Men and Arguing

In My Humble Opinion
21

@Nametag: IMO stereotypes get to be stereotypes because we all know people like that. E.g. “Teenagers are slackers.” Well, we’ve all known some of those. But I’ve known some that put the work ethic of adults to shame. But there are more of the former than the latter and that’s the generalization people will make.

While it may be the stereotype that men dominate conversations, I’ve known some very dominant women as well. I’ve never read Tannen’s books, but like most social science theories there are bound to be plenty of exceptions.

And I’ll give you one subgroup that IME really queers the whole thing: foreign-born women. When they leave an oppressive culture and come into the US—where they suddenly have rights—holy shit they will assert them (as in, a chip on the shoulder). Why, sometimes they even assert rights they don’t have.

@FML, sorry to hear you couldn’t work things out. Hopefully this isn’t too personal but I wonder: would you say this behavior was there when you were dating and living together and you just didn’t realize how it would wear you out over time, or would you say that the behavior didn’t manifest till you put the ring on her finger?

22

Could the issue in the OP be something as simple as, he’s got a very linear mind, and if you interrupt him, it throws off his thinking process, which makes him frustrated, so he’s just trying to avoid losing his train of thought? Hell, I’m like that sometimes; I know that if something happens to throw me off, I’ll never get back on track, so I earnestly try to stick to my line of thinking and plow straight through so I don’t forget anything.

It may not necessarily be a “man thing”; I think lots of people are like that. Hell, maybe even mostly men, because sometimes we’re not the clearest thinkers on the fly, so we mentally prepare a whole spiel before we even start the conversation. And when that speech gets interrupted, there just ain’t no way to pick it up again from the middle.

Lemme see if I can come up with an example that makes sense. Let’s say our hypothetical couple has been going over to her parents’ house every night for a week. Let’s say our hypothetical husband is getting tired of going over there and just wants to stay home. Now, this is a delicate conversation, because he wants to get his way (staying home), but he doesn’t want her to think that he just hates her family or something. So, he thinks about it, and comes up with what he feels is a good argument that will allow him to stay home and will also keep the family peace.

So, that night she announces they’re expected at her parents’ house again. He begins his speech. In the middle, she says, “But Cousin Earl and his wife Tanqueray are in town for just one day and they want us to see their new baby!” Well, now his argument is fragmented. He can’t go back and repeat the “it’s been great going over there” part, because then he won’t get what he wants. If he just presses on with, “but I’m just not in the mood for it”, now that it’s logically disconnected from the first part, he comes off like an antisocial jackass. Basically, the whole discussion’s blown.

Now, if this happens to him often enough, he’ll probably come to recognize on some subconscious level that, unless he can make his argument in once piece, he’s gonna lose. The only way he can think to fight back is with a “no interruptions” policy. He still comes off as a jerk, but at least he stands a chance of winning once in a while.

I dunno, maybe I’m just talking out my ass. Does any of this make sense to anyone but me?

23

My last supervisor (male) did this. He’d make the most bizarro, unethical, twisted assumptions and throw them back as if they were coming from me. Then he’d become enraged when I’d throw them right back at him by pointing out that those words and ideas were coming out of HIS head and that they said nothing about me and everything about him, none of it good. That it was extremely rude, unethical and disrespectful to me as a person to attempt to put unethical statements into my mouth just because it served his purposes of demonizing me.

24

My ex used a variation of this strategy when argu… I’m mean discussing. Often began with an absurd statement, “but yesterday when you kicked the cat -”
Wha?!
“- before you took the bus, you…” and she goes on and on burying the initial absurd statement often followed by other obviously untrue “facts” until when you, at last, get an opportunity to reply, really can’t say anything other than: “but… but, it’s not true!”
“Yes it is, you did take the bus yesterday.”
“Yes, well, but -”
“There you go.”
We had lots of “discussions”, but to try to talk with her was pointless.

On the good side, I learnt alot about myself and about relationships by living with that woman.

25

There’s also a group of people who don’t really listen. If you say something that’s leading up to an argument, one or two sentences into it they’ve turned off the listening apparatus. They don’t interrupt, but as soon as you finish, they’ve got their counterargument ready. You can tell when this is happening because they only address the first sentence or two. They’ve skipped information in your statement that clearly refutes what they’re saying. This is because they didn’t hear it in the first place.

26

Mr. brown does this, although he tends toward the “be an audience to my diatribe even though I’ve ranted this same rant about 8,055 times (and don’t suggest any practical solutions or I’ll get pissed)”. It gets extremely old to pretend sympathy or join in outrage over the same old crap that’s been bugging him for 25 years. He’s starting to get the idea that I’m not into being an eternal listener, so he takes his ranting to a local cigar bar. I wonder if the regulars there are also getting tired of being cornered and complained at.

27

Is there any connection between the people posting here and the ones who posted in the Women’s conversation styles thread?

In fact, it seems like the same topic… someone is complaining about something and clearly doesn’t want a “solution” to it. The difference is, in the other thread, men were encouraged to try to listen through the woman’s complaint and empathize with it. In this thread, women are encouraged to…

28

There’s a difference between ranting *to * someone and *at * someone. I’m happy (well, willing) to listen to the first, if it helps. I’m unwilling to put up with the second.

