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I was fuming. We had been walking around Price Chopper for fifteen minutes looking for a specific ingredient. It seemed to me that I was frustrated not because he did not know where it was, but because he insisted on trying to find it himself rather than very simply stopping to ask one of the employees we frequently encountered. Perhaps, I was viewing my friend’s behavior through the lens of my own: If I needed that spice, I would have simply asked the first employee I came across for its location. Since asking for directions does not make me uncomfortable, refusing to ask makes no sense to me. In my friend’s world, however, walking around in circles until he found his way was the reasonable thing to do since asking for help made him feel uncomfortable. I reasoned that he was avoiding that discomfort and trying to maintain his sense of himself as a self-sufficient person. At this point, I actually realized that many of the men I knew usually resist asking for directions and other kinds of information. Perhaps, they view it as a critical aspect of the independence that they perceive as a requisite to self-respect, or maybe, asking questions frames them as uninformed or inferior in knowledge. But why is it that many women don’t hesitate to ask when in doubt?
