Sex, Lies and Conversation: Why Is It So Hard for Men and Women to Talk to Each Other?

DEBORAH TANNEN

I was addressing a small gathering in a suburban Virginia living room-a women's group that had
invited men to join them. Throughout the evening, one man had been particularly talkative,
frequently offering ideas and anecdotes, while his wife sat silently beside him on the couch.
Toward the end of the evening, I commented that women frequently complain that their husbands don't
talk to them. This man quickly concurred. He gestured toward his wife and said, "She's the talker
in our family." The room burst into laughter; the man looked puzzled and hurt. "It's true," he
explained. "When I come home from work I have nothing to say. If she didn't keep the conversation
going, we'd spend the whole evening in silence."
This episode crystallizes the irony that although American men tend to talk more than women in
public situations, they often talk less at home. And this pattern is wreaking havoc with marriage.
The pattern was observed by political scientist Andrew Hacker in the late '70s. Sociologist
Catherine Kohler Riessman reports in her new book Divorce Talk that most of the women she
interviewed-but only a few of the men-gave lack of communication as the reason for their divorces.
Given the current divorce rate of nearly 50 percent, that amounts to millions of cases in the
United States every year-a virtual epidemic of failed conversation.
In my own research, complaints from women about their husbands most often focused not on tangible
inequities such as having given up the chance for a career to accompany a husband to his, or doing
far more than their share of daily life-support work like cleaning, cooking, social arrangements
and errands. Instead, they focused on
communication: "He doesn't listen to me," "He doesn't talk to me." I found, as Hacker observed
years before, that most wives want their husbands to be, first and foremost, conversational
partners, but few husbands share this expectation of their wives.
In short, the image that best represents the current crisis is the stereotypical cartoon scene of a
man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman
glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.

Linguistic Battle of the Sexes
How can women and men have such different impressions of communication in marriage? Why the
widespread imbalance in their interests and expectations?
In the April [1990] issue of American Psychologist, Stanford University's Eleanor Maccoby reports
the results of her own and others' research showing that children's development is most influenced
by the social structure of peer interactions. Boys and girls tend to play with children of their
own gender, and their sex-separate groups have different organizational structures and interactive
norms.
I believe these systematic differences in childhood socialization make talk between women and men
like cross-cultural communication, heir to all the attraction and pitfalls of that enticing but
difficult enterprise. My research on men's and women's conversations uncovered patterns similar to
those described for children's groups.
For women, as for girls, intimacy is the fabric of relationships, and talk is the thread from which
it is woven. Little girls create and maintain friendships by exchanging secrets; similarly, women
regard conversation as the cornerstone of friendship. So a woman expects her husband to be a new
and improved version of a best friend. What is important is not the individual subjects that are
discussed but the sense of closeness, of a life shared, that emerges when people tell their
thoughts, feelings, and impressions.
Bonds between boys can be as intense as girls', but they are based less on talking, more on doing
things together. Since they don't assume talk is the cement that binds a relationship, men don't
know what kind of talk women want, and they don't miss it when it isn't there.
Boy's groups are larger, more inclusive, and more hierarchical, so boys must struggle to avoid the
subordinate position in the group. This may play a role in women's complaints that men don't listen
to them. Some men really don't like to listen, because being the listener makes them feel one-down,
like a child listening to adults or an employee to a boss.
But often when women tell men, "You aren't listening," and the men protest, "I am," the men are
right. The impression of not listening results from misalignments in the mechanics of conversation.
The misalignment begins as soon as a man and a woman take physical positions. This became clear
when I studied videotapes made by psychologist Bruce Dorval of children and adults talking to their
same-sex best friends. I found that at every age, the girls and women faced each other directly,
their eyes anchored on each other's faces. At every age, the boys and men sat at angles to each
other and looked elsewhere in the room, periodically glancing at each other. They were obviously
attuned to each other, often mirroring each other's movements. But the tendency of men to face away
can give women the impression they aren't listening even when they are. A young woman in college
was frustrated: Whenever she told her boyfriend she wanted to talk to him,
he would lie down on the floor, close his eyes, and put his arm over his face. This signaled to
her, "He's taking a nap." But he insisted he was listening extra hard. Normally, he looks around
the room, so he is easily distracted. Lying down and covering his eyes helped him concentrate on
what she was saying.
Analogous to the physical alignment that women and men take in is conversation is their topical
alignment. The girls in my study tended to talk at length about one topic, but the boys tended to
jump from topic to topic. The second-grade girls exchanged stories about people they knew. The
second-grade boys teased, told jokes, noticed things in the room and talked about finding games to
play. The sixth-grade girls talked about problems with a mutual friend. The sixth-grade boys talked
about 55 different topics, none of which extended over more than a few turns.

