Men and women sometimes don’t seem to be speaking the same language, and this is certainly true when it comes to discussing emotions.
A young woman we have been coaching was thinking about a conversation she needed to have with her father about something that she was sure was going to be very upsetting to him… but she also knew that he almost always denied being concerned about anything that was too emotionally significant. In this case, her sister had sent him a letter saying she didn’t want to be in contact with him ever again, and so she could pretty much count on a denial from him.
We talked about how gender affects communication and, in particular, I mentioned the remarkable work of Deborah Tannen (a linguist at Georgetown University). Her book You Just Don’t Understand – Women and Men in Conversation was published in 1990, was on the New York Times best seller list for nearly four years, and was translated into 30 languages.
It is a rarity in the self help world: an approachable book, easy to read, yet written by a world expert on the subject.
Her basic point is that men and women use language for different purposes. For women the purpose of communication is to connect with other people and to work out differences. Thus communication is fundamentally emotional and intimate. For men the purpose of communication is to influence and to lead and to teach. Thus for men communication is fundamentally directive and not emotional.
Another author, Michael Gurrian, wrote a book to address the ways that this gap affects boys who are growing up – The Wonder of Boys.
And of course there are the popular books by John Gray (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus), which we are not quite as enthusiastic about.
We ended up suggesting that the best way to get her father to talk to her about his feelings was to come up with some activity that they could do at the same time (fishing, walking, running are all good examples) and to bring up the topic only after the conversation was well under way.
This often works amazingly well – we still recall the long conversations we had when we were running years ago. Somehow the fact that there was always something to attend to other than feelings allowed us to talk about feelings much more deeply…