Are you an akser or a Guesser?

[Moonliner]

Originally Posted by Alex

I've mostly brought Lani around on this type of thing. She finally realized that if she says "would you do the dishes now" I will almost always happily do so (and if I don't there's probably a good reason) whereas "do you want to do the dishes" gets a "no I don't" and "would you do the dishes when you can" gets me doing them when I get around to it."

Now, the logical question is why I don't just learn to interpret "would you like to..." to mean "do...". Well, obviously it is because "would you like to..." actually means "would you like to..." and I can't reward ambiguity.

When all the time what they really seem to want is the dishes to get done without any type of comment at all.