Hi all.
I’m writing an essay about genderlects, specifically how men and women communicate in a relationship. I’m going to interview couples to see how communication works between them. But I need some help with my questionnaire. If you could tell me about instances where you and your SO don’t understand each other because you don’t express yourselves the same way, I would be very grateful and I will be able to make sure I don’t miss any interesting aspects.
Thanks all!
Dang. Forgot to check for e-mail notification.
Soda,
When my SO comes home and tells me about the trials and tribulations of her day, I used to offer suggestions as to how she could avoid them in the future.
After several counseling sessions, I found out she only wanted me to listen to her, not solve her problems for her.
Heembo
I’d love to help you out, O.S.C, but my situation is different.
Most communication issues that Anniz and I have are due to vocabulary/language issues; her not knowing the right word in English and my not being able to discern said word from similarities she provides.
We each communicate differently, but that may be cultural, I don’t know.
My SO (Jenn) and I do have a hard time talking to each other, and we have been to couseling for it in the past with no resolution as of yet.
I always talk about how I feel. I want everyone around me to know what is going on in my head (this being both a good thing and a bad thing). While my SO keeps all her thoughts and emotions to herself. This drives me batty, as I am sure mine does to her.
I hope this answers your question.
We’re usually just fine, but we sometimes misunderstand each other’s advances.
I mean, he won’t be able to tell that I think I’m outright yelling “LET’S GET INTO BED!”.
Hope that helps and doesn’t embarass me that much =>
Woo-hoo, Heembo! You’ve got it!
That’s just what I was going to suggest. Women need to talk to vent. If you then respond as if you have all the answers, it just increases our frustration. (Yes, my problems are so minimal that you can solve them all in twelve seconds after hearing a brief description…)
I forsee a good relationship for you and your SO.
In my mind it is all in the timing. I will be sound asleep (I foolishly thought she was too) and am all of a sudden shaken awake. Clearly, it is the middle of the night so I know something on the level of a house fire is taking place for me to be awakened at this time, so I jump out of bed, begin putting a shoe on, grab for a large object in case the emergency is a burgler and try to say reassuring things to my wife like “blurbfrost, cannolidred.”
As I stumble out the bedroom hitting my one unshoed foot on at least four more really big hard things than we own, I look back and see that she is sitting in the middle of the bed with her arms crossed. So I stop.
“We need to talk,” she says.
I once again try to communicate with her, and it comes out something like, “carowbrat?” And to find out what time it is, I look for my watch which I know I laid next to the bed when I went to sleep, but it has somehow disappeared.
“Are you going to sit down?” she asks as if this were an easy question to answer while reassuring oneself that none of his toes are broken and trying to figure out why he has just put on a neon green life jacket.
“What time is it?” I rationally ask, although the words come out more like “Hat fine fizzit?”
“Huh?” she responds clearly worried that I have begun speaking in tongues.
“Fine, Fine, Fine,” I begin to shout pointing to the place my watch was when I climbed into bed and then to my wrist where it would reside were I am normally awake. Somehow rather than communicating my need to know the time, it looks more like I am doing an impersonation of one of John Travolta’s disco moves in “Saturday Night Fever.”
“Do you want to talk or don’t you,” she asks not finding my dance moves the least bit entertaining.
As honest as it would be to answer in the negative, she and I have been together long enough for me to know it is a great deal safer to just nod in the affirmative and hope the power of speech returns to me sometime soon. So I perch on the edge of the bed quietly.
“It’s about what you said this morning.”
At this point, I am having a hard time remembering the morning much less what I said. I vaguely remember mentioning something about rotating the tires, but I don’t think that would get her up sometime between one and five a.m. (but you never can tell) so once again I attempt to take the safe route. I try to make a sound that communicates the phrase “oh really?”, hoping it will encourage her to explain.
“Oh, you know,” she says playfully shoving me, but because of my lack of a firm plant on the edge of the bed, I fall off the bed and onto the shoe I couldn’t find earlier. As I land upon the shoe, I hear an uncharacteristic crunch from it. As I rise I pick up the shoe and reach inside it and I find the smashed form of my watch.
