Q. We used to talk; now, it feels like so much work on my part. Why?
A. Alas, my dear earth lovers, commitment can be tough on conversation. “Did you get the car fixed?” replaces “I have this neat poem I read that I want to read to you,” and “What did you tell the Smiths about dinner on Friday?” takes precedence over “How do you feel about the work of Jane Smiley?”
Anyone who’s ever seen a couple in a restaurant staring past each other throughout the whole meal wonders about the fate long-lived love. That’s when lovers come to me and ask what this thousand-year-old goddess thinks can be done about it.
Well, there’s good news and bad. The closer we get, the less we seem able to show our goofy, open side to one another; we become afraid of being criticized by this person who means everything to us; we go inward with our thoughts.
But there’s a less egalitarian problem. The male gender is tough on conversation. Scholars have long been interested in the way women and men speak to one another, having discovered that women not only ask more questions, but say “you know” more often than men. One such researcher, Pamela M. Fishman, through studying everyday conversations among men and women from 25 and 35, saw a problem in the power relations between the genders.
Women far more often than men attempted conversation start-ups to no avail, while all of the men’s attempts to start a conversation succeeded. To compensate for the difficulty, the women ended up raising many more conversational topics than the men did, and asking more questions, because so many of their attempts failed. Moreover, she found that the failure of the women’s topics is not due to their content– which is often indistinguishable from men’s—but to the failure of the men to respond, or to work at turning the attempts into conversation. “Women use a number of interactional strategies to try to increase their chances of successs, strategies that men seldom have to use,” Fishman said.
Since women have more difficulty getting conversations with men going, women are seen as needier than men—which of course infuriates us all. Of course women seem to need more attention than men do because they must work so much harder to get it in conversation–while men seem to not need attention because they get it with so very little effort!
We’ll talk a lot more about conversation here. For the truth is, it’s one of the ways we connect, and connection is of course the heart of love. Sexual intercourse is nothing more than conversation—connection– through sexuality, no? So we all have to become versed in every possible way that promotes connection, be it verbal or nonverbal.
I do know one thing about talking. It takes listening. And it takes two people committed to being surprised by the other, open to each other and delighted by the other.
The bottom line, my loving ladies, is this: If you have to struggle too hard for conversation; if it takes too much work to generate the connection that you so badly crave; and if you find yourself asking too many questions and saying “You know,” all the time in order to get a man to speak with you—stop and think for a moment. If he won’t talk early in the game, what happens in a few years? If he isn’t interested in what you say now, what happens when he thinks he knows what you have to say?
You already know the answers: Words or no, he has already told you.
