Ask vs. Guess Culture
I am from the northern US (Protestant Scandinavian&#x2F;German) and my wife is from the southern US (Protestant English&#x2F;German) [1]. In the first several years of our relationship, we had several big disputes about how to treat each other, and how to treat guests. After a while we realized that she had been brought up to feel extreme insecurity over responding to the needs of guests, and I had been brought up to be blithely ignorant to the needs of guests.<p>Over the years I definitely insulted several southern guests by mostly ignoring them, and she definitely projected insult onto several northern guests by assuming that they were secretly judging us for not being better hosts. We&#x27;ve since realized that southerners tend to prefer &quot;guess&quot; culture and northerners tend to prefer &quot;ask&quot; culture, to use the terminology from the article. There are certainly many exceptions, but this generalization has taught her to chill out a little over hosting duties, and taught me to pick up some slack when taking care of guests.<p>We still both greatly prefer our native cultures. I don&#x27;t like being fawned over or offered things I don&#x27;t want, and she is extremely recalcitrant when it comes to asking for anything.<p>[1] I mention the distant ancestral backgrounds because it&#x27;s amusing to me how well I get along with northern Europeans who are plainly spoken and &quot;rude&quot; by US standards, and how a lot of proper hosting culture from the UK reminds me of how her family operates. She finds Scandinavians and Dutch incredibly rude, whereas I find the English hilariously polite, even to their own detriment.