a gentle fact about this world is that people will want to help you. a cruel fact about it is that you do have to put on your big boy pants and open their contact on your phone and say some human words to ask them for it
i struggle with this
because of a certain loop of logic that happens in my head
- I can’t ask someone else for help, that would be coercive.
- why?
- because if I ask them for help and they don’t want to, they will still say yes
- why
- because they feel that saying no isn’t a safe option.
- why do you think they’d feel that way?
- because I would feel that way, if I were in that position.
- why would you?
- because someone who’s reached the absolute last resort of “asking another person for help” is a desperate individual with no other recourse… I don’t wanna know what they’d do if someone said no.
- why do you think that about people who ask for help??
- because that’s the only way I would ever ask for help.
- and why wouldn’t you ask for help otherwise?
- because (loop back to beginning)
…this looks ridiculous when laid out like this
but it is the exact reason why dating and flirting, in most societies, is a whole complex system of indirect hints and guesses
and I see why this is
because I recognize the potential for coercion, if a guy asked me outright for sex, knowing how guys often handle rejection
and then I just extrapolate that to other things in life…
because sex isn’t fundamentally different for me, and mostly I would be just as upset to be pressured (or unwittingly pressure someone else) into other things
anyway I’m not saying there’s any perfect answer here
if people all followed the same rules, like “ask for help if you need it; answer honestly when someone asks whether you wanna help; accept the answers people give"… it would work
but the moment you know that someone else COULD be living by different rules, it all goes screwy, and the ethical choice for you may no longer be what you thought it was
anyway I wish I had a way to say "it’s okay if you say no!” and have the other person actually believe it
but until Minnesota proves itself to be a sufficiently advanced Emotionless Civilization for the Vulcan Prime Directive to no longer apply, we aren’t getting mindmelds here