“Jeez,” I shout frustrated.
She stops smiling, starts tearing up, pulls a pillow to her chest and says, “Fine, if you don’t want to talk, I’ll just go back to sleep.” And the amazing thing is, she does.
I am left standing in the dark, holding a broken watch and a shoe with tiny splinters of glass inside it.
Yep, it’s timing.
TV
heembo, you’re a wise man. You’ve mastered the skill that took me three and a half years to almost get. Almost. Unfortunately.
I agree with heembo, too, but I’d like to point out that these two communcation styles aren’t necessarily woman=talk-about-it and man=fix-it (although it’s probably usually that way). In my husband’s and my case, it’s the opposite. He often talks about problems he’s having and, when I offer solutions, stops me with a, “I don’t want you to fix the problem. I’m just talking to get it off my chest.” I tend to not talk about issues until after I’ve mulled them over for awhile and I’m ready to problem-solve.
That tendency has caused some misunderstandings. If my husband does something that really bothers me, I get mad. Instead of saying anything, though, I’ll stew about it. Sometimes, I’ll get over it by myself without saying anything. Other times, when I’ve thought about it for awhile, I’ll bring it up. My husband used to notice that I was upset and instantly try to talk about it, even though I still needed time alone with the issue. After being together for awhile, though, he’s figured out that I’ll talk when I’m ready. I’ve also tried to be better about addressing problems sooner. Neither of us are yellers, so I don’t think he’s ever felt blindsided when I bring something up at a later time. He just doesn’t always understand the need that I have to think about stuff alone first.
In my relationship my SO is the one who likes to talk about things and I would rather just keep everything inside.
He’s very good about expressing himself. I, on the other hand, am not. He will bring up stuff and want to talk about it and my standard answer to everything is either, “I don’t know” or “Whatever.” It frustrates the hell out of him when I don’t “talk” back to him. I’ve really tried to communicate better but it’s hard for me. If something is bothering me I just sit and think about it and then he asks me what’s wrong and I say, “Nothing.” I really think that I have more of a man’s emotional role in the relationship because I’m reluctant to talk about things. Isn’t it usually the women who are expressive and talkative?
Wow, C3, with the exception of the yelling thing, I could have written your post. Imagine my surprise after many nights of horrible fights, Mr. Athena finally got it through my head that HE DID NOT WANT ME TO ANALYZE AND FIX THE PROBLEM HE WANTED ME TO LISTEN TO HIM. That’s a GIRL thing. But that’s what he wants.
I tend to stew, too. What usually goes through my head is “If I’m still upset about this tomorrow, I’ll bring it up. Otherwise, I’ll let it go.”
But this is all from the couple who have been known to have knock-down, drag-out fights over issues that we both agree on. Seriously. When we calm down and talk about things, we find we were saying the same thing. So I don’t think we count as “good communicators.”
Put me in the if-I-talk-about-a-problem-I-want-a-solution-even-though-I’m-female camp. To that extent, my husband and I are compatible.
However, he definitely is the archetype of the feelings-what-feelings? male. We had a situation last fall which posed me to ask for the first time in our twelve years together “How do you feel?” And his answer was, “I feel that such-and-such is going to happen.” So, he didn’t tell me how he felt, he told me what he thought was going to happen. I reiterated the question, and got no further. Later discussions with friends leads me to believe that many men’s feelings are limited to “I’m hungry,” “I’m tired,” and “I’m horny.” So much for soul-searching discussions.
I am glad to see people acknowledging that the fixer/bitcher roles are often as not reversed in a relationship. I really think that those silly Venus/Mars books hurt more than they help because if you are wraped up in expectaions: “Boys are like x, girls are Y that” you often don’t take the time to see that your partner is Z. I got terribly depressed in HS thinking that I was gonna have to put up with a man as described by Grey if I ever wanted to be in a relationship. Thank god he wasn’t speaking for as many men as he thought he was.