29

Part of the problem with the man in my OP (whom I know quite well, so it’s not like I’m just taking her word for it…I’ve seen them interact, though not when he’s in “don’t interrupt” mode, of course) is that he tends to overreact about a lot of things. He’s the one who nearly threatened divorce when the straps on the baby’s car seat were ever so slightly looser than the training class he had taken showed him…when the car seat was strapped in the stroller…not even in the car. He is a bit neurotic, and fussy…and jumpy. He tends to start conversations in the middle of thoughts…and figures you know what he has been thinking. And not every discussion with his wife ends up like this…but when they do…and when my son does this…it’s really hard to know how to deal with it. If you say you are walking away, they get angrier. I know with my son I just shut up, ride it out, try not to look angry…but I refuse to be pressured into agreeing with things I don’t agree with. In a day or two, he will be in the mood to be reasonable, and will probably take the total opposite view than he did during his rant.

30

oops

31

Perfect sense. I totally understand because I experience this on a regular basis. Very frustrating.

32

Max has it bang-on for me. I’m not a confrontational person, and when I do decide to bring up an issue, I’ve already thought about it hard and come up with a way I feel I’m comfortable expressing it. I also have a difficult time ignoring digressions. If I get cut off in the middle and we take a trip off a side road, I may never get to the point I wanted to make. So I always ask that I be allowed to speak my piece in full.

Having said that, I would never make it a diatribe as the OP described. That’s disrespectful and unfair. I try to keep what I have to say reasonably concise, and when I’m finished I try to give the other person my full attention until they’ve spoken their piece. I admit I’m not perfect at that; if they say something particularly egregious it’s difficult for me to let them wind down first. By a similar token, though, if I have a three minute speech lined up and I make a patently faulty or false statement in the first minute, interrupting me to correct that is more of a boon than an annoyance. :stuck_out_tongue:

33

Just consider yourself lucky you never had to argue with the guy I talked about in the bad breath thread. This is the primary reason he’s a former friend, not anything else.

1> We played D&D. We have a big battle with large numbers of Kobolds (small lizard-dog like creatures), many of whom are Sorcerers and are casting spells. For the sake of simplicity, I have each one cast one spell, over and over. After the game, he stops by to pick up something he left at my apartment. He starts going on about how I shouldn’t have had one kobold casting all those spells. Now if he’d had his brain in gear, he would have realized that what he was saying was a violation of the rules (one creature = one spell per turn) and let it go. Six times I try to explain that there were multiple Kobolds casting different spells. Each time I get his usual “I’m thinking too hard about my argument to listen to you” response of “I know but…” followed by repeating his original statement or a very slightly altered version of it. I finally blow up and swear at him that I wasn’t doing that and his criticism is invalid. He catches the word “criticism”, stops and says “Oh I see what I’m doing wrong. I shouldn’t be phrasing it as a criticism. I should be making a suggestion. I should be suggesting that you shouldn’t have had one Kobold casting all those spells”.

I had a reproduction of Arwen’s sword from LotR about 12 feet away. I should have buried it in his cranium. I didn’t, but I did eject him from my apartment.

2> The man never cooked (major mental and physical health related issues there). I’m trying to talk to him about how easy it is to make really basic stuff. I describe cooking frozen sweet corn in a covered bowl in the microwave, mentioning that I like to put butter and salt on it. He tells me that I shouldn’t put salt on it, because the other people might not like salt. I stop, pause and tell him that I’m talking about cooking for just myself. He says “I know but you shouldn’t put salt on it, because the other people might not like it.” Tried to keep arguing the point but I moved on to something else.

I could give many other examples of this same pattern, but you get the point. I tried to talk to him about it on several occasions. He admitted that he would get an idea stuck in his head and argue it, being so intent on that idea being right that all he was really listening for was whether or not you agreed with him. If you weren’t, then his whole frame of mind was about what he was doing wrong that you didn’t agree. :eek: It never occurred to him that maybe you had a valid argument about why he was wrong, or that he might be as coherent as Emily Litela.

Oh, and don’t suggest that the solution was to agree. If you did, just to end the conversation, you’d later find that all these odd bits of bullshit he’d been inventing in his head had been somehow attributed to you. Shit he’d never mentioned at the time.

Even after multiple discussions about this, he kept doing it. So I said bye bye.

34

The problem is that you know three assholes. Their gender is irrelevant.

35

Well-said. I think people should take turns in a conversation. Interrupting is rude. I don’t want to be forced to interrupt you just because you interrupted me. This only works if one side isn’t monopolizing; obviously if someone has gone on for >3 minutes then there needs to be an adjustment.

I probably get it from interactions with my mother. With her, there is no two-sided conversation unless you interrupt her decisively and often. It makes me feel really pushy and I don’t like it, but for her it feels totally natural. She also has been known to run 2 televisions and a radio simultanously :eek: We’re due for an intervention at some point.