In Brief
- Men’s talk tends to focus on hierarchy—competition for relative power—whereas women’s tends to focus on connection—relative closeness or distance.
- But all conversations, and all relationships, reflect a combination of hierarchy and connection. The two are not mutually exclusive but inextricably intertwined. All of us aspire to be powerful, and we all want to connect with others. Women’s and men’s conversational styles are simply different ways of reaching the same goals.
- The context in which women’s focus on hierarchy and men’s on connection is most obvious and most intense: the family. In particular, sisters provide insight into relationships among women that are deeply influenced by competition and hierarchy as well as connection.
Why don’t men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book. It appeared on cocktail napkins (“Real men don’t ask directions”) and became a staple of stand-up comics as well as jokes that made the rounds: “Why did Moses wander in the desert for 40 years?” and “Why does it take so many sperm to find just one egg?”
The attention surprised me. I had not known how widespread this experience was, but I included the asking-directions scenario because it crystallized key aspects of a phenomenon that, I had discovered, accounts for many of the frustrations that women and men experience in conversation. I have spent more than three decades collecting and analyzing thousands of examples of how women and men interact and have found that men’s talk tends to focus on hierarchy—competition for relative power—whereas women’s tends to focus on connection—relative closeness or distance. In other words, a man and woman might walk away from the same conversation asking different questions: he might wonder, “Did that conversation put me in a one-up or one-down position?” whereas she might wonder, “Did it bring us closer or push us farther apart?”
This article was originally published with the title He Said, She Said.
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1 Comments
Add CommentThis article helps me in two ways, understanding a particular irritation I have when my wife 'orders' me to help her with preparing dinner. I have never been able to understand why I feel irritated, even angry, when this particular communication happens. I also have new information to teach my clients who are court ordered for domestic violence education. Mike Logan
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