Reply to "How are you?" How do you respond when "fine" is a lie?

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to ""How are you?" How do you respond when "fine" is a lie?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]These responses are really surprising to me. I would absolutely want to hear the true response. I’d feel so sad to know you were suffering through something and I could’ve lent you an ear or a hug but that you felt the need to fib and feign you’re fine. I ask because I care, not because we are supposed to have some fake small talk tango. If I hadn’t met you before that would be odd, but otherwise I appreciate candor and honesty and am shocked others prefer/expect surface lies.

Separately, I’m sorry for whatever is bringing you down, OP, and hope things resolve for you in some way. [/quote]

Op here. Thank you so much. I've been thinking about it from the askers perspective, too. I want to know when my friends are hurting for the same reasons.

It's so interesting to think about how some people share so much and others not so much and how that impacts how close people feel to them. I suppose I'm an introvert and tend to not share very much, but I think that means people know me less and thus don't get as much support as friends who do talk about their challenges more.

I have a close friend who is similar to me and a year ago we were at a dinner party and heard so much about one friend's sprained toe while my friend sat silent about her new cancer diagnosis. I've had a sprained toe myself and understand that they are a bigger pain than you'd think they would be. But still in the big scheme of things they're typically a smaller deal than cancer. I asked my friend afterwards why she didn't mention it and she said felt like it would have been one-upping the toe friend. She didn't want to shut down conversation.

Overall it's probably much easier to talk toes than cancer, but the other friends in the group also said later they would have wanted to be of more support to the friend with cancer but they just didn't know.

If we all saw each other every week it would be easier, but gatherings are so few and far between we end up talking more about superficial things.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics