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skrebbel 4 hours ago

I'm not that autistic but I simply can't deal with Guessers. The idea that I have to play some kind of 4D chess game to figure out what I am and am not allowed to ask or do makes me extremely stressed out. How am I supposed to map out the wishes and expectations and goals of everybody involved? Isn't that, in fact, borderline rude? What if I guess wrong? Everybody loses when that happens and it happens all the time.

Growing up in the east of the Netherlands made this worse; the Dutch are widely known as rude and direct (ie Askers), but in the rural east this is very much not the case. Everything there runs on a mixture of "what will the neighbours think" and "what will people expect me to do?" and it's just maddening. Fortunately I was sufficiently tone deaf as a youth to not notice when I was getting it wrong, and when I grew old enough to figure that out I moved to places where you can just ask stuff. It's nuts that such a small country can have such a widely varying cultural differences but it's very real.

I live in the south now and here I can ask everybody everything and people won't feel bad for saying no. It's lovely.

I also figured out that my mom (a total Guesser like everybody in my family) loves me even if I get this wrong! So I just began to treat her like an Asker and verrry explicitly spell out that it's totally fine to say no, no really it is, I'm not asking for a favour, I just want to know what you want, really mom it's true. It stresses her out! The idea of being asked point blank for her personal, disregard-other-people preference is just entirely outside her normal way of thinking. She has to do hard effort to disregard other people's wishes, it's just all totally mixed together in her brain. I know it's not nice of me, but the alternative is that we (my wife and I) keep getting it wrong and accidentally visit too often or too little or invite them to parties they don't want to go to and so on.

So yeah, protip for askers, treat guessers who love you as askers. They'll forgive you for it and everything else becomes easier.

tyingq 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That makes sense if it's in moderation. An overzealous asker can disproportionately eat up people's time. Context as to why you're asking helps set priorities.

skrebbel 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah ofc. I mean as someone who grew up in Guesser Land and got taught that it’s important to be able to read people’s minds, discovering that I can just, you know, ask, felt like a superpower. I don’t think I’m overdoing it.