Deborah Tannen Quotes

Smashing heads does not open minds.

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.

We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.

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

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.

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.

While boys create connections through friendly competition, girls create connections by downplaying competition and focusing on similarities.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The parent of a child, as Deborah Tannen has written, has the power not only to create the world the child lives in but the ability to dictate how that world is to be interpreted. Seen from that point of view, one of the lasting and important legacies of a mean mother is a wellspring of self-doubt. The other, explained by adaptive behavior, is a need to replicate the relationship she has to her mother with other people, regardless of how unhappy it makes her.

early 1990s, Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, attracted international notice with her book You Just Don’t Understand. Her book, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for over four years, argued that men and women often talk past each other without appreciating that the other sex is almost another culture. Women, for example, are highly attentive to the thoughts and feelings of others; men are less so. Women view men’s speaking styles as blunt and uncaring; men view women’s as indirect and obscure.

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.

Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated and fraught with the effects of moments from the past. My mom knew this and wanted me to know it too. On one visit home, I found an essay from the Washington Post by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen that had been cut out and left on my desk. My mom, and her mom before her, loved clipping newspaper articles and cartoons from the paper to send to Barbara and me. This article was different. Above it, my mom had written a note: “Dear Benny”—I was “Benny” from the time I was a toddler; the family folklore was that when we were babies, a man approached my parents, commenting on their cute baby boys, and my parents played along, pretending our names were Benjamin and Beauregard, later shorted to Benny and Bo. In her note, my mom confessed to doing many things that the writer of this piece had done: checking my hair, my appearance. As a teenager, I was continually annoyed by some of her requests: comb your hair; pull up your jeans (remember when low-rise jeans were a thing? It was not a good look, I can assure you!). “Your mother may assume it goes without saying that she is proud of you,” Deborah Tannen wrote. “Everyone knows that. And everyone probably also notices that your bangs are obscuring your vision—and their view of your eyes. Because others won’t say anything, your mother may feel it’s her obligation to tell you.” In leaving her note and the clipping, my mom was reminding me that she accepted and loved me—and that there is no perfect way to be a mother. While we might have questioned some of the things our mother said, we never questioned her love.

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.

Women and men would both do well to learn strategies more typically used by members of the other group— not to switch over entirely, but to have more strategies at their disposal.

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.

Yet another man commented that women seem to wallow in their problems, wanting to talk about them forever, whereas he and other men want to get them out and be done with them.

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.

One woman put it this way: "...I'm a compassionate person, but I also don't want to be friends with somebody who doesn't full show up as well.

Maybe most of all, Karl is like family because of how I feel when I'm around him: completely and unself-consciously myself.

If women resent men's tendency to offer solutions to problems, men complain about women's refusal to take action to solve the problems.

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.

We are more likely to respond according to our habits than to the specifics of the situation.

When we think we are using language, language is using us.

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.

Second, there is a payoff in self-defense. If what we want or think does not meet with a positive response, we can take it back, or claim—perhaps sincerely—that that’s not what we meant.

...You're so real. That's why we love you." ... Her friend's response reflected the reciprocity of showing vulnerability. It is a gift not only to the one who has the meltdown but also to the ones who witness it.

For girls, talk is the glue that holds relationships together. Boys' relationships are held together primarily by activities: doing things together, or talking about activities such as sports or, later, politics.

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.

Psychologists John and Sandra Condry asked subjects to interpret why an infant was crying. If they had been told the baby was a boy, subjects thought he was angry, but if they had been told it was a girl, they thought she was afraid.

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.

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.

The danger of misinterpretation is greatest, of course, among speakers who actually speak different native tongues, or come from different cultural backgrounds, because cultural difference necessarily implies different assumptions about natural and obvious ways to be polite.

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,

Penelope Eckert, who observed boys and girls in high school, points out that boys define their social status in a simple and straightforward way—their individual skill and achievement, especially at sports—but girls 'must define theirs in a far more complicated way, in terms of their overall character.

Linguist Robin Lakoff devised another set of rules that describe the motivations behind politeness—that is, how we adjust what we say to take into account its effects on others. Here they are as Lakoff presents them: 1. Don’t impose; keep your distance. 2. Give options; let the other person have a say. 3. Be friendly; maintain camaraderie.

The characteristics of a good man and a good candidate are the same, but a woman has to choose between coming across as a strong leader or a good woman. If a man appears forceful, logical, direct, masterful, and powerful, he enhances his value as a man. If a woman appears forceful, logical, direct, masterful, or powerful, she risks undercutting her value as a woman.

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.

