People who don’t ask me questions drive me crazy. Why are they like that?

When I was about 7, my father scolded me for being a bad conversationalist. I had been holding forth about my day, Pokémon and cute dogs. “In a conversation, you can’t just talk about yourself,” he said. “You have to ask other people questions about themselves.”

I was confused. Didn’t everyone want to hear my thoughts about Golden Retrievers?

Not everyone sees questions as an essential element of conversation. Sarah Miller writes about what she and her friends call “non-askers” – people who are happy to chat at length about their own lives, but don’t often ask questions of others. Non-askers are one of Miller’s great pet peeves, but experts say there are many reasons people may not appear curious in conversation.

One man told Miller that a friend confronted him about not asking her about herself. He realized he was intimidated by her, and he didn’t want to be seen as prying. Some people are shy, others are distracted, and some are under so much pressure in their lives that they come across as withdrawn. “Anxiety can easily look like egocentrism,” says Katy Cotterell, an art psychotherapist.

And asking questions isn’t always virtuous, says Patrick Blanchfield, a teacher of psychoanalytic theory – think of pickup artists. Asking questions “can be a way to assert power”, he says.

Readers had lots of thoughts about Miller’s piece, and you can see some of their responses here. What do you think about non-askers? Sorry… didn’t mean to pry.

Read Miller’s full story here.

Our lungs are amazing, says Phil Daoust in his latest Fit for ever column – they help us take about 20,000 breaths a day, and 600m breaths in our lifetime. But are you taking proper care of them? As Daoust says, it’s not enough to not smoke cigarettes. Lung function begins to decline in your 30s. Here are some tips for keeping them strong:

• Exercise. Aerobic exercise like running and brisk walking can promote the efficient movement of oxygen around your body. Strength training is also important, as muscles around the lungs help the organ inflate and deflate.
• Avoid pollution as much as possible. Air pollution can damage our lungs, experts say. Dr Pallavi Periwal, a pulmonologist, suggests checking the air quality index before you go out, and masking up if necessary.
• Clear your home. Indoor air pollution is too often ignored, says Periwall. Our homes contain mold, household chemicals, pet hair and dust. Protect your airways by regularly cleaning linens and dusting surfaces.

Read the full story here.

A tweet I think about a lot says: “Oh, you’re a people pleaser? Name three people who are pleased with you.” The idea is that those who self-identify as people pleasers can be decidedly unpleasant. This isn’t always true, but one person will always be hurt by such tendencies, says psychotherapist Moya Sarner: yourself. Sarner’s own people-pleasing impulses left her feeling empty, with no solid sense of self. But when she looked closer, she found a self that experienced a range of uncomfortable emotions like “envy, hatred, fear, vulnerability”. Only by getting to know the different parts of herself and by befriending these emotional monsters under her bed was she able to feel more solid.

Read the full story here.

Can “friends with benefits” ever work? Two separate but almost identical movies investigated the question in 2011 (Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached – I preferred the latter). Over a decade later, great minds are still wrestling with it. A reader tells Leading questions columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith they want to start dating again, but don’t want to stop having sex with their ex, who is great in bed. Gordon-Smith says it’s not necessarily true that this set up never works, but that it may be more difficult to connect with someone new. “If the life goal is ever to be fully disentangled from this person, that will eventually mean in bed, too,” she says.

Read the full story here.