So I have learned a few things about women over the years. One of them is about “would you like to …” You see women will ask a man “would you like to” and follow it with something no man in history has ever wanted to do of his own free will. Now when a man asks “would you like to” he is asking if doing the said thing will make the person more happy than not doing it. For example “would you like some food?” Or perhaps “would you like to go to the baseball game.” If one answers “no” that is fine. It was a real question.
A woman uses that sort of question the way a man asks “would you please do me a favor and …” In other words the ask is for something the askee wants the asker to do that they may or may not want to do.
I learned rather quickly that when a woman asks a question like this she really expects a “yes” answer regardless of the request. At first I thought that meant they wanted a man to lie. In other words, the wanted the man to say “yes I would like to do that” no matter how distasteful the task was. Well I was half right.
They do want the man to say “yes” but they don’t want it to be a lie. They want to man to actually want to do the thing. Really! Now that can be hard for a guy to understand. We don’t really want to lie but we do get asked to do things we really would rather not do. So to learn to live with myself I decided that a woman was really asking a different question. “Would you like to change the litter box?” translates to “Do you love me enough to change the litter box?” Now that question I can honestly answer (to my wife anyway) “Why yes I do!”
That way I don’t have to lie and my wife is happy because I change the litter box. It’s the difference between a literal question and an idiomatic interpretation. I pass this bit of wisdom off to you guys who are not yet married or who are recently married.
Tags: advice to young husbands
I’m not sure that this is exclusively the domain of women.
Sometimes it’s clear what’s meant: “Do you want to change the litterbox?” clearly doesn’t mean, “Would you derive enjoyment from changing the litterbox?,” but is instead just a syntactically-incorrect way of requesting an action.
But sometimes it’s not clear. When someone asks me, “Do you want to go to the store with me?,” it’s not always clear whether they’re politely offering to allow me to tag along, or whether they’re telling me that they really want me to come help, and just not saying it.
I’m not married (and perhaps this is why), but I tend to err on the side of taking the question at face value. Not to absurd levels (“Do I want to put down the video game and administer CPR to you? Not really…”), but I figure that, when the question is ambiguous, giving an ambiguous answer isn’t going to help. (If you wanted me to go the store, you could have asked me to do so!)
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