To reconcile after an argument; or to invent a story; or to compensate for something.
To reconcile with someone after a disagreement or argument; also, to invent a story or excuse that is not true; or to do something to compensate for a loss, mistake, or missed opportunity.
Type
Separable
Collocations
make up after a fight — reconcile with someone
make up a story — invent something untrue
make up for lost time — compensate for something missed
⚠️ Watch out
Has several distinct meanings (reconcile, invent, compensate, decide) — context is essential, since these senses aren't related to each other.
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On the night of November 9, 1989, East and West Germany were on the verge of something that had seemed impossible for twenty-eight years. The Berlin Wall, built in 1961, had physically and politically divided families, neighbors, and a nation. When East German authorities unexpectedly announced that citizens could cross the border freely, thousands of people {{flooded|verb-various-tenses|medium}} the checkpoints. Families who had been separated for decades {{embraced|verb-various-tenses|medium}} on Checkpoint Charlie and at the Brandenburg Gate. Siblings who had grown up on opposite sides of a {{concrete|adjective|medium}} barrier — some who had not spoken in years, others who had never met their own relatives — stood together on the rubble of a wall being {{torn down|verb-various-tenses|hard}} by ordinary hands. The reunification process was not {{painless|adjective|easy}}; economic and cultural tensions between East and West Germans persisted for years. {{But|connective|easy}} November 9 represented a genuine, historic turning point: a broken relationship between two halves of a people beginning the slow, {{difficult|adjective|hard}} work of healing. {{So|connective|medium}}, it is one of history's most dramatic examples of what it means to {{make up|phrasal-verb|medium}} — not just between two people, {{but|connective|hard}} between two entire ways of life.
To reconcile means to restore a friendly relationship with someone after a disagreement or period of conflict. It implies that both parties have worked through their differences and chosen to move forward together.
Type
Transitive verb
Collocations
reconcile with someone — the most common structure, indicating the person you restore relations with
finally reconcile — emphasises that reconciliation came after a delay or difficulty
reconcile after an argument/dispute/falling-out — specifies the context or cause of the rift
attempt/try to reconcile — suggests the effort involved, without guaranteeing success
reconcile and move forward — common pairing in neutral writing to signal a positive resolution
⚠️ Watch out
In neutral contexts, 'reconcile' is almost always used with a human subject and often followed by 'with' — saying 'they reconciled each other' is grammatically incorrect. Be careful not to use 'reconcile' in overly formal constructions such as 'a reconciliation was effectuated,' which can sound stiff and out of place in journalistic or conversational writing.
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Tom and his sister hadn't spoken properly in almost a year. It had started over something small — a comment at a family dinner that neither of them had handled well — and had slowly hardened into silence.
Their mother didn't push them. She simply made sure they were both at the table at Christmas.
They reconciled that evening, not dramatically, but quietly — over leftover turkey and a shared memory that made them both laugh before they were ready to. Tom admitted he'd been stubborn. His sister admitted the same.
By the time the table was cleared, they had reconciled fully, and the year of distance felt, if not erased, at least forgiven. Sometimes that's enough.
The Long Road Back: How Two Childhood Friends Rebuilt What They'd Lost
Some friendships end with a dramatic argument. Daniel and Marcus ended theirs with an unanswered message — a single text that sat unread for three years while both men quietly got on with their lives and told themselves they didn't mind.
They had grown up on the same street in Leeds, spent their teenage years in each other's kitchens, and then, somewhere in their late twenties, let a misunderstanding about money and a missed conversation harden into something neither of them quite knew how to undo.
It was a mutual friend's wedding that forced the issue. Seated two tables apart, they spent the first hour carefully not looking at each other. By the second, something had shifted. During the speeches, Marcus caught Daniel's eye and offered the smallest nod. Daniel returned it.
They spoke briefly by the bar. Then longer, outside. By the end of the night, they had managed to reconcile — not completely, not without awkwardness, but genuinely.
'We didn't talk about the original thing straight away,' Daniel later said. 'We just remembered who we were to each other first. That made it easier to reconcile the rest of it.'
They meet for a walk most Sunday mornings now. Some things, it turns out, are worth the wait.
In work English, 'restore the relationship' means to repair a professional connection that has been damaged by a disagreement, conflict, or breakdown in communication. It implies a deliberate, structured effort to return to a productive and cooperative working arrangement.
Type
Verb phrase (transitive)
Collocations
restore the relationship with a client — used when repairing a damaged client partnership
work to restore the relationship — emphasises ongoing, deliberate effort
steps to restore the relationship — refers to a structured or planned approach
restore the relationship on a firm footing — suggests rebuilding with a stronger, clearer foundation
fail to restore the relationship — used when remediation efforts are unsuccessful
⚠️ Watch out
In formal work contexts, always specify whose relationship is being restored — 'restore the relationship with the supplier' is clearer than 'restore the relationship' alone. Avoid using the phrase in casual internal messages between colleagues, where it may sound disproportionately formal or imply a more serious breakdown than intended.
