> Deciding what to eat for dinner with guess-culture people isn’t as simple as asking people what they want to eat for dinner, because they will not tell you what they actually want to want to eat for dinner. They will say “oh, whatever you want,” or “whatever is easiest.” And when you insist that you really really want to know what they want to eat for dinner, and if it’s too much work, you’ll do something else instead, the response you receive will already be a compromised version of what they want, taking into account the preferences of everyone else in the house, what the kids will eat, and the leftovers in the fridge.
Man, people are so bad at communicating.
I have found that a lot of communication from americans includes hidden unsaid statements, which are frequently expected by the speaker to be automatically inferred by the listener.
Alternately, plain speaking is heard by the american listener to imply things that may not be intended at all.
It's somewhat baffling to me, so much so that I wrote a whole article about it.