A noteworthy thing from the FB version of this thread was that people radically varied in which question seemed awkward to them. (My FB friends list is sharply distorted by ‘the sort of friends Ray is likely to have’, so I’m not sure how much conclusion can be drawn from this, but at the very least it seemed that typical minding abounds all around re: this class of question)
Sure, I think all of these questions would be awkward addressed to various kinds of strangers, which is part of my point: it’s important to do actual work to figure out what kind of question a person would like to be asked, if any.
So a reframing of this question is “what do you say/do/act to gain information about what a person would like to be asked without resorting to one of these sorts of questions?”
(With a side-note of “the hard mode for all of this is when you actually do kinda know the person, or have seen them around, so it is in fact ‘legitimately’ awkward’ that you haven’t managed to get to know them well enough to know what sorts of conversations to have with them.)
A noteworthy thing from the FB version of this thread was that people radically varied in which question seemed awkward to them. (My FB friends list is sharply distorted by ‘the sort of friends Ray is likely to have’, so I’m not sure how much conclusion can be drawn from this, but at the very least it seemed that typical minding abounds all around re: this class of question)
Sure, I think all of these questions would be awkward addressed to various kinds of strangers, which is part of my point: it’s important to do actual work to figure out what kind of question a person would like to be asked, if any.
So a reframing of this question is “what do you say/do/act to gain information about what a person would like to be asked without resorting to one of these sorts of questions?”
(With a side-note of “the hard mode for all of this is when you actually do kinda know the person, or have seen them around, so it is in fact ‘legitimately’ awkward’ that you haven’t managed to get to know them well enough to know what sorts of conversations to have with them.)