Deborah Tannen > Quotes

“Smashing heads does not open minds.”
― Deborah Tannen

“A perfectly tuned conversation is a vision of sanity--a ratification of one's way of being human and one's way in the world.”
― Deborah Tannen

“We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.”
― Deborah Tannen

“The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation — or a relationship.”
― Deborah Tannen

“A woman will be inclined to repeat a request that doesn't get a response because she is convinced that her husband would do what she asks, if he only understood that she really wants him to do it. But a man who wants to avoid feeling that he is following orders may instinctively wait before doing what she asked, in order to imagine that he is doing it of his own free will.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“At every age, the girls and women sit closer to each other and look at each other directly. At every age, the boys and men sit at angles to each other—in one case, almost parallel—and never look directly into each other's faces.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“While boys create connections through friendly competition, girls create connections by downplaying competition and focusing on similarities.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“The more contact people have with each other, the more opportunities both have to do things in their own way and be misunderstood. The only way they know of to solve problems is to talk things out, but if different ways of talking are causing a problem, talking more isn’t likely to solve it. Instead, trying harder usually means doing more of whatever you’re doing—intensifying the style that is causing the other to react. So each unintentionally drives the other to do more and more of the opposing behavior, in a spiral that drives them both up the wall.”
― Deborah Tannen, That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

“It is natural in interaction to assume that what you feel in reaction to others is what they wanted to make you feel. If you feel dominated, it’s because someone is dominating you. If you can’t find a way to get into a conversation, then someone is deliberately locking you out. Conversational style means that this may not be true. The most important lesson to be learned is not to jump to conclusions about others in terms of evaluations like “dominating” and “manipulative.”
― Deborah Tannen, That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

“One man commented that he and I seemed to have different definitions of gossip. He said, 'To you it seems to be discussion of personal details about people known to the conversationalists. To me, it's a discussion of the weaknesses, character flaws, and failures of third persons, so that the participants in the conversation can feel superior to them. This seems unworthy, hence gossip is bad.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“Both women and men could benefit from learning each other’s styles. Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy, and many men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand

“We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood—heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“So there it is: Boys and girls grow up in different worlds, but we think we're in the same one, so we judge each other's behavior by the standards of our own.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“If my colleague’s reaction is typical, imagine how often women who think they are displaying a positive quality—connection— are misjudged by men who perceive them as revealing a lack of independence, which the men regard as synonymous with incompetence and insecurity.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand

“It’s important to remember that others’ ways of talking to you are partly a reaction to your style, just as your style with them is partly a reaction to their style—with you.”
― Deborah Tannen, That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

“Knowing that somewhere in the world there is someone who cares what you wore, an insignificant detail of your life that would seem unimportant to anyone else, makes you feel more connected to that person and less alone in the world.”
― Deborah Tannen, You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships

“Why can’t we just say what we mean? Why is so much communication indirect, hinted at in metamessages, picked up in tones of voice and glimpsed in facial expressions instead of confronted head on and clearly stated in words? First, there is a payoff in rapport. It is far better to get what we want, to be understood, without saying what we mean. It makes us feel the fine pleasure of being on the same wave length. This is the pleasure of those magical conversations when we say just a few words—or no words at all— and feel completely understood.”
― Deborah Tannen, That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

“Whereas it might seem as though the right to go ahead gives one the upper hand, that is only the message level. On the metamessage level, the one who decides who goes ahead has the upper hand, regardless of who gets to go. This is why many women do not feel empowered by such privileges as having doors held open for them. The advantage of going first through the door is less salient to them than the disadvantage of being granted the right to walk through a door by someone who is framed, by his magnanimous gesture, as the arbiter of the right-of-way. Most of us tend either to resist or to yield to frames. Those who instinctively resist frames set by others tend to balk when they feel pushed. Those who instinctively fit inside the frames set by others tend to yield when they feel pushed. We are more likely to respond according to our habits than to the specifics of the situation.”
― Deborah Tannen, That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

