Book Review

You Just Don’t Understand by Deborah Tannen

B

Genre: Nonfiction

It’s amazing how much conflict in romance novels stems from the hero and heroine not communicating. Of course, the most obvious example here is the Big Misunderstanding trope, but even more coherent couples sometimes have the hardest time having a coherent conversation. You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation is a limited book in scope and depth, but it does help explain why our heroes and heroines often seem to be having entirely separate conversations at the same time.

I have to say that the beginning of the book did not wow me, because I felt like I didn’t have a way to evaluate the author’s claims. It’s frustrating that although Tannen provides a lengthy bibliography, she doesn’t talk about how she arrived at her conclusions or how any of the studies she cites in the bibliography were conducted, so the only way to judge the book is whether it matches the reader’s experience. It may have sound science behind it but there’s not way for the reader to evaluate that science. Initially I didn’t buy her claim at all, but as the book progressed it made more sense to me. However, I never felt like Tannen “proved” anything so much as she pointed out some trends that seemed familiar to me.

I did feel that the book got more convincing as it went along, although it never did give me the science background I wanted. The more it went into depth about the different things men and women try to get from a conversation, the more it resonated with my own experience and the more it seemed helpful when I think about my own interactions with men and women.

Tannen’s main thesis is that when men talk, they are trying to do something. They want to convey information, or get information, or solve a problem. Tannen calls this “report talk”. Men base their friendships on shared activities and they base their status on appearing independent. According to Tannen, men don’t ask for directions because they don’t want to seem dependent on anyone else.

Women base friendships on interconnectedness and they build those connections by talking. Tannen calls this “rapport talk”. When a man reads the paper at breakfast instead of talking to his wife, he figures they are growing close together because they are doing something together, whereas she wants to grow closer by talking and she feels ignored (or, and this is my interpretation, she’s pissed because he’s hogging the whole paper). For the man, talking is a means to an end but for women talking is an end in and of itself.

It’s very important to read the introduction and the afterword to get a sense of what Tannen is and isn’t trying to accomplish. She’s dealing in stereotypes but while she thinks some things are often true, or generally true, she doesn’t think they are always true. Tannen is adamant that there are advantages and disadvantages to how both men and women communicate, and she considers it a huge problem that the male way of communicating in the workplace is considered the norm. When women use typically female communication, they are ignored or seen as too soft or ineffective. When women communicate in a more typically male fashion, they face tremendous backlash for being too aggressive, too pushy, and too bossy. Tannen has a whole book about communication in the workplace (Talking From 9 to 5) which I assume gets into this in more detail.

Tannen also intentionally avoids the nature/nurture question. She’s not interested in why people are like they are; she just wants to draw attention to the patterns that she sees. She doesn’t talk much about class differences, generational differences, or cultural differences, although she does talk a lot about being a Jewish New Yorker.

It’s a limited book, but an interesting one.  It’s a book that promotes understanding but isn’t big on solutions – there are no exercises or suggestions for how to deal with communication differences.  It just presents the differences as Tannen perceives them, with an apparent hope that simply understanding the differences will help people move beyond them.

What Tannen offers is evidence that when your boyfriend/husband/male BFF is inscrutable and confusing, there are reasons behind their mode of speech and communication – they aren’t just trying to randomly frustrate you. We talk with different goals, different styles, and different patterns. At our worst, we talk at complete cross-purposes but at our best, our styles complement each other.

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You Just Don’t Understand by Deborah Tannen

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  1. Bea says:

    For a discussion of class issues, I heartily recommend “Limbo” by Alfred Lubrano.

    He talks about what it means to be a blue-collar thinker in a white-collar world–being the first of his family to transition that way, and the differences between those cultural worlds of class.

    As a first-generation white-collar myself, I found it fascinating.

    He doesn’t really touch on gender roles, but he definitely nails the fish-out-of-water feeling of not quite knowing the new social rules….

  2. cleo says:

    I remember reading this in the early 90s, and it felt like such a huge revelation (along with Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice). When you mentioned it in on a different thread, I wondered if it’d have the same impact now, because I think some of her ideas have been popularized by things like the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus books and generally incorporated into pop culture.

    And plus one to the concerns about not addressing cultural, class or other differences.

  3. Susan says:

    I’ve read a couple of Tannen’s books, including her first one when it came out in the early 90s. Some of what she presents seems obvious, but in the sense that you’ve been subconsciously aware of it but maybe didn’t actually think about/analyze it. For me, at least. I’m curious about this one (whether it covers new/different material), but will hope for a price drop/sale.

    I did smile about you paragraph describing rapport talk. It reminded me of the time when I was just out of college, living back at home, and having my dad drop me off at the train station every morning on his was into work. They were largely silent trips, and I became increasingly uncomfortable until I mentioned to my mom that I thought he was mad at me. She relayed that he had just told her how much he was enjoying those rides, spending time with me. It underlined our different expectations and approaches, and was something of a turning point in my relationship with him.