Listening to Body Language
Switching topics is another habit that gives women the impression men aren't listening, especially
if they switch to a topic about themselves. But the evidence of the 10th-grade boys in my study
indicates otherwise. The 10th-grade boys sprawled across their chairs with bodies parallel and eyes
straight ahead, rarely looking at each other. They looked as if they were riding in a car, staring
out the windshield. But they were talking about their feelings. One boy was upset because a girl
had told him he had a drinking problem, and the other was feeling alienated from all his friends.
Now, when a girl told a friend about a problem, the friend responded by asking probing questions
and expressing agreement and understanding. But the boys dismissed each other's problems. Todd
assured Richard that his drinking was "no big problem" because
"sometimes you're funny when you're off your butt." And when Todd said he felt left out, Richard
responded, "Why should you? You know more people than me."
Women perceived such responses as belittling and unsupportive. But the boys seemed satisfied with
them. Whereas women reassure each other by implying, "You shouldn't feel bad because I've had sinr
ilar experiences," men do so by implying, "You shouldn't feel bad because your problems aren't so
bad."
There are even simpler reasons for women's impression that men don't listen. Linguist Lynette
Hirschman found that women make more listener-noise, such as "mhm," "uhuh," and "yeah," to show
"I'm with you." Men, she found, more often give silent attention. Women who expect a stream of
listener-noise interpret silent attention as no attention at all.
Women's conversational habits are as frustrating to men as men's are to women. Men who expect
silent attention interpret a stream of listener-noise as overreaction or impatience. Also, when
women talk to each other in a close, comfortable setting, they often overlap, finish each other's
sentences and anticipate what the other is about to say. This practice, which I call "participatory
listenership," is often perceived by men as interruption, intrusion and lack of attention.
A parallel difference caused a man to complain about his wife, "She just wants to talk about her
own point of view. If I show her another view, she gets mad at me." When most women talk to each
other, they assume a conversationalist's job is to express agreement and support. But many men see
their conversational duty as pointing out the other side of an argument. This is heard as
disloyalty by women, and refusal to offer the requisite support. It is not that women don't want to
see other points of view, but that they prefer them phrased as suggestions and inquiries rather
than as direct challenges.
In his book Fighting for Life, Walter Ong points out that men use "agonistic" or warlike,
oppositional formats to do almost anything; thus discussion becomes debate, and conversation a
competitive sport. In contrast, women see conversation as a ritual means of establishing rapport.
If Jane tells a problem and June says she has a similar one, they walk away feeling closer to each
other. But this attempt at establishing rapport can backfire when used with men. Men take too
literally women's ritual "troubles talk," just as women mistake men's ritual challenges for real
attack.
A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, Deborah Tannen has written numerous articles
and several books presenting linguistics research for a general audience, including You Just Don't
Understand: Women and Men in Conversntion (1990) and That's Not What 1 Meant: How Conversational
Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations with Others (1986). Her scholarly works include Framing in
Discourse (1993) and Linguistics in Context (1988).
(This reading adapted from Deborah Tannen's overview of her research about male and female
conversational patterns, published in the Sunday Washington Post in 1990)