QUANTEPHOBIA

Having recognised my quantephobia, at least having acknowledged that it has a name, I have decided not to deliberately put myself in situations in which I suspect that ‘aggressive questioners’ will be roaming about. Just in the last two days, I’ve been in social gatherings in which I’ve had to face up to active questioners. For someone like me, [who by the way, has a hard time in the hairdressers because of ‘hairdresser questions], the experience of being questioned particularly by strangers, is very upsetting.
I think it’s true that certain people learn to adopt a questioning social front so that it is they who is able to control a conversation they have with another person. That sounds obvious now I’ve written it, but the ‘questioner’ is the one who ‘society’ considers socially skilled and conversationally sophisticated. I hold the opposite view– it’s the people who don’t pressurize other people into answering what are usually the most mundane of questions, who are are the socially skillful. The trouble is, we who don’t ask questions are frequently in the company of the aggressive questioners and therefore we are nervous, on guard, ready to flee and as a consequence it’s difficult for us to find the energy to have conversations at all.
The other night, in the same social gathering, I managed to ‘deal’ with a woman who came on at me so strongly with the questions that her head was even bent at a questioning angle as she followed me across the room, ghoulish. I was able, and pleased with myself for it, to answer her questions patiently after I had asked her what it was she REALLY wanted to ask me. A while later I was sitting next to a hungry woman, but not speaking to her as she ate. I could sense that she was expecting me to ask her something, I could sense her almost flinching, I could also sense that although she was ready to be compliant should I start up, she didn’t want to be questioned. So I waited until she had eaten and then we slid easily into a terrific conversation in which neither of us questioned the other at all about anything personal, or for that matter anything.
It isn’t just any question that quantephobics hate, it’s certain kinds of questions that we sense are disingenuous, or are frankly intrusive, or the purpose of which is to make the questioner feel better at the expense of the one being questioning, .
There surely are some societies, small scale though they might be, where questioning someone would be considered extraordinarily rude, I heard once of a place where you did not call another man by his own name.
When I start a conversation about this questioning business with people, especially when you can see they are using your answers as a ‘social map,’ they tell me that asking questions is ‘showing an interest.’ In other words they see it as polite. In fact it’s a deeply entrenched convention, and as is true of many other social ‘norms’ and conventions they are not in any way kind or even meant to be kind. And if they are not kind, they are not worth wasting time on.