Many women feel it is natural to consult with their partners at every turn, while many men automatically make more decisions without consulting their partners. This may reflect a broad difference in conceptions of decision making. Women expect decisions to be discussed first and made by consensus. They appreciate the discussion itself as evidence of involvement and communication.

conflicting metamessages inherent in giving help become especially apparent when people are in a hierarchical relationship to each other by virtue of their jobs. Just as parents are often frustrated in attempts to be their children’s “friends,” so bosses who try to give friendly advice to subordinates may find that their words, intended symmetrically, are interpreted through an asymmetrical filter.

the platitude “If you love each other, you can work it out” is not necessarily true. Instead, the more you love each other, the more unrealistic your expectations of perfect understanding, and the more painful the metamessage of misunderstanding. And that, in turn, is why so many people, finding that they can’t work it out, conclude that they don’t—or even less logically, never did—love each other.

the act of helping sends metamessages —that is, information about the relations among the people involved, and their attitudes toward what they are saying or doing and the people they are saying or doing it to. In other words, the message of helping says, “This is good for you.” But the fact of giving help may seem to send the metamessage “I am more competent than you,” and in that sense it is good for the helper.

Another way to think about metamessages is that they frame a conversation, much as a picture frame provides a context for the images in the picture. Metamessages let you know how to interpret what someone is saying by identifying the activity that is going on: Is this an argument or a chat? Is it helping, advising, or scolding? At the same time, they let you know what position the speaker is assuming in the activity, and what position you are being assigned.

The payoffs of indirectness in rapport and self-defense correspond to the two basic dynamics that motivate communication: the coexisting and conflicting human needs for involvement and independence. Since any show of involvement is a threat to independence, and any show of independence is a threat to involvement, indirectness is the life raft of communication, a way to float on top of a situation instead of plunging in with nose pinched and coming up blinking.

American men’s information-focused approach to talk has shaped the American way of doing business. Most Americans think it’s best to “get down to brass tacks” as soon as possible, and not “waste time” in small talk (social talk) or “beating around the bush.” But this doesn’t work very well in business dealings with Greek, Japanese, or Arab counterparts for whom “small talk” is necessary to establish the social relationship that must provide the foundation for conducting business.

Communication is a system. Everything that is said is simultaneously an instigation and a reaction, a reaction and an instigation. Most of us tend to focus on the first part of that process while ignoring or downplaying the second. We see ourselves as reacting to what others say and do, without realizing that their actions or words are in part reactions to ours, and that our reactions to them won’t be the end of the process but rather will trigger more reactions, in a continuous stream.

Sometimes it's not self-evident whether a remark is truly meant to be hurtful or meant in the spirit of friendly teasing (or ambiguous or both at once). Between women and men, teasing is risky because playful insults are a common way of showing affection among boys and men but less so for most women—at least most American women. My husband tells me that one of the first things he learned about me was that he had to curb his impulse to tease me because I would be hurt rather than touched.

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,

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.

Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz, in their study American Couples, found that lesbians have sex less often than gay men and heterosexual couples. The sociologists believe that this happens because, as they found, in heterosexual couples the man almost always initiates sex, and the woman either complies or exercises veto power. Among gay men, at least one partner takes the role of initiator. But among lesbians, they found, often neither feels comfortable taking the role of initiator, because neither wants to be perceived as making demands.

Parents often complain that their adult childhood won't let them change. Children don't want their parents to move from the home in which they grew up, or convert their old bedrooms into offices. They refuse to take their cartons out of the attic or basement and become angry at even the suggestion that their parents might show them away. We are more focused on our parents as the repositories of our childhoods, which we want to hold on to, than on the sacrifices they made for us that they might no longer want to make—such as using their own bedroom or the dining rooms as an office so we could have a bedroom.

Many women discuss with friends what's troubling them, because talking about personal problems is one of the fundamental ways that women create friendship. But when a woman's problems involve family members—which they often do—discussing personal problems means taking inside information about family members outside the family. Men, in particular, often perceive this as betrayal, because they don't understand the purpose: Men's friendships are typically built not on telling secrets but rather on sharing activities—doing things together. From Tom's point of view, Eve's talking to her friends about him was breaching the walls of the family fortress.

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.

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.

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.

Each person’s life is lived as a series of conversations.

This has been one of my biggest surprises in writing this book: the distinction be\etween introverts and extraverts did not come up in any of my previous books about relationships, but it emerged early on a significant factor in this one.