“But the manner of giving voice to thoughts and feelings becomes particularly significant in the case of negative feelings or doubts about a relationship. The difference was highlighted for me when a fifty-year-old divorced man told me about his experiences in forming new relationships with women. On this matter, he was clear: "I do not value my fleeting thoughts, and I do not value the fleeting thoughts of others." He felt that the relationship he was currently in had been endangered, even permanently weakened, by the woman's practice of tossing out her passing thoughts, because, early in their courtship, many of her thoughts were fears about the relationship. Not surprisingly, since they did not yet know each other well, she worried about whether she could trust him, whether their relationship would destroy her independence, whether this relationship was really right for her. He felt she should have kept these fears and doubts to herself and waited to see how things turned out.
As it happens, things turned out well. The woman decided that the relationship was right for her, she could trust him, and she did not have to give up her independence. But he felt, at the time that he told me of this, that he had still not recovered from the wear and tear of coping with her earlier doubts. As he put it, he was still dizzy from having been bounced around like a yo-yo tied to the string of her stream of consciousness.
In contrast, the man admitted, he himself goes to the other extreme: he never expresses his fears or misgivings about their relationship at all. If he's unhappy but doesn't say anything about it, his unhappiness expresses itself in a kind of distancing coldness. This response is just what women fear most, and just the reason they prefer to express dissatisfactions and doubts - as an antidote to the isolation and distance that would result from keeping them to themselves.
The different perspectives on expressing or concealing dissatisfactions and doubts may reflect a difference in men's and women's awareness of the power of their words to affect others. In repeatedly telling him what she feared about their relationship, she spoke as though she assumed he was invulnerable and could not be hurt by what she said; perhaps she was underestimating the power of her words to affect him. For his part, when he refrains from expressing negative thoughts or feelings, he seems to be overestimating the power of his words to hurt her, when, ironically, she is more likely to be hurt by his silence than his words.
Such impasses will perhaps never be settled to the complete satisfaction of both parties, but understanding the differing views can help detoxify the situation, and both can make adjustments.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“Often, focusing on the words spoken precludes figuring out what sparked a crisis, because the culprits are not words but tone of voice, intonation, and unstated implications and assumptions.”
― Deborah Tannen, That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

“When we think we are using language, language is using us.”
― Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Stopping America's War of Words

“Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy, and many men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“Always taking an adversative stance can result in avoiding situations one might really enjoy. And always accommodating can result in accepting situations one would really rather avoid. One man described to me what he and his former wife called the I-like-chicken-backs phenomenon. When his family ate a chicken for dinner, someone had to eat the back, and in his family it was always his wife, who assured the others, 'I like chicken backs.' But, as this man commented to me, nobody really likes chicken backs. She had convinced herself that she liked chicken backs—and broken egg yolks and burned toast—to be accommodating. But years of accommodating built up to mounting frustration that they both believed had contributed to their eventual divorce.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“It is the interaction of the two styles - his withdrawal and her insistence that he tell her what she did wrong - that is devastating to both.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

“The main difference between these alternatives is symmetry. Dependence is an asymmetrical involvement: One person needs the other, but not vice versa, so the needy person is one-down. Interdependence is symmetrical: Both parties rely on each other, so neither is one-up or one-down. Moreover,”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand

“One reason it's so difficult to decide what to say became immediately clear: comments and questions that some appreciated were not appreciated by others.”
― Deborah Tannen, You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships

“The belief that sitting down and talking will ensure mutual understanding and solve problems is based on the assumption that we can say what we mean, and that what we say will be understood as we mean it. This is unlikely to happen if conversational styles differ.”
― Deborah Tannen, That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

“We are more likely to respond according to our habits than to the specifics of the situation.”
― Deborah Tannen, That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

“the ways of doing things or speaking can be judged incorrect by some external standard. But often critics—male and female—want their intimates to adhere to standards that are not absolute but simply reflect their own cultural conventions, or even their individual habits and styles. And what seems “illogical” is often an expression of a different rather than a lapsed logic.”
― Deborah Tannen, That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

“If I wrote, 'After delivering the acceptance speech, the candidate fainted,' you would know I was talking about a woman. Men do not faint; they pass out.”
― Deborah Tannen, You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation