What do you think I should think?

Not too long ago, one of my friends was complaining to me about how a lot of his friends are constantly asking him what he thinks.

“What do you think of this sweater?”

“What do you think of my new boyfriend?”

“What do you think of the restraining order?”

He and I can talk about such things because he knows I often don’t care what he thinks. In fact, we disagree pretty often. Last year, he told me he was planning on moving to Paris and then maybe going for another graduate degree after that. I told him I didn’t think he’d actually do it and he told me to shut up.

The next time he called me on the phone, I said, “Ooh, are you at the airport? What’s the weather like? God, you’re up early!”

I did this for about six months and, since then, he hasn’t mentioned anything requiring a passport, much less Europe.

When he moaned about all his friends asking for his opinion, I asked him if his friends had any opinions at all. He laughed and said he didn’t know, but then he realized that they aren’t just asking for his opinion, they’re asking for his approval.

“It’s like they want me to approve or deny everything in their lives,” he said.

“How are you friends with so many weak-minded people?” I said. “Will they suddenly change their minds if you tell them you don’t like something? I mean, that’s a lot of power to wield.”

Maybe a week later, he found me online on a chat program and told me his coworkers had been asking his opinion on something.

“Oh, but get this,” he said. “I love it how certain people ask for your opinion and then get mad at you when you don’t like something! It’s like they want to know my opinion as long as it’s the same as theirs!”

I thought about this for the next week and couldn’t figure out why this happens. How is “What do you think?” such a loaded question? I mean, at face value, shouldn’t it just be an inquiry about what the other person thinks?

I found the answer in the unlikeliest of places: Reality TV — on The Food Network, to be exact. When I was lording over the household of a sick relative, doing the cooking, cleaning, shopping and driving to doctor’s appointments, I called myself “Fairy Poppins.” To be fair, I stole that from a David Sedaris story I read somewhere. I used to keep The Food Network on during the day for background noise, almost to keep me company. At night, it became my go-to channel when I didn’t like anything else on TV during a particular time slot. I used to sit on the couch and watch it with a tiny plate of crackers and cheese and a few splashes of Two Buck Chuck.

Two years later, and I had long grown tired of shows like “The Food Network Challenge” and “Ultimate Recipe Showdown,” where no-name cooks would compete for cash prizes before a panel of celebrity chefs and food critics. These people are hardly ever the stay-at-home amateurs the shows would have you believe, like some sort of Betty Crocker Cookoff, but often own their own food-related businesses like specialty stores, catering services and restaurants. It’s likely that these people are famous or at least popular in their hometowns or unincorporated county lands. The problem with these shows is that the format never changes so, once you’ve seen a handful of them, you feel like you’ve seen them all. You know that someone is going to drop their food while trying to plate it. You know that one of the appendages on the cake will be too heavy and will collapse on itself. The artificial drama, inserted by way of fast-paced music, quick cuts between cameras, and well-timed commercial breaks, always seems to happen at the same time in each episode.

I found myself flipping through the channels one night and came upon a burger-themed episode of “The Food Network Challenge.” I happened upon the show after most of the introductions and cooking were already over, and we were just about to hear what the judges had to say.

One by one, the judges displayed how unimpressed they were, and one by one, the camera cut to the cooks, each one even more disappointed than the judges. Cat Cora said she would have liked a citrus of some sort to brighten the flavor of one sandwich. Cut to a pretty woman with dark hair, maybe 40 years old, crestfallen. “My family and friends love that recipe,” she said, in a later interview. I expected this kind of reaction.

While tasting the next recipe, another judge shook his head like a see-saw and said, flat-out, “This just didn’t come together.”

Cut to another woman but, this time the cook was shooting lightning and poison-tipped darts from her eyes, and I didn’t expect that.

Of course, there’s no reason I shouldn’t have expected her to be angry. You can see angry faces directed at people like Simon Cowell every week. It seems like reality TV is full of people who have either been told they’re special or have just come to believe it in some other way so, when they do something that’s not so hot, they simply can’t stand to have it called to their attention. It’s a little clearer to see on “Kitchen Nightmares” when Gordon Ramsay, brusque as he may be, tells chefs that their ego is clouding their judgment, and that microwaves and Hershey’s syrup are not good culinary shortcuts.

When someone is crushed by a judge telling them that the fruits of their labor weren’t very good, it’s because their whole world-view is being called into question. It’s because, whatever they did, they thought it was good — really good. Having it labeled as something else means they now have to ask themselves: If I thought that was good and they thought that was bad, what else that I think is good is actually bad?

Sometimes this thought process is just too much, and that’s when otherwise rational people get angry and defensive, and why shouldn’t they? Being told your efforts aren’t good enough is an assault on your sensibilities. Maybe it’s your mother’s recipe — that’s how we’ve always done it — or maybe it was your favorite song, the one that got you a standing ovation at karaoke. Now, thanks to “American Idol,” people put out in such a way have taken to responding to criticism with, “I made it my own.” The sad part is that when the rest of us hear someone say that, it means it wasn’t as good as the original, whether it was your mama’s or Otis Redding’s. You might get invited to the next dinner party or get approached by people at Whisky Richard’s Tavern, but you might not be selling a million cookbooks or albums. Just sayin’.

So when people ask for your opinion about something, they might not actually be looking for your opinion, they could be looking for you to validate their opinions. Maybe it’s to let them know that they’re not alone in their sensibilities, maybe they’re feeling insecure and their ego needs a little stroke.

Since they’re not going to tell you the reason they’re asking, it can’t hurt to buy yourself some time by telling them, “Well, I don’t know. What do you think?”