By Ismar, in Brazil.

I have always believed there is a line between being interested in another person and entering a part of their life that does not belong to you. Then I started dancing, met new people and discovered that sometimes curiosity opens a door rather than crosses a boundary.

When I was a child, my parents sometimes stopped me when I became curious about something that did not concern children.

“This subject is not for kids,” they would say. “Maybe when you grow up, you can discuss it, but it is not the time now.”

There was another lesson that stayed with me much longer.

“Your life is your business. Other lives are not your business.”

Leave other people to live how they want, they told me, and you will avoid many problems.

I think I still live very much according to that rule.

If I meet someone for the first time, of course I need to ask something. What is your name? Where do you live? What do you like? Do you enjoy sports or travelling? These are normal questions to me. Otherwise, how do two people begin a conversation?

But there is a point where curiosity becomes something different.

If someone tells me they work for a company that pays well, I would never immediately ask, “How much do you earn every month?” Even with people I know quite well, I consider salary a private matter.

The same applies to relationships.

You might ask someone whether they are married. That is one thing. Asking about the intimate details of the marriage is something else entirely.

I have been asked questions like this myself.

Years ago, a French teacher asked whether I had a girlfriend. When I said no, he asked whether I had a boyfriend. I answered him normally, but I thought it was a strange and impolite question. I would not ask somebody else the same thing unless that person had already opened that kind of conversation with me.

I have also had people ask me very directly about the sexual side of relationships I had many years ago. I never understood why they wanted this information.

It was related only to me and to the woman involved.

What would another person do with the answer?

That is perhaps the question I ask myself most often when people gossip.

Information with nowhere useful to go.

Some people are extremely interested in the private lives of others.

They want to know who is seeing whom, who is having problems, who might be cheating on somebody. Then they pass the information to someone else.

I do not enjoy this.

If somebody tells me that one married person is cheating on another, what am I supposed to do with that information? I have no intention of solving their relationship. I do not want to become involved. For me, it is useless information.

I have also been on the receiving end of gossip.

Once, a cleaner working in my girlfriend’s home told her she had seen me at a bus stop talking to another woman. I did not even understand what she was talking about. I had not been meeting another woman during the period she mentioned, but suddenly there was a small problem created from something somebody thought they had seen.

Once, a cleaner working in my girlfriend’s home told her she had seen me at a bus stop talking to another woman.

Another time, I had met the girlfriend of a colleague only once or twice. Later she disappeared, and somebody contacted me suggesting I might have problems with the police because I knew her.

I knew almost nothing about her life.

The police never contacted me. Nothing came of it. But I remember wondering how a person who barely knew the situation had connected my name with it in the first place.

This is what bothers me about gossip. Information travels, changes shape and creates problems for people who may have nothing to do with the original story.

I prefer my parents’ rule.

Your life is your business.

Curiosity needs an invitation.

This does not mean that I want people to remain strangers.

I think curiosity depends on how the other person approaches you.

If someone is polite with me, I tend to be polite with them. If someone is very direct, perhaps I can also become more direct. I do not change myself completely according to the person, but I respond to the way they interact with me.

At my dancing classes, for example, when somebody new arrives and I dance with her, the first thing I normally ask is her name.

If she replied, “Why do you want to know my name?” I probably would not ask anything else.

For me, that would be a clear message: there is no space for the conversation to continue.

Fortunately, nobody has answered me like that.

I also know there are questions people do not like. I do not ask women their age, for example. If people do not like discussing something, there is no reason to force the subject.

Perhaps curiosity should work like dancing.

You make a movement, the other person responds, and then you discover whether there is another movement to make.

Making mistakes and having fun.

The dancing classes have taught me something else about people.

There are people who become very critical when somebody makes a mistake. I am not very interested in becoming closer to these people.

We are there to learn.

Of course we make mistakes.

I prefer the people who can make mistakes and have fun.

Some people have been dancing much longer than I have. Some dance better than me. Some, in my opinion, have been there longer and still dance worse than me. But ability is not the most important thing when deciding whether I want another conversation with somebody.

What matters more is how the person behaves.

