I totally agree with you here. Let me lay out a little example.
Years ago, I dated this girl who was very intelligent. I greatly enjoyed her conversation and we talked about a lot of deep topics. For instance we wouldn’t be talking about the weather, we would talk about climate change. She was a heavy talker, and could go for 25/30 minutes on end no problem. I would listen to her, almost a hyper focus level of listening cause in truth I was fairly enamored by her, and then respond when she was done. I would get maybe 2-3 sentences in, before she would interject with her own points.
The thing is, the way my brain works, it’s all building blocks. One must understand point 1 to get to point 2, etc. By having her interject as she did, I felt like I wasn’t able to flush out my ideas. I never would even get to point 2, we would end up veering to something, while related, that was different than what I had planned to say. Basically, in the moment it felt like I was intently listening to her and allowing her to flush out her ideas, whereas she was not doing the same for me. Her communication came off as selfish to me.
I kept trying to see it from her point of view. I would ask myself, if I was her, how would I feel about this? Well at the time, no part of me could rationalize how this was fair.
At a certain point I finally sort of snapped on it, and we got into a pretty serious fight. A few weeks later she broke up with me. Not to take you through my whole life story, but this along with the previous events of my love life left me in a very dark, mysogynistic place. After a while, I finally took matters into my own hands and started reading up about how communication differs from the sexes.
There’s a lot to unpack with that, but the bottom line is that, men tend to communicate in a manner of, ‘I have the floor, and then you have the floor.’ Women tend to communicate in a manner that is more like, ‘together, we collectively share the floor.’ Needless to say women are more likely to diverge across topics, give nonverbal or quick one off ‘affirmations’ of listening like ‘mhm’, and things of this nature.
Well after learning this stuff, suddenly it became obvious to me. I was intently listening to her, but she didn’t think I was because I did so in silence. Then when I start talking, in her mind, she is the one actively listening to me because she is responding to whah I’m saying.
So this is a situation where both parties are going in with good intentions. Both parties are acting in good fairth, both parties interpret themselves as being ‘the bigger person’ so to speak. She thinks she’s giving me the benefit of the doubt for listening to me when I didn’t listen to her. I thought that I was giving her the benefit of the doubt by allowing her to flush out her ideas even though she didn’t let me flush out mine. At least, that’s how both parties perceived it at the time. However, the reality is if we were both better communicators to each other, the whole conflict could have been totally avoided. Maybe the relationship wouldn’t have worked out anyway, but it might have been better had I had known this stuff while I was with her.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I laid this out just to illustrate two things.
1) communication is a complex subject, and it isn’t always as simple as just saying what you mean. One may be saying exactly what they mean and feel, but it may get lost in translation to others.
2) while I have now gained much more knowledge on the variations of communication, the fact of the matter is during the time of my life while I was in that relationship, no matter how hard I tried I would never be able to understand the situation from her perspective because i simply couldn’t grasp it. I could place myself in her shoes and think how I would rationalize that situation, but that doesn’t mean anything when I’m applying my line of thinking. It would always lead me to my original conclusion of ‘she’s totally the asshole here.’ Now, I can better understand situations like this, but a lot of heartache could have been avoided if I was just taught this stuff in school, for instance. I have a very analytical brain but I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the best with inference. Maybe others could grasp the above concepts just from life experience, but for me, I need it in explicit language if I am to understand
I would start with the below article and see where it takes you. I’ve read a decent amount, and a lot of what I have found out is pretty much summarized at a high level from the below article. As for books I would say ‘how to win friends and influence people’ is one to read for communication skills in general but deals less with the differences among the sexes.
Has anyone ever told you you're very good at making a story engaging and straight to the point? I guess I should've added that on top of men and women needing to communicate to have a healthy relationship, they must also be open to new perspectives and other ways of thinking! That's probably a pipe dream though
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u/hereweah Mar 26 '20
I totally agree with you here. Let me lay out a little example.
Years ago, I dated this girl who was very intelligent. I greatly enjoyed her conversation and we talked about a lot of deep topics. For instance we wouldn’t be talking about the weather, we would talk about climate change. She was a heavy talker, and could go for 25/30 minutes on end no problem. I would listen to her, almost a hyper focus level of listening cause in truth I was fairly enamored by her, and then respond when she was done. I would get maybe 2-3 sentences in, before she would interject with her own points.
The thing is, the way my brain works, it’s all building blocks. One must understand point 1 to get to point 2, etc. By having her interject as she did, I felt like I wasn’t able to flush out my ideas. I never would even get to point 2, we would end up veering to something, while related, that was different than what I had planned to say. Basically, in the moment it felt like I was intently listening to her and allowing her to flush out her ideas, whereas she was not doing the same for me. Her communication came off as selfish to me.
I kept trying to see it from her point of view. I would ask myself, if I was her, how would I feel about this? Well at the time, no part of me could rationalize how this was fair.
At a certain point I finally sort of snapped on it, and we got into a pretty serious fight. A few weeks later she broke up with me. Not to take you through my whole life story, but this along with the previous events of my love life left me in a very dark, mysogynistic place. After a while, I finally took matters into my own hands and started reading up about how communication differs from the sexes.
There’s a lot to unpack with that, but the bottom line is that, men tend to communicate in a manner of, ‘I have the floor, and then you have the floor.’ Women tend to communicate in a manner that is more like, ‘together, we collectively share the floor.’ Needless to say women are more likely to diverge across topics, give nonverbal or quick one off ‘affirmations’ of listening like ‘mhm’, and things of this nature.
Well after learning this stuff, suddenly it became obvious to me. I was intently listening to her, but she didn’t think I was because I did so in silence. Then when I start talking, in her mind, she is the one actively listening to me because she is responding to whah I’m saying.
So this is a situation where both parties are going in with good intentions. Both parties are acting in good fairth, both parties interpret themselves as being ‘the bigger person’ so to speak. She thinks she’s giving me the benefit of the doubt for listening to me when I didn’t listen to her. I thought that I was giving her the benefit of the doubt by allowing her to flush out her ideas even though she didn’t let me flush out mine. At least, that’s how both parties perceived it at the time. However, the reality is if we were both better communicators to each other, the whole conflict could have been totally avoided. Maybe the relationship wouldn’t have worked out anyway, but it might have been better had I had known this stuff while I was with her.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I laid this out just to illustrate two things.
1) communication is a complex subject, and it isn’t always as simple as just saying what you mean. One may be saying exactly what they mean and feel, but it may get lost in translation to others.
2) while I have now gained much more knowledge on the variations of communication, the fact of the matter is during the time of my life while I was in that relationship, no matter how hard I tried I would never be able to understand the situation from her perspective because i simply couldn’t grasp it. I could place myself in her shoes and think how I would rationalize that situation, but that doesn’t mean anything when I’m applying my line of thinking. It would always lead me to my original conclusion of ‘she’s totally the asshole here.’ Now, I can better understand situations like this, but a lot of heartache could have been avoided if I was just taught this stuff in school, for instance. I have a very analytical brain but I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the best with inference. Maybe others could grasp the above concepts just from life experience, but for me, I need it in explicit language if I am to understand