Sex Lies And Conversation Deborah Tannen Summary

The article “Sex, Lies, and Conversation” by Deborah Tannen is about how a lack of communication between heterosexual couples is what might be leading to their demise. This article is fairly dated, being published by The Washington Post in June of 1990, which meaning relating it back to todays technological age is hard. Yet this article still brought up some good points about how each gender talks to one another.

Within this article Tannen talks about how a lack of communication leads to divorce within heterosexual couples but she also talks about how each gender talks to someone of the same sex and the differences the two have is. One point that Tannen brings up is the conversational habits of men and women. She notes that women hate it

Tannen says in this article that a lack of communication is what is failing in relationships and is also what is leading couples to get a divorce. Now over the 25 year span that this article has been out we have came across many new ways of communicating with people. Which in a sense makes some of Tannen’s arguments not necessarily applicable to todays society. With communication being more modernized, i.e. texting, Facebook, and any other social media, one could say that Tannens arguments can’t really be applied. However if you take a look at what she says it can more then likely be used in conversation. Tannen mentions that for girls, intimacy is the fabric of a relationship (304). Now when texting it is hard to find that intimacy that you get with a face-to-face conversation. Yet sometimes a phone call can be just as intimate. Reaching out to a friend who lives to far away to have a face-to-face conversation can be hard but phone calls have just as much meaning to them. But the thing you are missing here is the body language that you might see. Deborah Tannen says that often women tell men that “You aren’t listening” only to have men protest that they are listening to what women have to say (304). For todays society though texting can be a way of solving problems like this. Men are more likely to get distracted, but with having the physical text in front of them men will be less likely to be considered not listening. Men have the ability to refer back to what she had said and can be fully aware of the conversation. Even if he has a lot of things going on. “Women’s conversational habits are just as frustrating to men as men’s are to women” (Tannen 305). When Tannen mentions this it shows that how we relate as a group. Both men and women’s conversations can be very confusing for us as a whole. But with new age technology we might be able to see what we mean and find a