I think topics like that where you have different opinions, it is just really hard to talk about without a risk of someone feeling attacked, I think it usually is better to talk about something else instead -- that doesn't mean not asking them anything at all, but knowing which topics are often sensitive, and talking about probably non sensitive topics instead, or saying "I'm really curious but I don't want to press if you don't want to talk about it, can you tell me about X.
I'm not good at this either. I'm always interested in "serious" conversations about politics, religion, etc (even if there might be as much intellectual challenge in learning about someone's hobby or similar), and have only slowly learned to avoid putting my foot in it. Some people are better at it. Trying to get myself away from thinking of it as a debate (even if it's something like politics where you might think there was a fair amount of one side being better than the other), and instead asking what they were *for*, asking about the interesting/good/strong parts of their views helped a little bit.
Re: Examples
Date: 2018-09-11 02:35 pm (UTC)I think topics like that where you have different opinions, it is just really hard to talk about without a risk of someone feeling attacked, I think it usually is better to talk about something else instead -- that doesn't mean not asking them anything at all, but knowing which topics are often sensitive, and talking about probably non sensitive topics instead, or saying "I'm really curious but I don't want to press if you don't want to talk about it, can you tell me about X.
I'm not good at this either. I'm always interested in "serious" conversations about politics, religion, etc (even if there might be as much intellectual challenge in learning about someone's hobby or similar), and have only slowly learned to avoid putting my foot in it. Some people are better at it. Trying to get myself away from thinking of it as a debate (even if it's something like politics where you might think there was a fair amount of one side being better than the other), and instead asking what they were *for*, asking about the interesting/good/strong parts of their views helped a little bit.