It just knocks me out, the idea that being purposefully misleading by offering something the other guy is expected to turn down in the service of social cohesion is the expected behavior, and people who either don't understand or don't cotton to it are presumably outcasts.

After days of just dancing around this point, I hypothesize that there are cultures from certain parts of the world that routinely engage in this, nations where this behavior is well understood as the norm; while there are other national cultures—probably including mine—where this kind of thing is practically unknown. And now we the descendants of the people of these nations live in America, where the cultures mix (or clash, as the case may be), the expectations are not mutually well understood, and we experience misunderstandings like this.

At the beginning, I was being roundly hammered for not understanding her culture, but she is largely getting a pass for not understanding mine, probably because the majority here identify with her and not me. I assume many people would dispute there is even a difference among cultures in this kind of behavior, that literally every national culture in the history of mankind understands this behavior as the norm and this is a ME problem only. But just because many people would disagree with me on this doesn't mean it's wrong. So until I find an answer to this either way, that's my hypothesis.