Rather than hijack this thread, I decided to start a new one. Over there, eleanorigby says
I’ve never gotten that. If I ask my wife:
“Do you know where my phone is?”
I mean:
“I seem to have misplaced my phone - it is not in any of its usual locations. I take full responsibility for misplacing it, and am perfectly willing to put forth every effort in locating it. However, before I begin such an effort, it seems prudent to ask the other observant, intelligent adult in this house if she has seen the phone recently, or knows its current location, since providing me with such information will save me the time and effort of searching for it, and said time and effort can be used on other activities which will benefit us both.”
However, even though I’ve explained my position several times, her default interpretation is:
“Hey! Where’s my phone! Get off your ass and find it! I don’t care if you’re busy performing the Heimlich on one of the kids - this is IMPORTANT!”
I don’t know if it’s a gender thing or what - I’ve certainly never expected her to help me look for something if she doesn’t know where it is, and if it’s urgent that it be found immediately for the good of our family, I’ll ask her to help in a separate request. So when your SO asks "Do you know where (lost object) is, do you usually interpret it as “Find (lost object) for me!”
Well, the person who asks that of me most frequently is my mother, followed by coworkers, my unmarried brother and sundry other…
I’ve even walked Mom through searching for her glasses without her glasses on, through the phone. And she’s been known to be unable to find them while wearing them as a tiara of sorts.
So no, I don’t have any problem with hearing “have you seen my glasses?” or “I can’t find my glasses! help!”
That’s absurd! If two people share a space, and one of them is missing something, isn’t it obvious to ask the other if they’ve happened to see what you’re looking for?
I must confess that yes, I do interpret “have you seen my cell phone” as “drop everything and look for my cell phone”. There’s a reason for that, and that reason is my husband stands there and waits until I get up and look for the cell phone. And if I don’t get up right away, he gets pissy and says “so you aren’t going to look for it?”.
Fortunately, his mother lives with us, so I only get this about half the time.
Her quote mentions after 2 dates, so I think it is a bit different than asking your wife (whom I assume you have gone out with more than a couple of times ) if she knows where your stuff is located.
I often ask my roomie the same thing. For us, “have you seen my phone” means have you seen it recently, and if you find it, put it somewhere less hidden. Also I may ask you to call it in a few hours when I decide I have no clue where it went. It does not mean get off your ass and look for it for me. We’re both girls, but then, we aren’t married. Just hetero life partners.
Actually… I’m the one who will ask my SO: “Whatchya lookin for, hun?” when he goes shuffling through things. Yeah, Yeah, I know… my fault for rearranging and tryin to organize things
Doesnt bother me one bit.
Now, if it was someone I had just started to see… if he did it constantly i would get irritated rather quickly. Maybe even bite his manbits off to make him stop.
I don’t like to ask, “Where’s my X?” because I feel like I’m a) lazy, and b) falling back on gender stereotyping. However, I sometimes do it because a) I’m lazy; and b) my wife knows where to find stuff (and sometimes, c) has put X in a completely unguessable spot).
However, let it be said that I hate it when my kids ask me, “Do we have any (food item)?” and “Where is (food item)?” Like I have a complete inventory of the food in my head! How do I know what we had in the first place? I didn’t do the shopping! And how do I know what’s been eaten? I haven’t even been home!
I grew up with two parents who said “have you seen X” but meant “I want you to find X” so when asked that I usually assume the same thing as your wife did. Of course, around age thirteen I finally said to my mother “Would you stop saying ‘could you please…’ when you are giving me a command? There’s no point in asking if I’ll do something if I have no option to say no!” She said she said asked please would I because “it’s polite.” :rolleyes:
I’ve had bosses who ask if you’ve seen something but want you to find it too, so that sort of interpretation gets reinforced even now.
Yeah, I think there’s a pretty big difference between what eleanorigby describes and the situation between roommates or spouses. I still think it’s strange to assume that gender is the issue at all, though.
For the record, when I ask my wife that question, I’m generally expecting an answer of “no,” in which case, I’ll say, “OK, thanks” and go hunting for x, or an answer of, “yeah, I think I saw it over yonder,” in which case, wonderful! I ask this of my wife because she is smarter and far more attentive than I am, and I don’t necessarily attribute either of those to her being female.
Heh. That’s about the age I started responding to my mom’s “Do you want to do the dishes now?” with “No I don’t, but I’ll do it anyway.” I was SO rebellious.
If you’re taking a poll, it would never occur to me, if I said “Do you know where X is?” to someone or if someone said it to me, that the question meant anything more than this surface, literal meaning. It would never occur to me that the question was actually a command or request to get up and do something.
Between literally interpreted question and command is where I think the truth lies. Most questions that start “do you…” have at least some suggestion of “would you…” For example, “Do you know how to resize an object in PowerPoint?” normally means “Would you help me resize this object in PowerPoint?”
Partially because one of my minor superpowers is that I frequently do know where small, misplaced objects are. Even from across the country in apartments I have never visited. All my friends and family know this, and I will get phone calls asking me this question at random intervals.
It’s not the question that bothers me, but the response. When I ask my wife, “Have you seen X?”, instead of responding, “No, I haven’t seen it”, she will ask “Is it in Y?” (Y being the laundry room, the kitchen drawer, or some other place I’ve just looked.) At which point my sarcastic streak kicks in. “Well, if it was there, I would have found it already, wouldn’t I?” At which point she gets pissed at me for being a smart-ass, and deservedly so.
But I certainly don’t expect her to get up and start looking for it. I just want to know if she’s seen it, and I don’t want to play a guessing game.
I do tend to interpret it as “Help me look for X” probably because that’s what it meant at home (when said by my father to my mother). Which I don’t really think is what my husband usually means. So I should try harder not to get annoyed when he asks because he isn’t expecting me to drop everything to help him look. Ingrained responses like this are really hard to break though!
I don’t know if there’s a gender thing involved or not, but I’d find it thouroughly weird if (as per the actual OP) anyone I didn’t share a living space with and whose house I’d only been to twice (if that) were to phone me up while I was somewhere else and ask if I knew the location of something in their own house. Not “don’t treat me like your mother” weird, but just “why on earth would anyone think I had something to contribute here?” weird
When I was growing up, I would ask my parents where X was (we’ll use my shoes as X, since they were what I was usually asking for), and they would invariably, rudely, reply, “LET’S SEE . . . *THE LAST TIME I WORE YOUR SHOES . . . *” And that would be the end of that. It used to drive me nuts.
Now my wife, she’s much better. When I ask her where X is she just ignores me :D.
) if she knows where your stuff is located.