Can we make a mistake without becoming angry? Can we laugh? Can we enjoy learning?

About two months ago, one of those conversations continued outside the dancing school.

I met a woman there who has this attitude. She wants to dance better and have fun. She does not become angry or annoyed when we make mistakes.

We started going somewhere else to dance.

Then we went walking.

We had lunch together.

And eventually I had to admit something.

I think we are dating.

This was not why I started dancing.

I did not enter the dancing school looking for a girlfriend. I think most people in the group are not there specifically to find a relationship. They are there because they want to dance.

But wherever you go, you meet different people.

Sometimes you become friends. Sometimes the relationship remains inside that particular environment. Sometimes nothing happens.

And sometimes something more happens.

Apparently, I am not single.

Even after saying all this, I described myself during our conversation as a single man.

The Mayor disagreed.

I explained that I meant I live alone. We do not share the same house.

He told me that this is not really the definition of being single.

Maybe he is right.

I am also trying not to create too many expectations. Human relationships are not easy. As we become older, I think they can become more complicated because we arrive with a background. We have had experiences. Sometimes we become defensive.

If I create a very big expectation, the frustration can also become very big.

So I prefer to see how the relationship progresses.

But there is no question that dancing has changed something in my life.

Recently somebody asked me what I thought about the dancing classes. I told them that perhaps it was one of the best things I have done during the last five years.

People found this answer funny.

Maybe it is surprising because I have often considered myself an unsocial person.

After dancing, however, a small group of us sometimes goes somewhere to eat. It might be a snack bar, a restaurant or one of the places where food stalls appear at the weekend.

We sit together.

We eat.

We talk.

They tell me that I am very talkative.

When I tell them I am shy, they do not believe me.

And perhaps the final evidence came near the end of our conversation.

The Mayor asked whether the woman I had met speaks English.

Without thinking too much about the words, I replied:

“My girlfriend?”

He stopped me immediately.

There it was.

I had said it myself.

For someone who believes very strongly that other people’s lives are none of my business, life has developed a nice sense of humour.

I still believe in boundaries. I still dislike gossip. I still think we should allow other people their privacy and not demand information simply because we are curious.

But curiosity is not always an intrusion.

Sometimes it is simply asking someone’s name.

Sometimes it is discovering that they also do not mind making mistakes.

Sometimes it is agreeing to another dance.

And then another conversation.

And then lunch.

I hope this one continues.

By Sylvie, France.

From polishing shoes on Saturdays to reminding grown daughters to clean their rooms, some household rules disappear. Others simply change shape.

When I was a child, Saturday meant cleaning.

We lived on a farm, so shoes in the house were not a big problem. There was dirt anyway. But every Saturday, the house had to be cleaned, and there was another job waiting for us: my father’s shoes.

We had to clean them every Saturday. It was not really optional.

My husband remembers the same thing from his childhood. It was normal then. You sat outside on a chair, gathered the family’s shoes and polished them.

Today, I hardly ever polish my own shoes.

Some rules simply do not survive.

When responsibility was just normal.

I do not remember my childhood as a house full of rules. My parents were busy, and there were things I simply had to manage myself.

Homework was one of them.

My parents did not have time to check whether I had done it. If I did not do my homework, it was my fault. It was my problem. Looking back, I do not think that was bad. I think it was a good thing.

There were other responsibilities that belonged naturally to everyday life. Once a week, I cycled to the butcher. Around the house and farm, everyone had things they were expected to do.

Even outside the house, responsibility had clear boundaries. Where we live, people are responsible for the pavement in front of their homes. When there is snow, you clear your part. If you do not, and somebody gets hurt there, that can become your responsibility.

Perhaps that is why some things never felt like rules. They were simply what you did.

Then you become the parent.

With my own daughters, I had rules too.

Their bedrooms did not have to be perfect, but I did not want things lying everywhere on the floor. They became quite organised. They learned to change their own bedding, put it in the washing machine and make the bed again. Sometimes they vacuumed their rooms themselves.

Of course, as they became older, there was another problem.

I kept reminding them.

“You need to clean that. You need to do this. You need to vacuum.”

Again and again.