There is an exquisite irony - a perfect relationship storm, you might say - between daughters and mothers. Because girls and women are judged by appearance, mothers want their daughters to look as attractive as possible. But any suggestion for improvement implies criticism. And therein lies the irony: for mothers, the person to whom you most want to offer helpful suggestions is the one most likely to resist and resent them; for daughters, the person you most want to think you're perfect is the one most likely to see your flaws - and tell you about them. -Deborah Tannen

We all have alternate lives we might have lived had we made different decisions, including decisions about whom to marry. I

We don’t know what’s going on in people’s lives. Not really. We can think we know, and they may share one or two details, but we don’t actually know. And we can’t ever know what someone is dealing with silently. What flaws and stresses and preoccupations are overtaking them, causing them to act the way they do. Deborah Tannen, an expert on communication and relationships, says all of our conversations are products of our own personal histories. What we say and how we say it is all a personal style that we’ve developed after years of interacting with people. The way our family talks to us or shows love becomes the way we speak and show love. And this is what creates conflict. We think we understand what someone is saying, but we are only really hearing them through our own filters.

These are the signals that combine with what is said to make up the devices we use to show we’re listening, interested, sympathetic, or teasing—and that we’re the right sort of people.

Thus conversational signals can get crossed when well-intentioned speakers have different habits and expectations about using pacing and pausing, loudness, and pitch to show their intentions through talk—

Our deepest wish is to be understood and approved of by our mothers and our daughters. We can get closer to that goal by listening to the ways we talk to each other, and by learning to talk to each other in new ways.

a girl who posts a picture of herself on Instagram must show that she doesn’t take herself too seriously, either by mugging or with a self-deprecating or humorous caption or, preferably, both.

Everything we say to each other echoes with meanings left over from our past experience— both our history talking to the person before us at this moment and our history talking to others. This is especially true in the family— and our history of family talk is like a prism through which all other conversations (and relationships) are refracted.

Everything we say to each other echoes with meanings left over from our past experience— both our history talking to the person before us at this moment and our history talking to others. This is especially true in the family —and our history of family talk is like a prism through which all other conversations (and relationships) are refracted. We react not only to the meaning of the words spoken— the message—but also to what we think those words say about the relationship—the metamessage. Metamessages are unstated meanings we glean based on how someone spoke— tone of voice, phrasing —and on associations we brought to the conversation.

the metamessage yields heart meaning.

IT’S 1996; MY father is eighty-eight. I arrive for a visit at their Westchester condo. My mother greets me at the door. After we’ve hugged and kissed, my father appears at the end of the hallway. It’s taken him longer to rise from his chair. He isn’t carrying the cane he finally agreed to use after his last fall. He stumbles, but the wall catches him. Something inside me rebels: who stole my father and put this old man in his place?

I’ll just be a memory,” he says. “There are so many people who were so real to me in their lives, and now they’re just memories.

In all my memories, my father is unfailingly cheerful. It’s my mother who is often unhappy, whose unhappiness I dread because I absorb it, as if I were a lightning rod grounding her sadness in my chest. When

Throughout everything, my father’s cheerfulness, his optimism, is palpable in his ever-present sense of humor. Yet I’m struck by a comment he makes in a conversation with Ryan: “If there is no humor, you find sadness. Sadness appears. No humor isn’t followed by nothing. It’s followed by sadness.” I see in his journals and written memories that my father’s perennial good humor and quick wit may be a cover for his sadness, which reminds me of my own.

The very next year the Statue of Liberty lowered her torch: in 1921 Congress imposed quotas, and in 1924—the year after my mother arrived—quotas were set so low that the doors effectively slammed shut.

I don’t think Jewish is a race—though in 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that it is, so Jews are protected by laws against racial discrimination—what is it? A religion? Yes, but I’m not religious. A culture? I hear people talk about “cultural Jews,” but that term feels inadequate to me; “culture” doesn’t go deep enough. I’m more comfortable with the term “secular Jew”; that feels like a reasonable way to describe Jews who aren’t “observant,” but it still doesn’t say what Judaism is. Is it

If I don’t think Jewish is a race—though in 1987 the Supreme Court ruled that it is, so Jews are protected by laws against racial discrimination—what is it? A religion? Yes, but I’m not religious. A culture? I hear people talk about “cultural Jews,” but that term feels inadequate to me; “culture” doesn’t go deep enough. I’m more comfortable with the term “secular Jew”; that feels like a reasonable way to describe Jews who aren’t “observant,” but it still doesn’t say what Judaism is. Is

During that year, 2017, according to FBI statistics, 60 percent of religious hate crimes were anti-Jewish (17 percent were anti-Islamic and 5 percent anti-Catholic).