Not unlike driving, I don't think you can call this "awful at communicating" when it works fine in its context, ie, with other people who also know to do that. They just speak a different language from you.
It's being awful at communicating when they can't adapt to other contexts or other people. E.g. it's totally unreasonable to get mad at someone for saying no when you ask them a question just because you'd never say no, or get at someone for asking you a question because you actually wanted to have a meaningful interaction or schedule something or find out what they wanted. Even within their own context of politeness culture, where they exist in their own gated community and never have to interact with literally anyone else, they are awful at communication. They never tell each other what they actually mean, want or think, and when they have disagreements they bottle everything up behind 5,000 softening modifiers so no one is even aware there is a problem.
The amount of shit I have heard from these kinds of people do my head in. People without problems desperately in search of problems.
Example:
Loving couple, except the man is much richer than the woman and she feels insecure because he keeps taking her to expensive restaurants and paying for her. She asks me for advice and begins crying because she already told him how she feels about this whole thing but he keeps bringing her to them. I ask her for her exact wording, and she said she told her SO that she loved all the restaurants but prefers instant noodles.
So I smash my head on the fucking wall trying to explain how expressing deep enthusiasm for a kind gesture will elicit more of it, and she should just have a frank discussion about how she doesn't want to feel like she owes anything to him. She says no, because she cares about his feelings, so she would rather lie and say she has work every time he invites her to a dinner. Of course it ended badly -_-
Another one, two good friends of mine from wealthy families. Neither of them working at all. Both deep in this politeness culture and basically turned themselves into a social pariah and a wallflower respectively because every time the rest of us tried to schedule a meetup including them, we would get a wall of "I'll call you back ASAP" or a "I'm definitely interested and I want to go" and even if you could force them to commit, conversations with them were like pulling teeth. You'd have to get interrogations just to find out what kind of weather they liked.
Oh well, no harm no foul right? Except the moment you have something go wrong, this kind of communication style becomes fatal.
People who wear their heart on their sleeve and say what they mean and mean what they say are reliable. You can work around them, and when you have a disagreement or they offend you, you know exactly where they stand and can build a strong relationship from that. So when the former got drunk and disgraced himself at a new year's party, he starts giving me this politeness crap of "yeah I agree with you 100% I should stop drinking and I will stop drinking other than the times I go drinking." The latter friend managed to isolate
himself by starting arguments with
everyone by constantly having secret discussions about issues he had with everyone behind everyone's backs... Because he was worried about offending people. So when people politely discuss with him the issues he has with them that they didn't know were bothering him,
he gets offended, because he said in his family it was impolite to discuss issues "you weren't supposed to have heard about." Even though the issues themselves were minute, trivial matters, this kind of stupid meta-matter ended up with him cutting himself off from everyone for fear of offending everyone even though no one was actually offended. -_-
Some people may drive on the left side, some people may drive on the right. But who the fuck is driving their car on the seafloor and their ship on the airport runway?
Some methods are more successful than others for group endeavours! There is a reason why where I work, all the nurses are blunt and straightforward, while all the doctors speak like 19th century civil servants. The doctors must absolutely make sure everything they say is strategically ambiguous so they're legally liable for nothing. Nurses must make sure things actually happen.
BE LIKE NURSES
SPEAK LIKE YOU WANT THINGS TO HAPPEN
Neurotypicals be like-
If I had a time machine I'd get Shakespeare to change the lines "Men should be what they seem" to just be Iago reeeeeeing on stage for 10 minutes "Cassio is a normie"
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9529235 times)