Asking someone for their opinion, then explaining why it won’t work and doing your own thing anyway, is a small pattern with an outsized ability to damage relationships. It rarely takes long before the other person says some version of “why do you even bother asking me?”, and they have a point.

Looking at it from the asker’s side, a few things are usually going on. Sometimes the ask is a bid to offload the weight of deciding alone. Sometimes it’s simply habit: “what do you think?” running on autopilot, more a way of thinking out loud than a genuine request. Either way, the useful move is to notice what’s actually driving the question before you ask it: are you actually open to being moved, or have you already decided?

From the other side, being asked for input costs something: attention pulled away from whatever you were doing, then, often, quietly discounted. It’s worth remembering that cost before asking again out of habit.

A simple test: if you find that you ask “what do you think?” and then follow your own instinct nine times out of ten regardless of the answer, the asking has become habitual rather than genuine. In that case, it’s more honest to say what you’re actually doing: “I’m going to go with the fish for dinner” rather than “what do you want for dinner?”, or to be upfront that you’re thinking out loud rather than genuinely soliciting a decision.

None of this is about never asking for input. It’s about noticing when a question has stopped being a real question, and either making it real again or dropping the pretence.