Conversation Styles of Men and Women

Tannen does not want us to radically change our ways of conversing, but rather to show why men and women misunderstand one another so frequently. Men basically believe that women in conversation want to take away their freedom, that there is something threatening about the way women converse. Women, on the other hand, basically believe that men deliberately want to deny them the intimacy they seek in conversation and in a relationship.

In fact, the two genders simply have different styles of conversing, of listening and talking, and have different purposes at stake in most conversations.

I make sense of seemingly senseless misunderstandings that haunt our relationships, and show that a man and a woman can interpret the same conversation differently, even when there is no apparent misunderstanding. I explain why sincere attempts to communicate are so often confounded, and how we can prevent or relieve some of the frustration (13).

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ations. Her husband felt that these people were saying that Tannen and he did not have a "real marriage" because of that separation. Tannen writes: I now see that my husband was simply engaging the world in a way that many men do: as an individual in a hierarchical social order in which he was either one-up or one-down. In this [man's] world, [in] conversations . . . people try to achieve and maintain the upper hand. . . . I, on the other hand, was approaching the world as many women do. . . . In this [woman's] world, [in] conversations . . . people try to seek and give confirmation and support. . . . (24-25). Tannen argues convincingly that men and women seek different things in conversation. Women seek intimacy, while men seek independence. She writes that "it is as if their lifeblood ran in different directions" (26). Clearly, if there is no attempt to compromise, or adjust, the man and the woman who are having a relationship based on completely different aims and desires, the relationship will be a failure and every conversation in it will be a frustrating failure. If a successful relationship full of effective and understandable conversations is to be achieved, the man and the woman will have to first become aware of the
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Approximate Word count = 2549
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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