Assumptions Kill

OPINION: Assumptions kill relationships.

It's really rude to assume I know what someone else is thinking or feeling, unless they’ve already told me what they’re thinking or feeling.  Or you.

I’d say go so far as to say that it’s disempowering them, and it diminishes their right to be in charge of their own thoughts and feelings.

And “But I know them well” is not actually a good excuse. If I know someone well (for example, I’ve known my bride for many decades), I may have a better guess, a less-ignorant assumption, but I’m still taking away their agency, damaging their responsibility for their own heart. I’ve made that mistake enough times to be gun-shy. (She has paid dearly for my assumptions over the years.)

Assumptions damage and can kill relationships, sometimes slowly and painfully, other times quickly and messily.

I watch folks pretty regularly make an assumption about someone else, then relate to them, or discuss them, as if those uninformed (or misinformed) assumptions were actually true. The assumptions prevent us from learning what is actually true about that person, and in conversation, they prejudice other people’s thoughts and expectations about them.

I was part of a social experiment one time. Six or eight of us were assigned to the task of figuring out the answer to a pretty complex problem. But as we worked on it, the researcher stuck labels (like “prideful” or “wise one” or “hair-brained”) on our foreheads and instructed us to assume that this is who each person really was as we worked on our problem.  

The exercise continued for another 10 or 15 minutes. The curious thing was that at the end of the exercise, we all knew what the label on our foreheads said, and we had all begun to live up to (or down to) those assumptions.

Lesson: in a relationship, my assumptions about you will help to shape who you are and how you relate to me and to others around you.

On the other hand, if I’m making assumptions about a public figure I’ll never have an actual relationship with, for example Taylor Swift or Donald Trump, then there’s no actual relationship to damage. But our assumptions still prevent us from understanding what’s actually true. If I believe that Taylor Swift is this way, then that’s what I’ll see, that’s what I’ll expect from her. More dangerously, that’s also going to shape (to limit) how I pray for her. Same with Donald Trump, or any other person I might pray for. (And I always recommend praying for both thought-leaders and political leaders.)

Personally, I’m working on (and I confess I have a long way to go) replacing assumptions with possibilities. I’m trying to eliminate “They think this” with “I allow for the possibility that they might think this,” and then ask enough questions to find out. Provided I really want to (and deserve to) know what they think. It seems to me that people made in the image of God are deserving of that level of respect.