The unexpected price of being an awkward houseguest
Today’s insight into my analysis of interpersonal risk and reward involves being a houseguest, a differently intimate sort of interaction than I usually focus on. I am hopeful that this different context for what is really the same issue will help someone understand it who previously hasn’t.
Sam and I took a flight together. Upon landing, Sam invited me to crash at Pat’s place. I trust Sam, so even though I’ve only met Pat once before and they weren’t there to welcome me, I accepted, and went to sleep in one of Pat’s guest rooms. Come morning, Sam was gone and incommunicado, but might have been back later. Pat was around, and we greeted each other. I asked if I could stick around for a few hours to do my day job. So far this is a perfectly normal experience in terms of friends and +1s crashing at each other’s homes, one I’ve been on both sides of multiple times in the past, and I think most of my friends will recognize.
Pat’s response was “I need to get [the guest part of the house] reset for an airbnb guest and then I have to leave soon”, and then they turned away from me and back to making their coffee. That was where everything went off the rails, both in terms of common expected responses, and in terms of my personal [perception of] risk in proceeding. It’s that risk that I want to walk you through next.
I predicted a 20% chance that Pat wanted me to leave and an 80% chance that they’d have been fine with me working in a different part of the house while they were gone and I was waiting for Sam to come back. Further, in the case where they wanted me to leave I predict a 50% chance they would give me a straight answer if I asked and a 50% chance they would take my followup as creating enough social pressure or obligation for them to let me stay even though they wanted me to go. And in that worst 10% case, there’s a decent chance that they would tell someone, and a small chance that person either repeats it badly or are themselves the sort of person to take misleading irresponsible leaps in paraphrasing communication, and a bunch of other factors and weightings that I can elaborate on if necessary… All of which leads to my probabilistic prediction that this choice would lead to about five people being told for the first time, and perhaps hundred more not for the first time, that [TRIGGER WARNING, this is about to take an unexpectedly intense turn] I am a rapist. And since that is an outcome I would prefer to avoid, I packed up and left the house.
Now Sam thinks I’m weird and awkward and ignorant of social norms and unable to read interpersonal signals, or at least a bit more of those things than they already thought, and is less likely to invite me to their friends’ homes. I knew that outcome would happen, and nothing about it surprises me. If I had a dollar for every time someone accused me of missing signals that I didn’t miss… I wouldn’t need to borrow nearly so much to buy a house.
What I need from you is either to convince me that I’m wrong in my predictions, or in my weighting of the harm/benefit of the various outcomes, or to stop being and/or associating with the people who do the game-of-telephone thing and mis-judging of these and other sorts of situations and all the other cognitive failures that have led to this state of affairs.