  4. You’ve just made your friendly neighborhood romance sociologist very happy! Jen and I both draw heavily from Tannen’s work in our teaching–from this book (which has been around for a long time) and some of her most recent works (especially “That’s Not What I Meant” and “Talking about 9 to 5”). You’ll find the latter works include more of the sociodemographic context variables you were missing from “You Just Don’t Understand”–things like ethnic and cultural background and social class. Her methodology is content analysis: she analyzes recorded conversations (either conversations others have recorded or conversations she records); some of her other books (and most of her scholarly journal articles) describe this, too. (In other words, social scientists find her methods legit)

    I’m so excited to see you sharing this here!

  5. Ah, so reading the newspaper together is ‘rapport’. I actually read snippets of the paper out loud – something he never does! He will smile and sometimes even snicker over something, but I have to ask “What’s so funny?” b/c he never spontaneously shares what he’s reading!

    So he’s not trying to make me feel left out by not sharing. Hmm. And not trying to manipulate me into asking.

  6. SB Sarah says:

    @Joanna:

    I had a feeling you’d be excited to see this book reviewed! Since I love dialogue in the romances I read, the way what we say has meaning above and beneath the text is fascinating, to say nothing of how we say or what we’re doing when we talk.

    Thank you for explaining her work in the larger sociological context – that’s really cool!

  7. Elinor Aspen says:

    Like Cleo, I read this book in the early 90s (the hardcover came out in 1990). It literally changed my life and helped me to develop a healthy long-term relationship (as an undersocialized introvert, I often misinterpreted other communication styles and found men in general to be perplexing).

  8. cleo says:

    @Elinor Aspen – I have the orginal hardcover! I remember buying this book so vividly – I discovered it browsing the orginal Border’s in Ann Arbor, while visiting my best friend, and I had to have it, even though I was a poor college student and I never bought hardcover books. But I bought it and fell into one of those book induced wormholes for the whole weekend – iirc, we both read it and were like, omg, that makes so much sense!

  9. Jazzlet says:

    Both me and my (male) OH read this, along with ‘That’s Not What I Meant’, back in the 90’s when they first came out. We found them very useful, especially the difference in the ways we were using ‘I’m sorry’. We spent quite a while saying ‘I’m sorry, as in I’m sorry about the situation you are in’ to each other, although twenty plus years later we don’t need to add the qualifier! I don’t know which book it came from, but it was really helpful for us and along with other things she says about the different conversational styles of men and women it improved our communication. Good communication is certainly one of the reasons we are still together after nearly thirty years.

    And as I was typing this he came into the room and I explained what I was doing. We than had a totally soppy moment rembembering reading the books and the difference that made to us. So thank you for reminding us of that!

  10. Andrea says:

    I’m so glad you reviewed this. This book saved my marriage about 20 years ago. I finally realized that my husband was trying to solve my problems when I complained about work. I thought he was being a condescending jerk, he thought I was rejecting his attempts to rescue me. It also helped me figure out that he was saying he loved me when he checked my oil before I took the car on trips.

  11. Taffygrrl says:

    Like others have said above, this book changed my life. Until I read this I’d had a fraught relationship with my good friend’s husband. We were like oil and water. There is a specific section in here (maybe it’s in “That’s Not What I Meant”? Anyway) where she talks about how different people require different length pauses in conversation – what to one person sounds like an “I’m done” pause is an “I’m just taking a breath and will continue” pause to another. And I realized our ENTIRE ISSUE was that what I was interpreting as an “I’m done” pause on his part was just a mid-thought pause to him. The next time I saw him I held back just a little – like, gave his pauses a half-second – and we went from actively disliking each other to being really good friends over the course of one visit. It was MIND BLOWING. I feel like I need to read these again as a refresher course.

  12. Taffygrrl says:

    Addendum to the story: he and his wife both noticed how things had changed and asked about it. And I noted that I’d read Tannen’s book, and the specific thing about pauses. They both immediately grabbed the book and I gather it helped them with some communication issues they’d had both with each other and at work. So, hooray!

  13. Judy Hudson says:

    Another really good book on the subject is Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps: How We’re Different and What to Do About It, by Allan Pease, Barbara Pease, a husband and wife team who inject some humor, and science to back up their ideas. I often think back to it when creating my heroes and heroines, particularly in dialogue and how they handle a problem. I remember in one story I read, (sorry, can’t remember the book or the author) when the heroine had a personal problem and the hero changed the light bulb on her porch to show he cared. Hilarious but perfect. Direct action – how men deal with problems. Reading this book has helped me understand my hubby too. 🙂

  14. Mara B says:

    Another interesting book about communication (spoken and written, though it deals less with gender differences) is James Pennebaker’s The Secrect Life of Pronouns. It’s been a while since I read it but if I remember correctly he’s good at saying what the methodology for the studies are.

  15. Mara says:

    Sounds like an interesting hypothesis… There also has to be a cultural component here: my Finnish friend says that the most challenging part of living in North America for her is that we all feel the need to talk incessantly. Per her, Scandinavian culture is much more comfortable with silences as a part of communication. So the gender break down of report vs. rapport may not map into non-Anglo cultural contexts… but I’ll differ to those who are actually from those contexts to confirm whether that’s true 🙂

  16. GG says:

    I really don’t like books like this because they draw too distinct a line between how men behave and how women behave. These tend to be small differences in tendency between the average man and the average woman in a particular culture. The differences between any two random people of the same gender is likely to be greater than difference between the statistically averaged man and the statistically averaged woman.

