mefitours: “One of my wife’s distant friends has attempted to invite herself to stay with us, again,” writes the exasperated owner of a prime 2 bedroom apartment in New York City in this Ask MetaFilter question. “She did this last March, and we used the excuse of me starting a new job and needing to do x, y, and z as well as the “out of town” excuse for any remaining dates. This got us off scot-free, but we both knew the time would come again… and it’s here. We need a final solution.”
He goes on to list two different possibilities he can think of for getting this woman to stop asking for free room and board. The first is a little white lie, something about their keys being hard to duplicate. The other is to be vague, to say something like “Sorry, that isn’t going to work for us” and hope she doesn’t ask why.
The first few answers give this poster very direct advice: Just say no. No need to give an explanation, it’s her who’s being rude by asking. Others give him advice that was probably more like what he was expecting: other ways to be vague like claiming that it’s “One of those random `Life in NYC things.’”
Another thread of discussion popped up around whether or not the woman asking for a place to stay was being rude. Some posters couldn’t understand how simply asking to stay in someone’s apartment was rude, while another went as far to say that putting someone in the position “having to be rude and say no” was rude in and of itself.
It is into this context that user tangerine contributes this answer:
This is a classic case of Ask Culture meets Guess Culture.
In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you’re a Guess Culture person — and you obviously are — then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you’re likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.
If you’re an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.
Obviously she’s an Ask and you’re a Guess. (I’m a Guess too. Let me tell you, it’s great for, say, reading nuanced and subtle novels; not so great for, say, dating and getting raises.)
Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people — ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you’ll have to embrace Ask behavior. Otherwise you’ll spend your life in a cloud of mild outrage at (pace Moomin fans) the Cluelessness of Everyone.
As you read through the responses to this question, you can easily see who the Guess and the Ask commenters are. It’s an interesting exercise. (#)
After this comment many users, including the original poster himself, began to use these terms in discussing the issue. And why wouldn’t they? Ask Culture and Guess Culture describe two valid yet opposing ways of interacting with the world with very little value judgment given to them. Framing the argument as such was a stroke of utter genius by tangerine, broadening the perspective of many who participated in the discussion and adding to the general lifebuzz.
aeveee: This is fascinating. My mom was, I think, a variety of Guess culture. She disliked telling her kids no to reasonable requests. We learned to make flat/information statements like “I’m going to need a ride after school on Friday,” and if she responded with another flat stament like “I have to work until 5 on Friday,” then we knew we had to problem solve an alternative. My parents divorced when I was 12. One summer spent with my dad when I was 16, he blew up at me. “Why don’t you just ASK for a ride?!” It was only when explaining mom’s preference that I realized I’d been trained not to make my mom say no. So I learned dad’s way too. This is the 1st time I’ve actually had NAMES for this issue.
Thoughts:
-I wonder how many failed relationships and divorces have mixed ask/guess culture as a component?
-I wonder how many other like me there are-trained in both cultures due to a mixed marriage-and what this does to our own relationships.
-why is this not a widely known thing? Good god it seems a HUGE facet of effective communication and I’m only just hearing about it at 51 years old? Is there a book about this somewhere? Dammit…
This is incredible and I can’t believe I’ve never heard it put this way before and I’m 54. My family is definitely of the Guess variety because this really explains the crazy lack of communication. My mother is an extreme Guesser and actually gets angry when you can’t just guess what she wants. She is 84 and I chaulked it up to being raised in the 40’s and 50’s when women didn’t ask for what they wanted. She didn’t do this as much when we were little but as we got into teenage years and she had to deal with us as young adults she apparently didn’t want to ask, but got irritated when we couldn’t guess.
When I was a teenager visiting family, apparently my aunt got tired of having to ask me and my sisters what we wanted all the time and asked us to speak up and said ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get.’ At the time I thought this was partly a lesson in gaining self confidence but at the same time I realized if I just ask and not expect everyone to guess, I can get more of what I need out of life with less stress.
Fast forward to now. My mother is still an extreme Guesser and three of my sister’s are Guesser’s and just make up reasons in their head instead of asking what’s going on. My other sister and I have learned to ask so they think we are rude for asking and we think they are rude for making shit up instead of asking. Wow. I can’t believe there’s a term for this. If this was taught as basic communication skills I think a lot more people would be able to get along. I definitely have to look into this more.
