What Did You Call Me? Male and Female (Mis)Communication

This lesson is going to focus mostly on how men communicate verbally, but there will be some overlap with the previous lesson because communication is made up of more than just what we say.

How we think, our body language, our tone of voice, our listening habits—all of these things make up our communication. And, once again, we are considering generalizations, so don’t think “my male character can’t say this, because men don’t talk like that.” Rather, think of how to show that it’s out of the ordinary.

Better yet, show how your hero can’t communicate at the beginning of your book, but grows throughout the book until he is able to talk about some of these things.

When it comes to communication, one of the most difficult things for men is talking about their emotions. It’s not that men don’t have emotions—despite what you may have heard. We just don’t want to appear weak, and we’re raised (especially in America) to believe that any sign of emotion betrays us.

It’s also an issue of vulnerability. If you tell someone what you really care about, they know how to hurt you. It’s even worse if the person you’re telling is a woman, and the feelings you have are for her, and you’re not sure how she’s going to react.

When men do finally break down and talk about their emotions, it’s usually a drawn out process.

Say a guy’s father takes him aside at their Saturday cookout and says, “I hear you’re having some trouble at work.” In actuality, the guy just got chewed the day before by his boss in front of all his co-workers. He might tell his dad, “Yeah, it’s been a little rough.” That’s it.

They’ll talk about other things for a while, maybe grab some beers. They’ll look at the yard and the car, talk about the roof and replacement windows. Slowly they’ll circle back to the subject and the guy might say, “It’s just been really hard, trying to tackle this new project with all the stuff going on here, Megan and I trying to have a kid.” The dad will sympathize, and again they’ll talk about other things until it circles back around.

Guys will very rarely just blurt out their feelings all in one big gush. It’s more of a trickle, and takes patience from the listener to get the man to open up. Women often want men to give the emotional Jerry Maguire speeches, and occasionally they may get it, but they’re more likely to have marathon conversations while the man works up his nerve to expose the fact that he is actually human and has feelings too.

We talked last time about how men are task- and goal-oriented. Sometimes women think men are uncaring and unemotional, just because women approach men at times when the men aren’t ready to talk about anything other than the task at hand.

When men are getting ready for work in the morning, for example, they’re thinking about the day ahead, the things they need to get done, how they’re going to attack it. If a woman wants to spend this time to discuss serious, heartfelt emotional issues, she’s probably going to find that the man is distant at best and annoyed at worst.

The cliché that men won’t stop for directions is a cliché because in many cases it’s true. Much of a man’s sense of self-worth is derived from being the mighty protector, the hunter-gatherer.

Stopping for directions makes a lot of sense when you’re lost, but to a man it means admitting failure, and that is quite a blow to his self-esteem. To the woman, it doesn’t mean that at all—it simply means that the best thing to do is stop and get directions so they can still be on time. But even a small thing like failing to find where you’re going affects a man’s ego. Finding their destination is the task at hand, and to stop and ask someone is to admit that he wasn’t up to the task.

So instead, he drives twenty miles out of his way and finally stops for gas, where he can nonchalantly ask the gas station attendant (or browse through the maps on the shelf while his wife is in the restroom) without completely exposing his devastating lack of instinctive directional ability.

We’ve all seen how men talk and act differently around their friends than they do when they’re in a one-on-one situation. The male hierarchy is much like the pecking order of apes, and men feel like they have to act a certain way to maintain there position in the social structure.

So your taciturn man suddenly becomes a wisecracking joker, or maybe an out-and-out obnoxious jerk, when he’s surrounded by his fraternity brothers. It doesn’t mean he’s not still the same sweet guy your heroine has come to love. It’s just the way guys act.

A sure way to get him into an argument or on the defensive is to bring up the fact that he’s different when he’s around his friends—especially if you bring it up in front of his friends, when he’ll definitely feel like he has to save face. This can be a great source of conflict.

Overall, men are much more direct than women. For instance, ask a man, “Do you love me?” and, to him, “Yes” seems like a good enough answer before he turns back to his football game.

He may not pick up on the cue that you need him to tell you how much he loves you, and why he loves you that much, and why nothing will ever change his love for you. Men think and speak in a very straightforward fashion, and this can also lead to conflict.

Knowing and using these differences in the way men and women communicate is great for this very reason—it creates conflict, and conflict makes our readers want to read more.

It also is a way to make your hero less of a too-good-to-be-real creation and more of a realistic, flawed person. Your hero can even be a bit of a jerk in the beginning—unable to communicate on even the most basic level with a woman unless he’s trying to get in her bed, for instance—as long as he grows and matures so that by the end of the book he’s able to tell the heroine how much he truly cares for her.

Remember that it’s ok to bend reality in fiction and make your man a bit more communicative than the real-life guy next door, as long as you leave enough realism in so that your readers don’t feel completely disconnected.

Here’s this week’s assignment. Think about other ways men and women differ in how they communicate (or use one of the ways listed here). Then, find a scene in your book where the hero and heroine are talking that is written in the heroine’s point of view. Rewrite the scene from the hero’s point of view, including what he’s thinking during the conversation. Compare both versions, and comment on which you feel is better and why.

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