Three ways husbands and wives can misunderstand each other …

Deborah Tannen was sitting at home with her husband when a simple question about a family visit turned into an argument she could not understand. Tannen’s sister had invited the couple to visit her, and Tannen wanted to know whether her husband wanted to go. She asked him, and he answered, “Okay.” To Tannen, that did not tell her whether he actually wanted to make the visit, so she asked again, “Do you really want to go?” Her husband became angry and demanded to know why she could not make up her mind about what she wanted.

Tannen was genuinely confused. She had been trying to find out what he wanted so she could accommodate him. He understood the conversation differently. To him, her original question implied that she wanted to visit her sister, so his “Okay” meant that he was willing to go along with her preference. When she questioned him again, he thought she had changed her mind. Neither had understood what the other was doing in the conversation.

The experience was especially interesting because Tannen is a linguist who has spent much of her career studying conversation -how people use language and how others interpret what they hear. Her research has shown that people can bring different conversational expectations to an exchange, influenced by factors such as culture and background. Her experience with her husband was a personal example of a larger communication problem she had studied: words that seem perfectly clear to the speaker can carry a different meaning for the listener.

Marriage gives those differences unusual importance because husbands and wives are continually interpreting not only each other’s words, but each other’s actions and reactions. Three differences are particularly worth understanding because they can leave both spouses sincerely believing they have communicated something their husband or wife has not received in the same way.

Significance through contribution and significance through priority
Significance is the experience of being important and valued in a relationship. Husbands and wives can both need significance in marriage while experiencing it differently. For many husbands, significance is strongly connected to contribution. What he provides, protects, fixes, solves, and takes responsibility for can give him a sense that he has an important and valuable place in the family. His contribution says, in effect, I matter here because what I bring to this family matters.

For many wives, significance is strongly connected to priority. She may judge her importance to her husband by the place she receives in his time, attention, and choices. She may appreciate how hard he works and everything he contributes while still needing to experience that she is important enough to be chosen when other demands compete for him.

That difference can make the same marriage look surprisingly different from opposite sides. He may feel insignificant when his contributions are treated as though they do not matter. She may feel insignificant when she repeatedly comes after everything else. Both are responding to significance, but contribution and priority are giving them different evidence of it.

Direct communication and contextual communication
Husbands and wives can also differ in what they believe it means to communicate something clearly. Many husbands rely heavily on direct communication: if you want something, say what you want; if something is wrong, say what is wrong. When his wife later says that he should have known what she needed, he may genuinely think, How could I know? You never told me.

Many wives rely more heavily on contextual communication, in which meaning is carried not only by explicit words but also by context, tone, previous conversations, and relational cues. She may therefore be just as certain that she did tell him. What seems to him like an unstated expectation may seem to her like something she communicated quite clearly.

The result is the familiar collision between Why didn’t you tell me? and Why should I have to spell it out? The useful insight is that neither question necessarily proves that one spouse was careless. They may simply have different assumptions about how much meaning must be stated and how much should be recognized from context.

Conflict as an event and conflict as a condition of the relationship
A similar difference can appear when husbands and wives decide whether an argument is over. Many husbands tend to experience a conflict as an event: there was a problem, they argued about it, the problem was settled, and now they can move on. When his wife raises the matter again, he may honestly wonder why she is restarting an argument they already resolved.

His wife may experience the conflict partly as a condition of the relationship. The original problem may have been settled, but what happened between them during the argument may not be. She may still be dealing with something he said, how he treated her, or the feeling that he never understood why she was hurt. She is not necessarily returning to the original problem; she may be returning to what the conflict left behind (for more about this, see my blog post on the topic of “repair” here).

That distinction explains why We already settled this and No, we didn’t can both be sincere. One spouse is referring to the issue that caused the conflict; the other is referring to the relationship after the conflict. Sometimes the argument really is over while its effect on the marriage is not.

The next time a conversation reaches the bewildering point where both spouses are certain that the other should understand, continuing to explain the same thing more forcefully may accomplish very little. One question can uncover what the argument itself has hidden: What are you hearing me say? The answer may be the first time either spouse discovers what conversation they have actually been having.

Scotty