  17. Lora says:

    This interests me. My interpersonal comm class back in the late nineties touched on report vs. rapport but didn’t go very in depth. The main reason I’m interested is i am a female teacher in an overwhelmingly female faculty with a quintessentially male report-communicator administrator who seems at best puzzled when i come to relay something that happened in my classroom as information rather than to seek an immediate ‘solution.’ I feel like he’s trying to solve me when I’m trying to speak to him. I may need to read the book because I don’t feel that either of us is truly at fault, but that it’s a stylistic difference. Ugh. I don’t even like having to think about it.

  18. Jazzlet says:

    @ 17 GG

    But Tannen does not do that! Take for example the conversational pauses thing that Taffygrrl and Mara mention, this can be cultural and it can simply be different conversational rythyms, it’s not a male/female split. When she does talk about male/female differences she makes it clear that she is talking about what those at the middle of the bell curve for each sex do and that there will be people of either sex whose conversational style is nearer that which most of the opposite sex use (and I’m using ‘opposite sex’ for simplicity, I do realise that sex is not a simple binary thing).

  19. Sarah says:

    I credit Deborah Tannen with saving my relationship with my mother as an adult. After I moved out we couldn’t stop fighting until we read “You’re Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation.” It gave us a lot of insight into how the other person was feeling. We read it every few years when we find ourselves at odds.

  20. GG says:

    Jazzlet, This article extracted from Deborah Cameron’s The Myth of Mars and Venus describes my reservations more eloquently than I can manage here:
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/01/gender.books

    This quote gets to my point about there being little actual difference between men and women’s communication:

    “But in studies of verbal abilities and behaviour, the differences were slight. This is not a new observation. In 1988 Hyde and her colleague Marcia Linn carried out a meta-analysis of research dealing specifically with gender differences in verbal ability. The conclusion they came to was that the difference between men and women amounted to “about one-tenth of one standard deviation” – statistician-speak for “negligible”. Another scholar who has considered this question, the linguist Jack Chambers, suggests that the degree of non-overlap in the abilities of male and female speakers in any given population is “about 0.25%”. That’s an overlap of 99.75%. It follows that for any array of verbal abilities found in an individual woman, there will almost certainly be a man with exactly the same array.”

    Couples often have communication issues, but it seems more likely that it is result of individual differences, rather than gender differences. I strongly suspect that same-sex couples run into similar problems of communication style mismatches.

  21. Anne says:

    A few years ago (maybe 2010) I got the audio version of Deborah Tannen’s “The Modern Scholar: He Said/She Said: Women, Men and Language” and it totally changed the way I look at interpersonal communication. I am a female Ph.D. student in astrophysics, and I thought the book would help me communicate better with my male colleagues. Instead, I started noticing how many of my own communication patterns are more traditionally “masculine,” probably due to spending my whole adult life in a primarily male environment. After I started paying attention to this, I was surprised by how much it improved my interactions with other women who communicate in a more stereotypically feminine way. I’m always a little irked by the “men do this, women do that” type things, and Tannen’s work doesn’t have the scientific rigor expected from, say, astrophysics, but the anecdotes really matched up with my own experiences and gave me a general framework for thinking about mismatches in communication skills.

    More importantly, the really invaluable life skill that this book gave me was the ability to take a step back from a conversation and decide whether a) the other person and I have different communication styles, or b) the person I’m talking to is just actually a jerk. I cannot overstate how important that was to my personal development.

  22. Tickled to see this old chestnut brought up again, and so happy to read many of the comments above. I remember my Sociolinguistics grad class in the 90s going gaga for this book and its (multi-)cultural implications. Even now as I, a native-French speaker (but long-time American, I’m talking seven years-old + I am an original Valley Girl) married to a Japanese man (whose English sounds like a surfer dude but he is Japanese all the way through … and I’ve checked, repeatedly) will still find myself thinking back to this game-changing book when he pisses me off. Like this morning. How much is gender? How much is culture? How much is just the person’s natural douchiness? And as the mother of sons (only one who can speak [for our youngest has global aphasia]), it’s been fascinating to observe my eldest’s changing conversation patterns over the years.

  23. Jen Lois says:

    This book is THE reason I went to grad school in sociology to focus on gender.

  24. Christi says:

    I have referenced this book over and over, for years, in conversation with friends, when they describe their current problem with someone – usually their spouse. I say, “You should read, You Just Don’t Understand, by Deborah Tannen. In it she explains that men seek independence and control, and women seek connection and cooperation.” My friends always respond with enlightened-looking interest. While there are many additional ideas in her book, that particular comparison/summary provides for me a lens through which I can re-look at many conflicts and resolve them. This concept always helps me with my husband. When you understand those particular general needs of the opposite sex, and what makes them feel right about themselves, it makes it so much easier to connect, meet needs, be accepting, resolve conflict, and forgive. I love this book. And after reading the other comments, I think I will check out some of her other books.

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