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U2:Why Is It So Hard for Men and Women to Talk to Each Other?男女交谈为何如此困难

I was addressing a small gathering in a suburban Virginia living room -- a women's group that had invited men to join them. Throughout the evening, one man had been particularly talkative, frequently offering ideas and anecdotes, while his wife sat silently beside him on the couch. Toward the end of the evening, I commented that women frequently complain that their husbands don't talk to them. This man quickly concurred. He gestured toward his wife and said, "She's the talker in our family." The room burst into laughter; the man looked puzzled and hurt. "It's true," he explained. "When I come home from work I have nothing to say. If she didn't keep the conversation going, we'd spend the whole evening in silence."那是在弗吉尼亚郊区一个住所的客厅里，我正在一次小型聚会上发言——这是一次女性的聚会，但也邀请了男性参加。整晚，一位男士表现得极为健谈，他不断地发表自己的看法，讲述奇闻轶事。而他的妻子却安静地坐在他身旁的沙发上。聚会接近尾声时，我说，一些妻子经常抱怨丈夫不与她们交谈，这位男士立刻表示同意。他指着妻子说：“在家里爱说话的是她。”于是满屋子哄堂大笑，这位男士一脸茫然和委屈。“这是真的，”他解释说，“我下班回家后总是无话可说，如果她不说话，我们会整晚沉默。”

This episode crystallizes the irony that although American men tend to talk more than women in public situations, they often talk less at home. And this pattern is wreaking havoc with marriage.这段小插曲反映了一种具有讽刺意味的现象，即美国的男性尽管在公共场合比女性健谈，在家里却比女性说话少。而正是这一现象使婚姻受到严重威胁。

Sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman reports in her new book "Divorce Talk" that most of the women she interviewed -- but only a few of the men -- gave lack of communication as the reason for their divorces. 社会学家凯瑟琳•凯尔•里兹曼在她的新作《离婚谈》中说，她采访过的大多数女性将离婚的原因归咎于缺乏交谈，但只有少数男性将此当作离婚的理由。

In my own research, complaints from women about their husbands most often focused not on tangible inequities such as having given up the chance for a career to accompany a husband to his, or doing far more than their share of daily life-support work like cleaning, cooking, social arrangements and errands. Instead, they focused on communication: "He doesn't listen to me," "He doesn't talk to me." I found, as Hacker observed years before, that most wives want their husbands to be, first and foremost, conversational partners, but few husbands share this expectation of their wives.在我本人的研究中，女性对丈夫的抱怨大多不是集中在一些实际的不平等现象，例如为了跟随丈夫的事业而放弃了发展自己事业的机会，或者她们所承担的日常生活琐事远远超过她们份内的部分。她们的抱怨总是集中在交流问题上，如“他不听我说话”，“他不和我说话”。我发现多数做妻子的都期望丈夫首先是自己的交谈伙伴。但是很少有丈夫对妻子抱有同样的期望。

In short, the image that best represents the current crisis is the stereotypical cartoon scene of a man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.简言之，最能体现目前这种危机的是一个老套的卡通画面：一个男人坐在早餐桌旁，手中拿着一张报纸看着，而他的妻子愤怒地盯着报纸背面，渴望与他交谈。Linguistic Battle Between Men and Women两性间的唇枪舌剑

How can women and men have such different impressions of communication in marriage?Why is there a widespread imbalance in their interests and expectations? 在婚姻中的交流问题上，为何男女会持有如此不同的观点？为什么男女的兴趣和期望普遍不一致？

In the April 1990 issue of American Psychologist, Stanford University's Eleanor Maccoby reports the results of her own and other's research showing that children's development is most influenced by social stucture of peer interactions. Boys and girls tend to play with children of their own gender,and their sex-separate groups have different organizational structures and interactive norms. 斯坦福大学的埃莉诺•麦科比在1990年4月《美国心理学家》刊物上发表了她自己和他人研究的结果。研究结果表明，儿童的发展主要受同龄伙伴交往过程中社交结构的影响。无论男孩女孩都喜欢与同性伙伴玩耍。不同性别的儿童小群体有不同的组织结构和交际准则。

I believe these systematic differences in childhood socialization make talk between women and men like cross-culture communication. My research on men's and women's conversations uncovered patterns similar to those described for children's group.我相信，儿童时代社交过程中的不同规则，导致了两性间的交谈如同跨文化交流一样难。我本人通过对男女对话的研究发现，成年男女对话的模式类似于儿童群体交流过程中的模式。