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Sex, Lies and Conversation: Why Is It So Hard for Men and Women to Talk to Each Other In the article, the well-known linguist Deborah Tannen discusses about the multiple issues of gender specific communication. Deborah Tannen shows that patterns of communication are different between the two genders and because of this it can eventually cause a communication failure, which could cause a divorce for many couples. Therefore she suggests that if they could understand the different patterns of communication with one another than it could result in an effective relationship.
“Boys and girls tend to play with children of their own gender, and their sex-separate groups have different organizational structures and interactive norms”. It is only natural for this to happen, boys become friends with each other by doing activities together and being in large groups, this prevents boys from having intimate conversations. Girls though, are completely different; they would rather have an intimate conversation with each other. Deborah Tannen mentions that boys tend to look away from each other in a conversation and girls look straight at each other, eye to eye in a conversation. While conversing, women like to share personal feelings with each other and understand one another and men do not really care about each other’s feelings, instead they talk to each other directly and switch from topic to topic. Since men speak to each other in this manner, women think they are unsupportive and not paying attention to each other. Both men and women feel really frustrated because of this and they think neither one of them are listening to each other.

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