I just about peed myself after reading this. I DO THIS! I may have even done the Wilford Brimley thing! It’s so easy and fun, I wonder why it’s not a usual thing with other people. I do it with friend’s wives when they ask the open-ended questions, and their husbands laugh as well. I respond similarly to ladies in the office…everyone chuckles.
My least favorite thing is when my wife asks me something when she already has a preferred answer.
Her favorite:
Wife: “Honey…start thinking about where you want to go to lunch.”
Me: “OK.”
Wife: “Where do you want to go, then?”
Me: “I’m easy…wherever.”
Wife: “That’s not an answer!”
If I do answer (like, for example, Kona Grill), thenshe overrides where I wanted to go anyway. Not having any real attachment to my choice most of the time…I let her.
-Cem
That’s a good one. There should be a law: If you ask the other person where they want to eat, and they answer, you should not be allowed to then disagree. It annoys me no end when refuses to come up with any suggestions, but then vetoes all my ideas.
With me, the conversation would go more like this:
Me: You’ll never guess who I ran into today?
You: Wilford Brimley?
Me: Yeah. How’d you know? (Or maybe, “That was a *really *close guess, but no. It was [person].”)
We often go through the whole “guess what guess what guess what!!” “uh you’re pregnant.” “no!” “you found a live porpoise in your garage and you’re now trying to keep it alive by putting wet towels on it” routine.
What REALLY bugs me, though, is when he starts a statement and he wants you to probe for details.
“so I saw someone at the grocery store” or “something weird just happened.” or “I have a new idea for a video game” . To which I’m supposed to respond, “who?” or “what?” and then he tells me all about it. It just seems so scripted to me, and the idea of having a scripted conversation just feels weird. It’s like the old routine- “my dog is so short” “HOW SHORT IS IT?”
There’s a name for this in Spanish: hacer el zopilote. Not to be mistaken with hacer el buitre or buitrear (to borrow without intending to repay), although both zopilotes and buitres are vultures.
It’s after the vultures’ scene in Disney’s Jungle Book, and I’m paraphrasind and back-translating so please forgive me the inaccuracies:
“what we gonna do?”
“dunnow, what we gonna do?”
“hey I donnaw… hey I asked first?”
“so?”
“so, dunnow… what we gonna do?”
A friend of mine has managed to cure her mother (mostly) of “what are you thinking?” by answering things along the lines of “of getting a divorce and a sex change.”
We have a deal that if you do veto, you must counter with another suggestion, which the other person can veto but the same applies, until we hit boredom or a restaurant we can agree on. However, if we’re both in a silly mood the counter-proposals usually run to horrific places neither of us ever want to eat again.
I have almost completely stopped giving any suggestions as I am convinced she only asks my opinion so she knows what she doesn’t want to do. All the way down to, “Which of these skirts do you like more?” To that I just say the opposite of what I think because I can guarantee she will go with the other one.
I wonder what that says about my taste and her awareness of it.
I, for one, think it’s a red lettered day for the dope that a misspelling in the title didn’t get commented on until the second page. I think this may be the first time that’s happened. Someone note today’s date for the record books.
Actually, I think Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation is a much better book on the subject. It’s written by an actual expert in sociolinguistics with some good academic research behind it.
The problem with these books that purport to explain the differences between men and women is that women read them, and then have all sorts of expectations about how men are supposed to behave. I dated a woman who happened to have done very well for herself and had somewhere around 10 times as much money as I have. I naively thought that wouldn’t be a problem. But after dating for several weeks, picking up the check every time we went out, and having her not offer to pay even once, not even for half, I finally asked if I was going to always be paying for everything. (I didn’t want her to pay for everything; I just thought it would be nice for her to offer maybe once or twice.) Her response was that I shouldn’t want her to pay because then I would feel “emasculated”. Listen honey - let me worry about whether I’m feeling emascuated or not.
I don’t need people telling me how I’m supposed to feel when I don’t fit into the stereotype of what some pop psychology author thinks a man is.
