeing me to focus on the true drivers of our marriage—things like love, fear and forgiveness. But even Larry conceded that one of our recurring marital disputes really was just an old-fashioned Canadian-American misunderstanding.
“When you apologize to Margaret,” he explained, “she sometimes hears the opposite of what you intend. Instead of empathy, she only hears you saying sorry, and it seems like you’re making it all about you. I think it’s a Canadian thing.”
Once again, Larry had a point. I do reflexively apologize for anything bad that happens. It’s probably a way for me to avoid conflict—and a bad Canadian habit. And for that, I am truly sorry.