Questions: The Stories We Ask Instead of Answering

There is a moment in some conversations when you realise you are no longer having the conversation you thought you were having.

You didn’t notice it shift. Nobody announced it. The words kept coming, the exchange kept moving, and somewhere in the middle of it the original thing quietly left the room and something else took its place. And by the time you notice, you are already deep inside the new conversation, defending a position you didn’t come in to defend, answering questions you didn’t come in to answer.

I saw this happen clearly once, in a WhatsApp group of people I had known for over twenty years.

This was when MeToo was just beginning to gather momentum. Not the headlines, not the celebrities, but the quieter version. Women talking in smaller spaces. Friend circles. School groups. The kind of rooms where people have known each other long enough that you’d expect a certain honesty.

Our group was active. Daily. Jokes, opinions, life updates, the full range. When MeToo entered that space, the tone shifted. Women in the group started sharing things. Not dramatic stories. Everyday things. College. First jobs. Public transport. The kind of incidents that rarely make it into formal conversation because they are too small to report and too frequent to ignore.

And then one of the men said it. This is all rubbish. Propaganda. Constructed to damage the reputation of a few men. The women pushed back. This is not rubbish. This is our reality. These are things that happened. To us. To people we know. Every woman is not lying. In the beginning, it felt like a conversation. And then the questions began.

What about men? Men get exploited too. Why does nobody talk about that? One of them was a lawyer. He talked about false domestic abuse cases, false harassment allegations, innocent families destroyed. Real suffering, he said, that nobody acknowledges. What about them? Who speaks for them?

And I watched the conversation move. Not collapse. Not end. Move. We had started in one place, women describing something specific, something immediate, something they had lived. Within minutes we were somewhere else entirely. Defending whether the original thing was big enough to matter. Whether it was fair to raise it without simultaneously raising everything else. Whether one conversation had to contain all conversations before it was allowed to exist.

If you had walked into the group at that point, you would not have known where it began. The questions were not looking for answers. They were looking for somewhere else to be.

There is a kind of question that doesn’t deepen what is being said. It quietly replaces it. What about men is not curiosity in that moment. It is redirection. It takes the conversation away from what is uncomfortable right now and moves it to something more manageable. Because if you stay with the original thing, something else might be required. Listening, maybe. Or sitting with something that doesn’t have a clean counterpoint. Or acknowledging that you recognise the thing being described, which is the most uncomfortable option of all.

The question prevents that. Neatly. Reasonably. Without anyone having to admit that prevention was the point.

What makes it so difficult to call out is that the question itself is not wrong. Men do get exploited. False cases do exist. These are real conversations. But not every conversation has to contain every conversation. And insisting that it does is one of the most efficient ways of ensuring that none of them go anywhere.

You see the same shape in smaller moments too. Someone says, this bothered me. And instead of a response, they get, but what about when you did this. Someone raises something uncomfortable and the reply is, are you sure that’s really the issue. Someone tries to name a pattern and suddenly they are defending whether the pattern exists, whether they have the right to name it, whether something from three years ago makes their current point less valid.

The ground shifts. The original thing is left somewhere behind. And the person who started the conversation is now managing a completely different one, usually one they didn’t choose and weren’t prepared for.

It is an old move. Some people have refined it so well they probably don’t know they are doing it anymore. The question arrives so naturally, sounds so reasonable, lands so cleanly that it takes a moment to notice the conversation has already moved.

That school group conversation never resolved. We didn’t agree. We didn’t understand each other better. We didn’t even stay with the same subject long enough to fully disagree about it. We just kept moving, from one question to another, until the original thing had dissolved somewhere along the way and nobody quite remembered where we had started.

Which was, I suspect, exactly how some people in that room wanted it to go. The next time a question arrives in a difficult conversation, it is worth noticing what it does. Does it take you deeper into what was said? Or does it move you somewhere else?

The difference is not in how reasonable the question sounds. It is in what happens to the conversation after it lands. And whether the thing that started it ever gets to finish. Or was ever meant to.

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This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .

This is a series about storytelling beyond a craft. As something we live inside. In memory, in conversation, and in the way we understand what happens to us. Read all posts here.

I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.