I’m not a hinting woman. I’m an oversharing, excessively verbalizing woman. Fifteen years in, it’s still a struggle to explain to my husband that I don’t hint.
I’d say something like, “Get this, Tom and Janey are getting divorced. She says the marriage hasn’t been working for a long time and she’s ready to give up.”
And he’d come back with, “Are you trying to say our marriage isn’t working and you want a divorce?”
“No. I’m saying exactly what I said. Tom and Janey are getting divorced. This isn’t about us at all.”
“Really? Then why are you saying it to me?”
“I’m sharing. This is a story I’ve heard, and I want to share it with my husband. With whom I’m in a great marriage. Where we share.”
“Ah, well, you should have said so from the start!”
So now I start every other story with “Our marriage is great. I’m very happy. I have no plans to criticize you for anything. But get this, Tom and Janey…”
This doesn’t eliminate the problem completely. Sometimes, I’d be doing something in complete silence and he’d stare at me with a severe look.
“So …” he’d say. “Any complaints? Do you have any thoughts about getting rid of me, throwing me out of the house and divorcing me?”
This is actually great progress. Years ago, he’d imagine that I was planning to divorce him because of something really trivial, like I’d suggest a movie and he didn’t want to watch it. He’d torture himself for weeks and then finally erupt, begging me to put him out of his misery and just say that I hated him because of the movie that I had forgotten about 3 seconds after the initial discussion.
I feel great compassion because none of this is about me at all. His favorite quote that he repeats regularly is from A Dog’s Heart by Mikhail Bulgakov. At the end of the novel, a stray dog who was picked up by a genius surgeon for medical experimentation says, “I’m so lucky. I’ve really been accepted into this apartment.” This is very sad.
So yeah, I don’t hint.
Clarissa's Blog 
I feel really bad for him now. He seems very high-anxiety.
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Or traumatized by people who were passive-aggressive and tried to manipulate him instead of communicating their wishes and feelings directly.
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Yeah, that sucks. I just have a nearly opposite reaction– try to passive-aggressively hint at me, and I will go to great lengths to try to help you say the thing you mean, out loud, in clear, precise language. Because the hinty hinty thing drives me bonkers and makes me angry. IF YOU’RE GIVING AN ORDER, DON’T PHRASE IT AS A QUESTION, DAMMIT. My mom did that. We have very nearly trained her out of it.
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Itś almost the only thing that might send me into a rage. FFS don’t mess me about, I haven’t got the time, the inclination and the mental space to second guess how stupid your ideas are. Just say it or if not, f off.
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He grew up in a very abusive family.
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“No. I’m saying exactly what I said.”
Same here. People who second-guess me drive me into a murderous frenzy, I simply cannot stand them. I try to use very precise language so that my meaning is absolutely clear but no, there is always someone trying to infer an arrière-pensée hiding behind my words: “That’s not what I said.” “Oh, but I thought you meant…” “No, I meant exactly what I said, no more, no less.” “Oh, but…” This charade can continue practically non-stop with some of my Italian students, until I put an end to it by rephrasing my message in even starker terms.
I wonder why so many of your readers seem to share similar experiences. I see a fair number of linguists and/or linguisticians among those who frequent this blog: who knows if this has something to do with it.
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My favorite is “so what you are trying to say is…” I’m not “trying”. The idea of trying presupposes piss-poor verbal skills, and mine are excellent in several languages. So no, I’m not trying. I’m saying exactly what I want to be saying. It’s simply disrespectful to say that to people.
But for many, conversations are a closed-loop process. They want to re-affirm their own position in the easiest way possible, and they need an interlocutor who’ll provide soft-ball prompts for this exercise. So they try to turn other people into that non-existent, easy to beat interlocutor. “So when you oppose the BLM, are you trying to say it should be OK to murder black people and have no consequences?” It would be so easy to argue with somebody who believes something like this. But since nobody does, it’s necessary to manufacture such patently evil interlocutors.
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There was an obnoxious British journalist who became notorious overnight for talking exactly like that while interviewing Jordan Peterson. Her name escapes me now, but her niggling style was particularly unpleasant. She kept snapping back to whatever Peterson had just said with “So, what you are saying is…”
At a certain point the famous Canadian psychologist made mincemeat of her rephrasing tick!
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The infamous interview, chopped down to every time she says the thing:
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Even people who didn’t like Paterson or didn’t know about him became fans after that interview because the woman was clearly being an absolute bastard. She’s congenitally incapable of interviewing people. What an absolute hack.
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” the famous Canadian psychologist made mincemeat of her rephrasing tick!”
But in a very polite way and they end up laughing together at the end IIRC. The very best verbal defense is not a bunch of withering insults but gently stopping the person from assaulting you so gently that they don’t notice.
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Being raised by a mother who prefers to communicate in manipulative ways and looks for hidden meanings in everything you say instead of hearing what you’re telling her is a special kind of hell.
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Another favorite is people asking me my plans before asking for a favor. Just ask me the favor first. “What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?” pre-supposes that if the answer is “nothing” it means I’m fully available to you. Doing nothing is a legitimate activity!
Just say “Can you give me a ride to the airport tomorrow afternoon?” It’s easier and more respectful.
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