Men and Women
... men and women are also able to coincide with one another, and converse in harmony just as well. Joyce also goes on to talk about a lot of pressing issues, she, and her friends deal with on a daily basis. It is a well rounded story that uses personal experiences to help you understand what to do as well as what not to do to in your relationship. In this first story I really enjoy how it is told on a personal basis and how Joyce isn't afraid to talk about not only a known problem couples face, but her own actual problems she deals with. The biggest thing is, she can relate to the problems you or others may be facing. Although Joyce does give a lot of personal examples, it is always nice to hear concrete facts from a few different people such as those in the following article. In this article by Mark A. Sherman and Adelaide Haas, they look at the problem with men and women's conversations using questionnaires and polls. They used one questionnaire that included one hundred sixty-six women over 17 which asked "how often they discussed each of 22 topics with friends of the same sex". Women came back saying that most of their conversations with the same sex consisted of things that involved relationships, family, health, weight, as well as food and clothing. The same questionnaire was done with one hundred and ten men, but they answers were all but the same. Men came back with answers that consisted mostly of music, current events, and sports. You can see that men and women talk about different things, in fact another survey showed that 60 percent of women talk about emotional issues in their same sex conversations, but guys came back with only 27 percent to the same survey. Sherman and Haas took another survey and asked guys "what they liked best about their all-male talk(s)", most guys came back saying it was just easy to talk to a group of guys rather than a women, you feel more at ease. Asking women the same question, most admitted that they enjoyed the ease too, but the common answer was that women seem to show more understanding and tend also to be more empathetic towards one another. Women also say that they understand each other better, as one woman put it, "The feeling of sharing and being understood without a sexual connotation". Another survey was brought up that consisted of questioning how essential conversations actually were to men and women. Women answered with 63 percent saying they were not only important, but necessary, whereas 43 percent of men said they were important. As you can see, men and women think differently, and therefore talk differently. You can see where men and women would have trouble communicating, it is because they have spent their whole life talking to other members of the same sex, and have gotten use to talking in one general pattern. But there is hope. It just takes time for men to understand they need to become better listeners and women to become more assertive. It really comes down to men and women adapting to each other's styles, and being able to work with it and respect it. Men and women can have successful conversations, "but as long as boys play with boys, and girls with girls the sexes will use language in different ways and for different purposes". The good things I saw in this article was that it did incorporate a lot of interesting facts, using polls and surv...