Dating Disasters·
THE ANSWER FIRST
A couple clash over naming a Polish object during a tense game as one partner speaks thoughts aloud, forcing the other to endure a detail-heavy explanation before the answer.
Answer first, or details first?
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The fight started over the name of a Polish object, and by then, the poster was sick, in a game, and too irritated to wait for the answer to arrive at the very end.
Their girlfriend, 21, had a habit that had been bothering them for a while: when asked a question, she would explain the evidence, the examples, the little supporting details first, and only give the actual answer after all that. The poster said she has no inner monologue, so she speaks out loud to think. But from their side, it felt like the question was getting buried. They had already told her they wanted the answer first, then the extra context after, especially for quick questions or simple yes/no stuff.
This time, they were both looking at a game screen and trying to move on. The poster asked whether a certain name was correct for a Polish object. Instead of just saying yes or no, she started in with examples and facts. The poster tried to pull her back to the point so they could keep playing. Frustration built fast.
She pushed back, saying she had to think out loud and that it "wasn't just a yes/no question." The poster repeated that she could still give the details, just after the actual answer. They even told her, "hey I still care about the extra details, I just want the actual answer first then the other stuff so I have that part that I asked about." If she needed more time, they said, she could ask for it or say she didn't know yet.
But she kept insisting she couldn't just think and then tell it straight, she had to "workshop it backwards."
The poster later came to the internet asking if they were being unreasonable. In the post, they said they did listen to her and that they liked her stories and info-dumps. "I do think I listen to her all the time," they wrote. "I really do like listening to her talk and everything." They also insisted, "I don't use her as a replacement for Google!" The issue, they said, was the small, time-sensitive questions, where the answer got held back behind the explanation.
The poster also admitted they were "a little more bitchy because of it" and that they had been impatient during the argument. In later edits, they said they understood the situation better. The girlfriend's no-inner-monologue way of thinking, they acknowledged, was just how she is. The poster also recognized that expecting her to answer in the poster's preferred format had been controlling, even if the original complaint had started with something as ordinary as a question during a game.