I know I made them nervous. My husband would tell me, “You need to stop. You always say the same.” He was right. Sometimes the first thing I said when I saw them was something they still needed to clean.

Sometimes the first thing I said when I saw them was something they still needed to clean.

But when you are the parent, you can also see what happens if nobody does it.

Someone still has to vacuum.

The rules they remember differently.

Not everything we gave our daughters felt like a rule at the time.

When they were small, I did not work on Wednesdays. Every Wednesday, I drove with them to the next city and we went to the library. We looked at books. We sat on the sofa. Each of them could choose what she wanted to read, or simply look at the pictures.

At weekends, my husband and I liked cycling. When our oldest daughter was very small, we took her with us. Later she could cycle herself while her younger sister travelled with us. We did many cycling trips.

Apparently, too many.

Now both daughters say they have had enough. Cycling and walking are finished for them. They remind us that we made them do far too much of it when they were younger. Maybe one day they will enjoy it again.

A house after the children leave.

Now one daughter has moved away for her studies, and the house is different.

It stays cleaner.

Her bedroom is tidy because she did what she needed to do before leaving. Before she comes home for the weekend, I only need to vacuum. There are fewer long hairs appearing everywhere around the house.

But she left something else behind.

Her aquarium.

A few years ago, she desperately wanted fish. She asked every day. Every day, every day, every day. Eventually we bought the aquarium.

She won.

Now the fish are still in her room, and we have to remember to feed them. Because nobody goes into that room every day anymore, you have to consciously think: the fish need food.

The aquarium also needs cleaning. That was always a lot of work, and my daughter could usually find another reason not to do it.

We are thinking about finding somebody who would like the fish and take care of them. My brother-in-law, who goes fishing sometimes, had another suggestion. He would use them as bait.

No. Absolutely not.

If I give the fish away, they are going to somebody who wants them.

Some rules remain firm.

Knowing when not to say anything.

The harder rules are the ones that change because your children are no longer children.

My daughter is 18 now. She has her driving licence. She can go where she wants without asking us to take her. She told me this was the best summer she has ever had.

I can understand why.

She went out almost every evening during the holidays. She went to another town with friends. She went to a discotheque and sometimes came home very late.

Of course, I worried.

Now that she is not living at home, she has allowed me to see her location on Snapchat. I am grateful for that. But this creates a strange new rule for me.

I can look, but I cannot say too much.

If I keep asking, “Where are you?” or putting too much pressure on her, she can simply stop sharing her location. So sometimes I know exactly where she is, and I have to keep quiet.

That may be one of the biggest differences between the rules of my childhood and the rules in my house today.

When I was young, responsibility meant polishing the shoes because Saturday had arrived, cycling to the butcher because it needed to be done, and managing my homework because nobody else was going to manage it for me.

As a parent, responsibility sometimes meant making rules and repeating them until everybody was tired of hearing them.

Now it can mean something completely different.

Sometimes it means trusting your daughter to make her own decisions, even when you are still watching the little dot move across the map.

The Mayor gave me a new rule: whenever something goes wrong, I am allowed to give only one answer.

Just add garlic.

I liked this immediately.

At home we had a very practical problem. The shutters on our bedroom windows were not working properly. On one window the shutter was down and could not open. On the other it was open and could not close. The wrong motors had been fitted. This is not ideal in a bedroom.

Normally you telephone somebody, order the correct motor, wait for another appointment and hope that this time everything works. But under the new rule, the answer is much easier.

Garlic.

I am surprised the mechanic did not think of it himself.

There are not many situations where garlic makes life worse. Perhaps if you have marmalade on your bread. Then I would be careful. Otherwise, I think we have possibilities.

But behind this stupid idea was actually a good question. Today we can get an answer for almost everything immediately. Google, YouTube, instructions, videos, forums. You type in the problem and — boop — there is the answer.

But is getting an answer the same as understanding?

I don’t think so.

First, Do Not Panic.

Cooking is a good example.

People can make a very small problem into a very big problem. The food is too salty and immediately they think: finished, terrible, throw it away, I must cook everything again.

Why?

