Quote:
Originally Posted by sarahsweets
Hey @rdgrad15-
I think you are thinking about this example an awful lot without getting clarification. As scary as it is, why dont you call, text or email or take this person aside and be honest. Tell her you planned on paying for your food and understood she was paying for drinks and when she chose to pay for you in confused you and you are worried things got off on the wrong foot. I was wondering if she agreed to buy the drinks was she just going to give everyone some cash separately to pay for their own drinks? Or was it one order with all the drinks and she was paying all at once. If this is the case then your burger would have been included in that one purchase of drinks so she may have thought you expected her to pay for your food or annoyed that you didnt wait until this purchase was complete and then placed your food order. Am I making sense?
How did you find out that she didnt like doing this?
You have every right to decline any help whenever you want but you shouldnt do this because you fear THEY want you to decline. People should not offer help if they do not mean it. If you are offered help and you accept its not your concern whether they meant it or not. You have to take it at face value and stop looking for the subtext or hidden meaning. At the same time to avoid any bad feelings you are also allowed to say no all the time.
How can you tell annoyance from a sigh? I think you are reading way too much into this. You have no idea why they are sighing.
They would not have stopped what they are doing and asked you if you needed help if they didnt want to. And sighing is just sighing.
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Hey @
sarahsweets, sorry it took me a while to get back to you. To answer your question, her paying for drinks was on a individual basis, not as one huge check. Just simply gave cash for us to get drinks. But I can see your point of view, it's likely something changed in her plans and I didn't realize it or something and she went off. I still think she could have handled it better though since I specifically said I would get my own food and even had my card out ready to pay. So something must have been up that caused her to snap that I am aware of. The reason I realized she didn't like doing it is because she was clearly relieved when it was decided at any other time that we would not go out to eat somewhere. Unfortunately the job she had actually didn't pay her.
She got paid through donations and it wasn't much so I could see why she would be glad to not feel obligated to do so. I'd feel the same way if I was in her position. In terms of sensing annoyance in a sigh, it is not just a regular sigh. It's an obvious annoyed gesture. The person's facial expression turns into one of disapproval and annoyance and if they sigh like I mentioned, it's very loud and abrupt and a couple times I've even had people tilt their head back as well while looking very annoyed. I do agree that there are people that actually want to help when they offer but unfortunately, this is not always the case. This hasn't happened to just me either, I've seen it happen to others.
I've been with someone else and someone would come up to the person I'm with and the person I'm with will offer a favor, as soon as the favor was accepted and the person who accepted it left, the person I was with will suddenly be very annoyed and ask why they need to do a favor for someone. So that's why i believe that just because someone offers a favor doesn't mean they actually want their offer accepted. But I get what you mean and I wish it was true that people wouldn't offer if they didn't want to but unfortunately it's not always the case.
For some reason, especially those who are close to each other, feel obligated to offer favors to others while secretly wishing their offer is declined. And if it's accepted then they get secretly annoyed, perhaps even wishing they didn't make an offer in the first place. I've even seen it happen among people I don't know. There has been numerous times I've been somewhere and I just happened to be nearby a couple people or even a small group, like family or friends, and I would see this exact same scenario play out. That's why I believe this is way more common than people realize unfortunately. That's why I'm also very careful and anytime I do accept a favor, I always make sure they know they don't have to do it.