I read a fascinating essay written by a Guess woman married to an Ask man and how that affected their sex life, and how they compromised.
ford-ye-fiji: My mother is an asker and my dad is a guesser and sometimes I have to butt in and translate what each other is trying to say XD I didn’t even know there was a word for it!!
tellmevarric: I learned to give people permission to say no to me. A lot of people, more than I ever expected, have trouble saying no, especially when, like in the original post, it’s because they just don’t want to, not because they have a reason. (As if not wanting to isn’t a valid reason… but I digress.) So, I tend to ask for things, particularly big or onerous things, like this:
“Okay, I need to ask you something but, first of all, please feel free to say no. You don’t need to give me a reason and I won’t be angry or upset.”
Then I ask for what I want.
And if they say no, I don’t ask why, I don’t get passive aggressive and I don’t get angry or upset. I don’t dwell on it. They’ve said no and that’s final. I thank them, then I move the conversation on.
Two of the most valuable things you can learn is how to say no and how to accept no.
This is also like high context and low context cultures - e.g. Western and Asian societies
Strangely, I couldn't find a tumblr which formatted this properly in the individual post - only on the main page. Then I realised adding "/amp" to the end of the URL formatted the post properly.
Related:
Extraordinary Passion: Escaping a Dead Bedroom
"The questioner asked about HL/LL (high libido/low libido) couples who had managed to survive new couple burnout and have a successful sex life. I’m the lower libido partner (LL) in a successful long-term relationship that almost went the “dead bedroom” route after two years together. It was hard, but we figured out answers that worked for us. Twenty years later, we probably have more and better sex than 95% of the couples our age...
Z and I met and became a couple in 1992. Sex had started out being spectacularly good, but in retrospect, that was mostly the raw rush of intense emotion. We were head over heels in love, a first for both of us at 28, though neither of us were virgins...
[There was] a tremendous amount of stress for both of us, and our sex life fell off a cliff. I not only had no interest in having sex, I felt numb when we did have sex. I started saying no, I’m not in the mood, and after a while Z almost stopped asking. We had sex less and less often and each time was unsatisfactory. This scared the hell out of both of us.
What saved us was our nerdiness. With my background in neuroscience and his in the social sciences and psychology, we turned ourselves into sex nerds, learning everything we could about sex, desire, arousal, marital happiness, and so on, to try to understand what was happening to us and how to fix it...
I’m an Asker and Z is a Guesser...
(This is also the sort of culture where you’re considered rude if you take the last cookie when someone offers it to you. You are not supposed to accept it until the other person has offered three times and you've said no twice. It’s a culture that involves a lot of indirection and subtlety and potential for misunderstanding, so it can also cause a lot of conflict between Askers and their Guesser in-laws!)
Guess culture rules seem clumsy and inefficient to me, but it's a system that works quite well as long as everyone was raised knowing the rules...
This can get pretty pathological where sex is concerned. If the HL partner is a Guesser, initiating sex is risky and being told no is perceived as a serious emotional rejection. And the LL/Asker partner generally has no understanding of how deeply wounding that rejection is. So after a string of "no" answers the HL/Guesser stops asking, frequency of sex goes to zero, and the LL partner is mystified and feels unjustly accused of being responsible. Even when I was uninterested in sex, I didn’t understand why Z stopped asking, so I assumed he wasn’t interested either.
In the reverse case, you get a "chasing" dynamic, where the HL/Asker keeps asking and the LL/Guesser feels harassed, coerced, and abused and deeply resents it. So even though the LL/G often "gives in," it tends to be the worst kind of duty sex with no emotional connection for either person.
It's important to understand how this works, because the solutions to a “dead bedroom” problem are completely different for Guess/Ask couples, for Ask/Guess couples, and for Guess/Guess couples. (Ask/Ask couples don't have trouble with this part of the HL/LL problem.)
Responsive Desire: In established relationships about 10% of men and 50% of women never or rarely experience spontaneous desire for sex. Sex researchers call this pattern “responsive desire.” RDs (people who fit that pattern) aren't necessarily people with low libido, but we don't get horny unless we're in a specifically sexual situation, which means we depend on something or someone else to get us started.
When two RDs or two Guessers pair off, they need to do things like scheduling sex or it just dies out completely. It can be just as bad when an HL/Guesser like Z gets paired with an LL/RD like me, because Guessers hate asking and RDs seldom even think of asking unless it’s on their calendar.
The deeper problem with responsive desire isn’t really about libido. It’s that the partner with spontaneous desire (SD) doesn’t understand how a person can be in love and attracted to someone if they never initiate sex. The SD partner wants to be lusted after and feels unloved, unattractive, and undesirable if the RD never seems to WANT the SD partner. So it can really undermine the SD partner’s ego and self-image if their partner never initiates sex, even if the RD partner seems to enjoy sex and is usually happy to accept an invitation."
Of course, this goes against the feminist fantasy of affirmative consent/enthusiastic consent and how if you have sex when both parties aren't actively 100% into it from the start, it's rape