BOOK REVIEW : Clear Voice Is Added to the Differences Between Sexes

YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND: WOMEN AND MEN IN CONVERSATION by Deborah Tannen William Morrow and Co. $18.95, 331 pages

He: I’m really tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.

She: I didn’t sleep well either. I never do.

He: Why are you trying to belittle me?

Another skirmish in the battle of the sexes? A relationship doomed to failure? Or is something more subtle going on here? According to Deborah Tannen in “You Just Don’t Understand,” the sparks that fly from the exchange of a few words can be explained by the fundamental differences in the way women and men express themselves. “She” is saying: “I know how you feel; I feel the same way.” “He” sees it as a put-down.

Tannen has a marvelous ear for the way real people express themselves, and a scientist’s command of the inner structures of speech and human relationship. In “You Just Don’t Understand,” she suggests that men and women are speaking to each other in different languages without realizing it. Thus, the risk of misunderstanding is enormous--and potentially catastrophic.

“There are gender differences in ways of speaking, and we need to identify and understand them,” Tannen explains. “Without such understanding, we are doomed to blame each other or ourselves--or the relationship--for the otherwise mystifying and damaging effects of our contrasting conversational styles.”

At least one of the obstacles to communication between men and women, Tannen writes, is the difference in the way men and women perceive the world--a difference that begins in early childhood and is reinforced throughout life. A man sees himself as “an individual in a hierarchical social order in which he (is) either one-up or one-down,” Tannen argues. A woman sees herself as “an individual in a network of connections.”

As a result, Tannen explains, a man regards conversations as “negotiations in which people try to achieve and maintain the upper hand,” while a woman is more likely to see conversations as “negotiations for closeness in which people try to seek and give confirmation and support.” When a man and a woman try to talk to each other, they are often talking at cross-purposes; the danger is that the man will be perceived by the woman as overbearing and insensitive, and the woman will be perceived by the man as nagging and manipulative.

Tannen has coined a number of words and phrases (or borrowed them from the scientific literature) to show us exactly what she means. Thus, for example, she urges us to look for the “metamessage” beneath the surface of an otherwise ordinary encounter: “That is,” she explains, “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.”

For example, Tannen suggests men are less likely than women to ask for directions, or, having been asked, to admit they don’t know. That’s because the “metamessage” in a request for information is perceived by men as a matter of status: “The one who has more information is framed as higher up on the ladder.”

The same mechanism is at work, she says, when the wife wants to chat and the husband wants to read the newspaper. A woman, for whom “talk is the glue that holds relationships together,” seeks “rapport-talk,” while a man is content with “report-talk” because his relationships are held together by “activities . . . or talk about activities.”

But Tannen insists that we can learn to avoid these dangers of miscommunication simply by recognizing and understanding them: “Realizing that men and women have different assumptions about the place of talk in relationships, a woman can observe a man’s desire to read the morning paper at the breakfast table without interpreting it as a rejection of her,” Tannen writes. “And a man can understand a woman’s desire for talk without interpeting it as an unreasonable demand or a manipulative attempt to prevent him from doing what he wants to do.”

Tannen, a “sociolinguist” and a professor at Georgetown University, has applied the tools of scientific research to the ordinary encounters of men and women in everyday life.

But there is nothing stuffy about “You Just Don’t Understand.” Quite to the contrary, it is a chatty, earnest and endearing book that promises here-and-now rewards for taking the trouble to listen more carefully to what others are saying--and to be more sensitive to what others are hearing.