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When a long-standing client threatened to walk away after a billing dispute, Marcus knew the stakes were high. He requested a face-to-face meeting and arrived prepared with a full breakdown of the error, a revised proposal, and a genuine apology on behalf of his team. His goal was straightforward: to restore the relationship and retain an account that represented nearly fifteen percent of annual revenue. The conversation was difficult, but honest. By the end of the meeting, the client agreed to continue on revised terms. It took several more weeks of consistent, reliable delivery before the trust returned fully, but the effort to restore the relationship had clearly been worth it.
The atmosphere in the boardroom that Tuesday morning was tense. For the past six weeks, the two firms had been locked in a dispute over intellectual property rights — a disagreement that had halted a joint product development project and, more damaging still, had left a trail of unanswered emails and cancelled calls on both sides.
Natalie Brennan, the newly appointed Chief Partnership Officer at Calloway Solutions, had been brought in precisely for situations like this. She had a reputation for calm, structured diplomacy, and her first priority upon reviewing the file was clear: restore the relationship before either party instructed their legal teams to escalate.
She opened the meeting by acknowledging the frustration on both sides without assigning blame. She presented a revised collaboration framework and proposed an independent mediator to oversee the transition back to active partnership. It was a measured, professional approach — and it worked.
Over the following three weeks, both teams returned to the project with renewed clarity about roles, timelines, and intellectual property boundaries. The decision to restore the relationship rather than pursue litigation had saved both companies considerable time, cost, and reputational risk. By the end of the quarter, the product was back on track and the partnership stronger for having survived the crisis.
In academic English, 'achieve reconciliation' refers to the process by which two or more parties successfully resolve a conflict or dispute and restore a cooperative or harmonious relationship. It is used to describe the outcome of negotiation, mediation, or interpersonal repair following a period of disagreement or estrangement.
Type
Verb phrase (transitive)
Collocations
achieve reconciliation between parties — used when specifying the two or more sides involved in the conflict
achieve reconciliation following [noun phrase] — indicates the triggering event, e.g. 'following a dispute'
seek to achieve reconciliation — expresses intention or effort, common in methodology sections
fail to achieve reconciliation — negative construction, used in contrast or when reporting unsuccessful outcomes
conditions under which [subject] achieve reconciliation — subordinate clause structure common in research questions and hypotheses
⚠️ Watch out
Avoid treating 'achieve reconciliation' as though it can be used intransitively without any contextual grounding; in academic writing, the parties involved or the circumstances should generally be made explicit. Additionally, do not conflate 'achieve reconciliation' with 'reach a compromise' — reconciliation implies restored goodwill and relational repair, whereas compromise refers only to agreement on terms.
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Dr. Harlow and Professor Mbeki had not spoken for nearly two years following a bitter disagreement over authorship credits on a landmark paper. Their colleagues watched the rift widen with concern, as both scholars were central figures in the department's most ambitious research consortium. It was ultimately the consortium's external review board that prompted a formal mediation process — one that neither researcher felt able to refuse. Over three carefully facilitated sessions, both parties were encouraged to voice their grievances and acknowledge the other's perspective. By the final meeting, they had managed to achieve reconciliation, restoring a working relationship that many had assumed was permanently damaged. The experience later led Dr. Harlow to publish a reflective essay on what it truly means to achieve reconciliation within academic communities, arguing that institutional structures must actively support, rather than merely hope for, relational repair among collaborators.
The question of whether deeply estranged individuals can achieve reconciliation has occupied relationship scientists for several decades, yet it remains surprisingly resistant to clean theoretical resolution. Part of the difficulty lies in the multidimensional nature of the construct itself. Reconciliation is not a single event but a process — one that unfolds across time, requires repeated behavioural confirmation, and is vulnerable to disruption at any stage. Early models drew heavily on forgiveness theory, treating the internal decision to release resentment as the primary mechanism of relational repair. More recent scholarship, however, has complicated this picture considerably. Longitudinal studies indicate that forgiveness and reconciliation are empirically distinct phenomena: an individual may sincerely forgive a transgressor while remaining unwilling or structurally unable to re-engage with them relationally. This distinction matters enormously for intervention design. If a therapy model assumes that cultivating forgiveness is sufficient to achieve reconciliation, it risks overlooking the environmental, communicative, and social scaffolding that empirical evidence suggests is equally essential. Future research would benefit from adopting process-oriented methodologies — diary studies, experience sampling, ethnographic observation — that can capture the granular, moment-to-moment dynamics through which relational repair either consolidates or collapses. The stakes are high: understanding these dynamics has direct implications not only for clinical practice, but for the design of institutional conflict-resolution frameworks across education, healthcare, and organisational management.