How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships

Excerpted from
That's Not What I Meant! How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships
By Deborah Tannen

The Problem Is the Process

You know the feeling: You meet someone for the first time, and it's as if you've known each other all your lives. Everything goes smoothly. You know just what she means; she knows just what you mean. You laugh at the same time. Your sentences and hers have a perfect rhythm. You feel terrific; you're doing everything right. And you think she's terrific too.

But you also know the other feeling: You meet someone, you try to be friendly, to make a good impression, but everything goes wrong. There are uncomfortable silences. You fish for topics. You bump into each other as you both start at once and then both stop. You start to say something interesting but he cuts you off. He starts saying something and never seems to finish. You try to lighten the mood and he looks as if you punched him in the stomach. He says what may be intended as a joke but is more rude than funny. Whatever you do to make things better makes them worse.

If conversation always followed the first pattern, I wouldn't have to write this book. If it always followed the second, no one would ever talk to anyone else and nothing would get done. Talk is mostly somewhere in the middle. We do get things done; we talk to family and friends and colleagues and neighbors. Sometimes what people say seems to make perfect sense; sometimes it sounds a little odd. If someone doesn't quite get our point, we let it go, the talk continues, and no one pays much attention.

But if an important outcome hangs on the conversation — if it's a job interview, a business meeting, or a doctor's appointment—the results can be very serious. If it's a public negotiation or an international summit conference, the results can be dire indeed. And if the conversation is with the most important person in your life, the little hitches can become big ones, and you can end up in a conversation of the second sort without knowing how you got there. If this happens all the time—at home, at work, or in routine day-to-day encounters, so that you feel misunderstood all the time and never quite understand what others are getting at—you start to doubt your own ability, or even your sanity. Then you can't not pay attention.

For example, Judy Scott is applying for a job as office manager at the headquarters of an ice-cream distributor—a position she's well qualified for. Her last job, although it was called "administrative assistant," actually involved running the whole office, and she did a great job. But at the interview, she never gets a chance to explain this. The interviewer does all the talking, Judy leaves feeling frustrated—and she doesn't get the job.

Or at home: Sandy and Matt have a good marriage. They love each other and are quite happy. But a recurring source of tension is that Sandy often feels that Matt doesn't really listen to her. He asks her a question, but before she can answer, he asks another—or starts to answer it himself. When they get together with Matt's friends, the conversation goes so fast, Sandy can't get a word in edgewise. Afterward, Matt complains that she was too quiet, though she certainly isn't quiet when she gets together with her friends. Matt thinks it's because she doesn't like his friends, but the only reason Sandy doesn't like them is that she feels they ignore her—and she can't find a way to get into their conversation.

Sometimes strains in a conversation reflect real differences between people: they are angry at each other; they really are at cross-purposes. Books have been written about this situation: how to fight fair, how to assert yourself. But sometimes strains and kinks develop when there really are no basic differences of opinion, when everyone is sincerely tiying to get along. This is the type of miscommunication that drives people crazy. And it is usually caused by differences in conversational style.

A perfectly tuned conversation is a vision of sanity—a ratification of one's way of being human and one's place in the world. And nothing is more deeply disquieting than a conversation gone awry. To say something and see it taken to mean something else; to try to be helpful and be thought pushy; to try to be considerate and be called cold; to try to establish a rhythm so that talk will glide effortlessly about the room, only to end up feeling like a conversational clod who can't pick up the beat—such failure at talk undermines one's sense of competence and of being a right sort of person. If it happens continually, it can undermine one's feeling of psychological well-being.

This book gives a linguist's view of what makes conversation exhilarating or frustrating. Through the lens of linguistic analysis of conversational style, it shows how communication works—and fails to work. The aim is to let you know you're not alone and you're not crazy—and to give you more choice in continuing, ending, or improving communication in your private and public life.

To give you an idea of how a linguistic analysis of conversational style can help, I'll begin by describing how I learned to love linguistics and listen for style.

I got hooked on linguistics the year my marriage broke up. Trying to turn a loss into a gain, I took advantage of my new-found freedom and attended the Linguistic Institute at the University of Michigan in the summer of 1973, to find out what linguistics was all about.

Seven years of living with the man I had just separated from had left me dizzy with questions about communication. What went wrong when we tried to talk to each other? Why did this wonderful, lovable man turn into a cruel lunatic when we tried to talk things out—and make me turn into one too?

I remember one argument near the end of our marriage. It stuck in my mind not because it was unique but because it was so painfully typical, and because the pitch of my frustration reached a new height. I felt I must be losing my mind. It was one of our frequent conversations about plans—simple plans, plans of no great consequence, but plans that involved us both and therefore had to be made in tandem. In this case it was about whether or not to accept an invitation to visit my sister.

I asked, cozy in the setting of our home and confident of my kindness in being willing to do whatever my husband wished, "Do you want to go to my sister's?" He answered, "Okay." I guess "Okay" didn't sound to me like an answer to my question; it seemed to indicate he was going along with something. So I followed up: "Do you really want to go?" He exploded. "You're driving me crazy! Why don't you make up your mind what you want?"