My mother taught me something different. If something becomes too salty or too spicy, you can sometimes grate a potato very finely and cook it with the food. It can help soften the problem.

If something becomes too salty or too spicy, you can sometimes grate a potato very finely and cook it with the food.

That is experience.

It is not panic, throw everything in the bin and start again. It is: look at the problem, think about it, try something.

I like this way.

Maybe the first rule of cooking should not be just add garlic. Maybe it should be first, do not panic.

Then add garlic.

A Recipe Is Not an Explanation.

You can find a recipe in seconds today, and that is fantastic. I use the internet myself. I use Google. I look on YouTube.

If something at home is broken, first I look at the instructions. Then I use my own brain. Maybe I take my tools out and try to find the answer myself. If I still have no idea, I go to the internet.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But with cooking videos I notice something. Many people tell you exactly what to do.

Put this inside. Then this. Then this. One spoon of that. Mix it. Finished. Boom.

Very few explain why.

Why does this ingredient help? Why this oil and not another one? Why does one small change make the food better?

For me, that is much more interesting than simply following instructions.

When somebody explains the reason, I learn something I can use again. The next time I do not need exactly the same recipe, because now I understand a little more about what is happening.

An instruction gives me one meal.

Understanding gives me possibilities.

Before Google, There Were People.

The Mayor asked me what we did before the internet.

Good question.

We asked somebody.

I asked my mother. I asked my father. I asked friends. If you needed specialist information, you found a book, went to a library or searched for somebody who knew more than you.

You needed more time. And you needed to know who to ask.

Today it is simple. I put the question into Google and Google says: Boop. Here is your answer.

For me personally, that is better. I like having information quickly. I do not want to return to a world where every small question requires a library and three telephone calls.

But perhaps the old way was better in one important respect.

People talked to each other.

If I did not know something, I had to find somebody who did. Then we had a conversation. The answer took longer, but something else happened at the same time.

We connected.

That is something an instant answer cannot completely replace.

The Beautiful Danger of Curiosity.

Of course, the internet creates another problem.

You search for one thing. Then you see another thing.

That looks interesting.

Click.

Then there is another video. Another barbecue. Another recipe. Another machine.

And suddenly three hours have disappeared.

I know this problem very well.

When my wife is out running, cycling or swimming, I sometimes have time for this. I can look at recipes, barbecue equipment and new ideas. I enjoy it.

But I also like the other version of curiosity: going somewhere and talking with somebody who really knows the subject. You stand there, look at the equipment, discuss it, ask questions, hear an opinion and learn something you did not expect.

Then perhaps I go home and continue on the internet.

For me, this combination is probably best.

The internet gives speed.

People give context.

Experience tells you whether any of it makes sense.

New Does Not Mean Better.

I notice this especially with barbecue equipment.

Somebody tells you one machine is fantastic. The best. Very, very good.

A few years later there is a new machine.

Suddenly the old one is terrible.

Now the new one is the best thing in the world.

I don’t like this.

It is completely okay to say, “I have learned something new. This version is better. This is the next step.”

Good. No problem.

But that does not mean yesterday’s good machine has become rubbish overnight.

Sometimes I look at these things and think: what actually changed?

The machine?

Or the story around the machine?

That is when your own experience becomes important. You have to look, compare and ask questions.

Curiosity does not mean believing everything new.

Sometimes curiosity means becoming slightly suspicious.

Use Your Own Head.

That, for me, is the important thing.

Instant answers are not bad. I use them. I enjoy them. I like being able to ask a question and have an answer in seconds.

But the instant answer should be the beginning, not always the end.

You still need your eyes, your nose, your experience and your memory. You need to know what your family likes and does not like. You need to remember the little tricks your mother taught you. You need to recognise when somebody on the internet understands what they are explaining — and when somebody is only saying, “Put this inside, then this, then this. Boom. Finished.”

And sometimes you should still ask another human being.

Perhaps the answer takes ten minutes instead of ten seconds, but you get a story with it. Maybe you laugh. Maybe you learn something you did not even know you wanted to know.

Maybe that is what curiosity needs in the age of instant answers.

Not fewer answers.

Better questions.

And when all of that fails?

Just add garlic.