Love Talk: Speak Each Other's Language Like You Never Have Before by Les; Leslie Parrott

Author:Les; Leslie Parrott
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780310245964
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2004-09-27T22:00:00+00:00

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Men Analyze, Women Sympathize

Now It Makes Sense

Wherever people of different sexes gather, there are bound to be stress fractures along gender lines.

Deborah Tannen

When men and women refer to “conversation,” they may not be talking about the same thing. Communication theorist Deborah Tannen reports a study in which students recorded casual conversations between women friends and men friends. It was easy to get recordings of women friends talking, partly because the request to “record a conversation with your friend” met with easy compliance from the students’ female friends and family members. But asking men to record conversations with their friends had mixed results. One woman’s mother agreed readily, but her father insisted that he didn’t have conversations with his friends.

“Don’t you ever call Fred on the phone?” she asked, naming a man she knew to be his good friend.

“Not often,” he said. “But if I do, it’s because I have something to ask, and when I get the answer, I hang up.”

Another woman’s husband delivered a tape to her with great satisfaction and pride. “This is a good conversation,” he announced, “because it’s not just him and me shooting the breeze, like, ‘Hi, how are you? I saw a good movie the other day,’ and stuff. It’s a problem-solving task. Each line is meaningful.”

When the woman listened to the tape, she heard her husband and his friend trying to solve a computer problem. Not only did she not consider it “a good conversation,” she didn’t really regard it as a conversation at all. His idea of a good conversation was one with factual, task-focused content. Hers was one with emotional connection.1

And so it goes. For centuries, no doubt, long before the topic of gender studies was even conceived, men and women have been puzzled by each other’s conversational competence. But one thing the genders do agree on is the supreme value of communication. Eighty-two percent of men and ninety-two percent of woman say open and regular communication is “extremely important” in marriage and dating relationships.2 So we keep trying.

This chapter is dedicated to helping you, as a man and a woman, take some of the mystery out of the gender gap. For even when you understand each other’s talk style, this gap continues to exist (though your new knowledge does diminish it). We don’t guarantee to solve the age-old gender puzzle in just a few pages, but we do intend to give you some practical insights for equipping you to straighten out the gender communication lines that so often get crossed. We’ll explore just how different we are in conversation, and we will expose the “fundamental cross-gender relational error,” an error that will trip you up every time. We then take turns at revealing in detail what men and women need to know about their respective partners.

So let’s begin at the beginning with a straightforward fact: men and women are different.

Are We That Different?

I’m standing in front of our open fridge when the following dialogue takes place:

Me: “Where’s the butter?”

Leslie: “It’s in the fridge.

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