For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.
Interpretation
Women often use conversation to build connections and maintain relationships.
Deborah Tannen's quote highlights the idea that for many women, conversation serves as a tool for creating rapport and fostering emotional connections. It suggests that women may prioritize relational dynamics in their communication style, using dialogue not just to convey information, but to nurture bonds and navigate interpersonal relationships.
In practice
In a workshop on effective communication, this quote can be used to illustrate how women may approach conversations differently.
Women as mothers grapple with corresponding contradictions. The adoration they feel for their grown daughters, mixed with the sense of responsibility for their well-being, can be overwhelming, matched only by the hurt they feel when their attempts to help or just stay connected are rebuffed or even excoriated as criticism or devilish interference.
Sister relationships span a huge range, from best friends to worst enemies. From 'I adore her; I talk to her five times a day' to 'I decided to cut her out of my life.' For most women, it's in between.
The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer.
Mothers and daughters find in each other the source of great comfort but also of great pain. We talk to each other in better and worse ways than we talk to anyone else.
Our spirits are corroded by living in an atmosphere of unrelenting contention - an argument culture.
Treating people the same is not equal treatment if they are not the same.
The reason 'closure' is a cliche is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn't in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships and much else in life is rarely achieved; only death brings closure and then not always for those still living.
You can blame your ugliness for keeping people at bay, when in reality you're crippled by the thought of letting another person close enough to popentially scar you even more deeply. You can tell yourself that it's safer to love someone who will never really love you back, because you can't lose someone you never had.
Man can see his reflection in water only when he bends down close to it, and the heart of man, too, must lean down to the heart of his fellow; then it will see itself within his heart.
From the moment of birth, when the Stone-Age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence called love, as its father and mother and their parents and their parents before them, have been. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potential.
If you think youβre enlightened go spend a week with your family.
It is still more likely that a woman's power would be seen as aggression, and a man's power would be seen as assertion.
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