I don’t know. Some of the things are just symbolic of deeper problems. I’ve found that many people do this.
If it’s just an isolated thing, everything else was perfect and it was a verbal tic, then that’s one thing. If it’s representative of a whole bunch of other actions or attitudes then it’s something else.
Often when people complain, “he always forgets my birthday” or “she never does whatever” then it’s a representative example of not being valued.
I agree with the ones who say that “I don’t know” in response to a statement (and not a question) is very dismissive and perhaps even calculated to be offensive. It is shooting down someone’s factual statement.
“i don’t know” is the polite way of saying “my god are you fucking nuts!?!?”
It means she thinks you are talking shit, but does not want to turn it into an argument.
Judging from your posting here, you do tend to ramble on around the focus of what you want to say.
Do yourself the favor of testing your same statements against a neutral, knowledgeable third party. Possibly via recording yourself. Maybe you are the one who is losing grip on facts?
And yes. If you found this response offensive, then you ARE too easily offended.
At the risk of getting further into the minutiae of “I don’t know”, how she said would be the most important thing to me. One of my friends and I can discuss all the woes of the world and how things don’t make sense and it often ends in a resigned “I don’t know”, just meaning “I don’t get it and am not sure what’s going to happen with that particular matter, but I think we’ve worn out this line of conversation.” Not anything bad, just that the topic is stale, and it is a mutual feeling before we move onto something else.
So if you said Smokey is 79 and she said “I don’t know”, based on her tone did she mean “I didn’t know that”, “I doubt that”, or is it just some acknowledgement/conversation ender?
I think a good response if you ever find yourself on the receiving end of “I don’t know” is simply to ask “What do you mean by ‘I don’t know’, are you doubting my statement or just acknowledging it?”
Enjoy Smokey! My gf recently did ad work for him. She was absolutely bowled over by him and his wife, two of the sweetest people she ever met.[/off topic]
A few years ago I had just started dating a girl I knew from the coffee shop for several years. She was doing some book work and her computer locked up. She asked me if I knew how to fix it. I told her the easiest way was just to restart the computer and she would only loose the entries that were unsaved. She said, " I don’t know" I said I do it all the time, believe me it works. " I don’t know" A few minutes later Joe comes in, no special qualifications and she asks him and he tells her the same thing she says ok and does it then comes over and tells me that Joe told her how to fix it. I ended the new relationship on the spot, so maybe I am a little hyper sensitive about being ignored but either way I really don’t need to put up with it.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet. A person like that is just an ad-homineming machine.
My husband does the “I don’t know” thing to me on occasion, and it makes me crazy too. It’s only been a handful of times over the course of our relationship, but if it were a regular occurrence it would grow quickly from an annoyance to intolerable.
You do know because I just told you!
The other possibility is that regardless of what you say, all she ever hears is “what do you want to do for dinner?”
That is what I say now
I will say this. It’s a little shocking that this happens to you so much. You are a man of strong opinions, and I have the general impression that when those opinions are challenged you are apt to be pretty defensive. If you are like that a lot, I can see people around you falling into the knee-jerk pattern of passively dismissing you, which could bleed over into matters of fact.
Take this with a huge grain of salt–I am working off of an impression formed from a message board persona, which is often not representative of someone’s meatspace persona. But I feel like it might be worth some introspection.
Being challenged doesn’t bother me at all. Being dismissed I admit does push some buttons. I wouldn’t say it happens to me a lot I can think of a few instances over the years. I tend to give off a bit of a thuggish persona left over from the way I grew up and it does affect how some people tend to take me.