There’s not really a better way to interact with Guessers, though. You either Guess yourself and spend a lot of effort in low-bandwidth discussion with lots of misunderstanding and weirdness, or you be mean to them in order to communicate and get your needs met.
I grew up in a strong Guess culture, and really one of the best things you can do for your mental health is to get out of that kind of place. It’s a way to passive-aggressively get concessions from those around you while making yourself miserable. Guessing is a terrible, terrible way to “win”.
The one I love and hope to spend my life with is a Guesser. This is how I learnt the previous comment. So I have quite a stake in learning Guess dialects. It helps not to mind weirdness, and to develop systems to catch misunderstandings. I’d be grateful for any advice.
My usual approach for dealing with culture-clashes in ongoing relationships is to work on the issues primarily in low-stakes contexts at first.
Beyond that, it helps to get some explicit agreement, first, that this culture-clash exists and what properties it has, and second, about what you collectively want to do about it.
If they are willing to meet you halfway, for example, they can practice explicitly verbalizing requests and expectations, and commit explicitly to not treating your silence as a refusal of a request even if it seems like one to them, and commit explicitly to not treating your explicit requests as demands even if they feel that way. You can make that easier by asking them whether they have a preference and if so what it is, framing questions open-endedly (e.g. “what would you like to do for dinner?” rather than “wanna do chinese?”), and vocalizing any uncertainty you may have (“wait… this feels weird. did I just miss an implicitly expressed preference?”)
If you are willing to meet them halfway, for example, you can study their pattern of cues and learn to recognize their implicit requests and responses. They can make that easier by telegraphing those cues, no matter how rude and insulting it feels to them like they’re being.
If they have any family members or childhood friends or whatever who have some insight into their own variant of Guess culture, they might be able to provide “translation,” but it’s important to understand that mostly people aren’t aware of the cultural cues they rely on, any more than we’re typically able to describe the phonetic rules of our native language. Certain things just sound right, that’s all.
This. Asking people to abandon their culture and adopt yours is likely to provoke hostility just on pattern matching. Meeting halfway is much more likely to succeed; even if you completely fail at guessing, it’ll show that you actually need an ask paradigm and aren’t being unfair in demanding it.
There’s not really a better way to interact with Guessers, though. You either Guess yourself and spend a lot of effort in low-bandwidth discussion with lots of misunderstanding and weirdness, or you be mean to them in order to communicate and get your needs met.
I grew up in a strong Guess culture, and really one of the best things you can do for your mental health is to get out of that kind of place. It’s a way to passive-aggressively get concessions from those around you while making yourself miserable. Guessing is a terrible, terrible way to “win”.
The one I love and hope to spend my life with is a Guesser. This is how I learnt the previous comment. So I have quite a stake in learning Guess dialects. It helps not to mind weirdness, and to develop systems to catch misunderstandings. I’d be grateful for any advice.
My usual approach for dealing with culture-clashes in ongoing relationships is to work on the issues primarily in low-stakes contexts at first.
Beyond that, it helps to get some explicit agreement, first, that this culture-clash exists and what properties it has, and second, about what you collectively want to do about it.
If they are willing to meet you halfway, for example, they can practice explicitly verbalizing requests and expectations, and commit explicitly to not treating your silence as a refusal of a request even if it seems like one to them, and commit explicitly to not treating your explicit requests as demands even if they feel that way. You can make that easier by asking them whether they have a preference and if so what it is, framing questions open-endedly (e.g. “what would you like to do for dinner?” rather than “wanna do chinese?”), and vocalizing any uncertainty you may have (“wait… this feels weird. did I just miss an implicitly expressed preference?”)
If you are willing to meet them halfway, for example, you can study their pattern of cues and learn to recognize their implicit requests and responses. They can make that easier by telegraphing those cues, no matter how rude and insulting it feels to them like they’re being.
If they have any family members or childhood friends or whatever who have some insight into their own variant of Guess culture, they might be able to provide “translation,” but it’s important to understand that mostly people aren’t aware of the cultural cues they rely on, any more than we’re typically able to describe the phonetic rules of our native language. Certain things just sound right, that’s all.
This. Asking people to abandon their culture and adopt yours is likely to provoke hostility just on pattern matching. Meeting halfway is much more likely to succeed; even if you completely fail at guessing, it’ll show that you actually need an ask paradigm and aren’t being unfair in demanding it.