Deborah Tannen, in You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, has two primary purposes in mind. First, she wants to describe and give examples of how men and women have very different ways of conversing. Second, she wants to suggest that once we come to understand these different ways of communicating, we can begin to make allowances for the opposite gender's communications and as a result experience more successful exchanges of information, ideas and feelings in conversation.
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).
Clearly, if we do not even know that we are having misunderstandings in conversations, it will be impossible to examine the nature of those misunderstandings and improve our exchanges. It is difficult enough to improve conversations in terms of understanding one another even when we do know that we are having misunderstandings.
Tannen's work is invaluable for any man or woman who seeks to have more meaningful and satisfying communication with the opposite gender. She has discovered that both men an...