What to Do When Someone Lets You Down

Relationships depend on partners who are able to count on each other. You say you’ll be somewhere at a certain time, and you are. The same would appear to be a normal expectation of your partner. What happens when your partner fails to meet this expectation?

Perhaps you were planning to meet for a quiet dinner at your favorite restaurant. Because you want to be home in good time, both of you agree to make the dinner reservation for 5 p.m., earlier than normal. At 1 p.m., you get a text pushing the time back to 6 p.m., and at 4 p.m., it turns out that your partner can’t get there any earlier than 7. So much for an early evening. You really don’t want to be out that late, so you cancel altogether.

Rather than your partner being apologetic, though, you’re met with an attack as to why you’re being so “rigid.” Claiming that circumstances got in the way (though these aren’t explained), your partner shifts the blame onto you rather than admitting to trifling with your time and emotions. What you suspect is that your partner had better things to do, and that’s why the time kept getting later.

Excuses, Apologies, and Justifications

It seemed to you that, rather than blast you for your unwillingness to be out so late, your partner should minimally have offered some type of reason. However, you don’t want to make things worse, so you let that go, even though you’re feeling very hurt. If your partner didn’t want to provide an excuse, aren’t you still owed an apology? If not for the constant time-switching, at least for the complaint about your rigidity.

According to a new study by University of Amsterdam’s Bastiaan Rutjens and colleagues (2024), it is important “to understand whether and how judgments of moral transgressors are shaped by actors’ accounts—or 'neutralizations'—of their behavior.”

There are four types of these mechanisms for explaining this violation of social norms defined in terms of admission of wrongdoing and taking responsibility:

• Apologizing: The wrongdoer admits being wrong and takes responsibility.
• Excuse-making: The wrongdoer admits to being wrong, but denies responsibility.
• Consequentialist justification: No admission of wrongdoing, takes responsibility but uses the consequences to justify the act: "The ends justify the means."
• Deontological justification: No admission of wrongdoing, takes responsibility but argues that the wrongdoer has the right to commit the act (and/or the victim has no right to appeal it).

Looking at these options, which do you think best applies to the dinner dilemma you found yourself in? So far, there was no apology offered by your partner, just a vague excuse. Turning to admission of responsibility, if they would just come out and say it was wrong to behave this way, at least you’d know that this was a one-off and probably wouldn’t happen again.

Testing the Role of Neutralizations in Accepting Moral Transgressions

To test the effect of a wrongdoer’s neutralization on social judgments, the authors created a set of scenarios in which a man named Jack cheats a coffee server out of $10 (the server gives him change for a $20 instead of the $10 he handed her). In the apology condition, Jack tells a friend about it and says he feels sorry (but doesn’t actually apologize to the coffee shop). In the excuse condition, he claims he was too tired to realize the mistake at the time. In the consequentialist justification, Jack rationalizes his behavior by saying he needed the money more than the coffee shop did. In the deontological condition, Jack claims that it’s not up to him to correct someone else’s mistake.

Now that you get the gist of these bad behavior neutralizations, you might wonder whether any of them stand up to scrutiny. The 398 online participants who completed the second of two studies (with this version of Jack’s behavior), rated him on the qualities of morality (honesty, sincerity, and trustworthiness), sociability (kind, warm, and friendly), evaluation of wrongness (e.g., bad-good, serious-not serious), and potential punishment (how much he should be penalized).

Across studies, the findings supported the prediction that Jack would be evaluated less harshly if he took responsibility, with no difference between apologies and excuses. However, neither form of justification was considered acceptable by the participants. Justification may make the transgressor feel better, but others find it to be reprehensible if a person takes no responsibility for their own violation of social norms.

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What Do You Do When You’ve Been Wronged?

Turning back to the original incident between you and your partner, the Dutch study suggests that it was indeed the lack of admission of wrongdoing that was the crux of your negative judgment about your partner. As the authors note, “the very neutralizations that may lower the threshold for transgressive behavior at the intrapersonal level evoke harsher social responses at the interpersonal level.” In other words, if someone has committed a wrongful act, they may internally justify it away, but it’s going to look bad to an outsider.

If your relationship is a long-term and committed one, this one incident probably won’t alter its trajectory, even though you temporarily feel snubbed. If not, then you might as well be on the lookout for other transgressions to see what your partner says as a way of explanation. However, if your partner is a keeper, then there could be value in revisiting the whole situation. Perhaps there’s something you missed, or perhaps your partner just needs to know that the delay tactics plus lack of admission it was wrong presented a very unwelcome set of circumstances that you hope won’t be repeated. By the same token, if/when it is you who commits a wrongdoing, you can now see why admitting it was wrong is the first step toward forgiveness.

To sum up, moral infractions can occur even in the best of relationships. Working your way back to a solid base of trustworthiness and honesty can help keep those infractions from spoiling the long-term stability and fulfillment in your closest relationships.