You are all going to laugh at me, but I really don’t think my spouse and I have any serious communication problems. There are things we disagree about, and which we are going to contiinue to disagree about, but it’s never because we can’t see the other’s side. I think that the fact that we are both liberal arts major has alot to do with this–we have a huge common frame of reference we can dip into to illustrate our points. We have alot of faith in the other person’s reason. If my SO is talking crazy, I know that there must be something else going on–he isn’t crazy–and I work to try and firure out what that is. We also meta-talk quite a bit–any time we do have some sort of communication lapse, we spend about 10x longer going over it and figuring out what happened than the actual lapse took. This is because we are both really analytical.
I try to find out what kind of listener they are first. You know like if they like watching football. Then one talks to them as if they were playing football. You don’t say ‘Would you wash the dishes for me honey?’ but instead, ‘It’s the fourth down, if you can get those dishes done in time youll get a touchdown tonight.’
I agree with everyone who has said the gender roles aren’t as cast in stone as we have been led to believe. Imagine my surprise to find out that my guy was not your archetypical Mars-type! “Ugg, me go kill food now. Got no feelings unless me smash thumb with hammer.” He’s a (surprise!) human being, too, as complex and inscrutable as any woman.
Thanks everyone!
I’m glad to see that John Gray isn’t among your favorite people, and I agree that he probably did more harm than good with those stupid books.
It’s also nice to see that my relationship isn’t the only one where traditional roles sometimes are reversed. We do fall in some traps sometimes, but just knowing that we have different ways of communicating helps a lot.
For those who are interested, I found three online articles by Deborah Tannen, who’s done a lot of work in this area. They don’t describe everyone’s reality, but they’re still very interesting.
The talk of the sandbox
Sex, lies and conversation
When you shouldn’t tell it like it is
From my side, I have been working on not trying to WIN arguments. I’m trying to work things into the “we have resolution” area, not just being able to say “I win, you lose.” It seems to calm me down and get things worked out easier. In most of my previous relationships, I would start fights or continue things solely for the purpose of winning…So I’m trying this because I realized that I really don’t care to win versus/over my wife. Instead of us having discussions that lead to fights upon disagreement, that lead to hurt feelings, that lead to not speaking with each other for a day or two, now we tend to have our disagreements and find some resolution in a shorter period.
It’s funny, but I notice now when I have something to say that would really piss her off. I’m sure some of you have had that experience knowing that 2 seconds after you finish your next sentence, the other person is going to start screaming. You know that if you say this one thing, you had better bring a lunch, because its going to take a long time before this fight ends. So, right at that point, I amend my sentences. I don’t want to fight with her.
The one hard thing we have sometimes is the same problem as Montfort. While my wife is incredible at English, sometimes she doesn’t understand my word usage (or maybe an idiom). And that can get frustrating as hell because it’s not always immediately obvious. Sometimes the word that caused the problem was 20 sentences ago, and so we have to spend the next 5 minutes figuring out where it went wrong, and then spend another few minutes defining the word properly, and THEN we can get back to the topic at hand. Ugh…
And yes, I admit it. I’m a fixer. Always have been. And when it comes to work problems, welllll…I don’t always agree with her. She works for an American company, so I understand why they do things the way they do better than she does.
“And the new boss wants me to write down what I do! Can you believe that!?!”
“Uh, yeah. She’s new. She, uh, wants to know, uh, y’know, what you do.”
“Why doesn’t she just let me do my job?”
“Well, she hasn’t changed anything yet, she really just wants to know what it is you do on a daily basis. Then, maybe, maybe not, she’ll look at the processes and…yada yada yada”
All the while my wife is starting to get a bit peeved…So, how do I not be a fixer when I really don’t agree with what she is saying?
Oops…gotta run-
-Tcat
There is this book called THE RULES. Its about how women should communicate with men. It’s just horrid.
In case there was some confusion, I was not generalizing the results of my couseling sessions to the entire population along gender lines.
I found that this was true of the conversations in my relationship, which is what I thought the OP was asking for.
I apologize if I implied that all women are not interested in solving problems and that all men are interested in solving problems, as this is clearly not the case.
Heembo
Oh yeah, I don’t care for that John Gray character either. Anyone who knows anything knows that men are from the third moon orbiting Saturn…