If This New Year Incident Sums Up 2014, It's Gonna Be A Good Year

At last night’s New Year’s party, we were discussing a rather – aggressive – friend of ours.  He’s a wonderful man, but he pretty much asks for everything he wants, which causes people to feel pressured sometimes… Even though he’s perfectly fine with being refused.
“Oh, that’s part of a wonderful article I read yesterday!” I gushed.  “It’s about Ask Culture!”
“…what?”
“Ask Culture,” I repeated.  “In many families, you’re trained to ask for all your needs… but there’s no stigma to being told ‘no.’  So you’re trained to ask, constantly, for even trivial desires.”
“Oookayyyy…” they said, squinting at me.
“And there’s – I think it’s called Guess Culture, where you never ask unless you’re sure you’ll get a positive response.  So rather than saying ‘Hey, can I crash on your couch next weekend?’ you feel the waters with a thousand questions like ‘So what are you doing on Saturday?’ and ‘So you’re not going out?'”
“That’s good.  This culture,” Gini said, starting to giggle – and then everyone around me giggled.
“But no, this is a thing!” I insisted, propelled by perhaps one too many glasses of Scotchka. “Because if you’re in Guess Culture and not Ask Culture – ”
More giggling.
” – then even the answer might not be for real!  Because people hate to say ‘no’ in Guess Culture, you can’t be certain if that’s a real yes!  So you have to figure out whether they actually want you!”  I put the glass down.  “That’s why I prefer Ask Culture.”
Snorts.  Active howling.
“Why the hell are you all laughing at me?” I cried.
“…’Ass Culture,'” they snickered, and then clutched their bellies and laughed – and I did, too, as I realized that to them, I’d been touting the benefits of what, in fact, sounded exactly like “Ass Culture” over and over again.
We laughed about that until about three in the morning.  So, you know, a good night.