If there's anything about me that pisses my mom off the most, it's The Dumbledore Theory.
The Dumbledore Theory is this.
Anyone who has had the pleasure of reading Harry Potter knows who Dumbledore is, but relatively few of those people know that Dumbledore is gay. It's true. Dumbledore likes men. J.K. Rowling revealed this in 2007, and we know she wasn't lying because she wouldn't willingly associate herself with the LGBTQ+ community unless absolutely necessary. So it's fact.
But even if this is what J.K. Rowling intended for the character, this detail is never explicitly mentioned in the books. It's perhaps alluded to in his relationship with Grindelwald, but nothing definitive is ever written. Why? I was listening to an interview once where Rowling was asked this question, and her answer was strikingly simple: it never became relevant.
It's that easy. It simply never came up in the plot or the storyline or in the dialogue, and therefore it was an irrelevant detail to include in the books. It was never revealed because it never became relevant.
And The Dumbledore Theory is exactly that: if you want to know something about someone, you need to find a way to make it relevant. In other words, you need to ask about it. All of this debate and curiosity wouldn't exist if Harry would have at any point in his hundreds of hours with Dumbledore said, "Hey, Dumby, do you like dudes?"
I'm not going to say I haven't taken this to an unreasonable extreme sometimes. There have been many occasions where I told my mom something unreasonably late, and when she asked why I didn't tell her sooner, I said, "It never became relevant until now."
But I think the idea at its core is still a valid one. If you want to know something about someone, you need to ask them. Don't underestimate the importance of just asking questions. I get that you can't ask everyone every question all the time, and all relationships still involve some personal agency in knowing what you should share with the other person. But you can't expect people to just proactively share everything you might be interested in. You need to make it relevant.
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