I think your response mostly didn’t make sense. “What’s that like” imposes a greater burden on you by requiring you to explain something again and again, and bluntly, I’m only going to be interested in that if me knowing helps you in some way, and I don’t see why it would, but maybe it would, I wouldn’t know, so it makes sense for me to just express willingness to help if needed, and that starts with “If you need to talk to someone, I’m here for you”.
I get frustrated with imaginary social scripts too, but that part of the script is fine.
I guess it’s possible to say both things, and I failed at disambiguating between the content of what was said and the tone. Most people looked at me like I was a beaten dog, offering support in the same ooh-that’s-horrible tone people vibe into during charity galas.
I get that it might be a (sub)cultural thing, but I’ve gotten a lot of appreciation for actually trying to understand the person’s situation. Guess vs ask culture maybe?
I guess there’s a subcultural aspect in how comfortable people feel with declining to answer questions: In subcultures where people can (or know to) just say “don’t worry about it” and people don’t get offended by that, questions are free.
But for the most part I think whether people are happy or annoyed with being asked a question comes down to how many times they have been asked. Asked zero times → very happy, like summer rain. Asked 30 times → not so much, but idk maybe you can mitigate the annoyance by copy and pasting something/publishing a statement.
I think your response mostly didn’t make sense. “What’s that like” imposes a greater burden on you by requiring you to explain something again and again, and bluntly, I’m only going to be interested in that if me knowing helps you in some way, and I don’t see why it would, but maybe it would, I wouldn’t know, so it makes sense for me to just express willingness to help if needed, and that starts with “If you need to talk to someone, I’m here for you”.
I get frustrated with imaginary social scripts too, but that part of the script is fine.
I guess it’s possible to say both things, and I failed at disambiguating between the content of what was said and the tone. Most people looked at me like I was a beaten dog, offering support in the same ooh-that’s-horrible tone people vibe into during charity galas.
I get that it might be a (sub)cultural thing, but I’ve gotten a lot of appreciation for actually trying to understand the person’s situation. Guess vs ask culture maybe?
I guess there’s a subcultural aspect in how comfortable people feel with declining to answer questions: In subcultures where people can (or know to) just say “don’t worry about it” and people don’t get offended by that, questions are free.
But for the most part I think whether people are happy or annoyed with being asked a question comes down to how many times they have been asked. Asked zero times → very happy, like summer rain. Asked 30 times → not so much, but idk maybe you can mitigate the annoyance by copy and pasting something/publishing a statement.