The Story of Sameness: Summer of Friendship #4
7/17/20 - We did not write a “female friendship” book, but we are indeed two women. And our friendship has been both strengthened and threatened by the ways we communicate. We interview linguist Deborah Tannen, whose book You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships was a touchstone for us—explaining concepts like "story of sameness," one way that some friends bond by finding similarities in each other's lives.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Jordan Bailey
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Design Assistant: Brijae Morris
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LINKS
Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Her latest book is FINDING MY FATHER: His Century-Long Journey From World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow
More on Big Friendship at BigFriendship.com.
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TRANSCRIPT: THE STORY OF SAMENESS: SUMMER OF FRIENDSHIP #4
[Ads]
(0:52)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: Hi Ann Friedman.
Ann: Hello Aminatou Sow.
Aminatou: Comment ca va?
Ann: You know, bien. [Laughs]
Aminatou: I'm so happy we're making progress. It's only been eleven years. I love this.
Ann: Someday after, you know, some secret Duolingoing or something pays off I can't wait to surprise you with one line of broken French in reply.
Aminatou: Maybe one day we translate this book into French and then that problem will be solved for me very quickly.
Ann: I'm sorry, what book is that? [Laughs]
Aminatou: Ann, I am the co-author of Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close with Ann Friedman, the journalist, my friend. It's available wherever you buy books and you can find out more about it at bigfriendship.com.
Ann: Ugh, yes. On a related note this is CYG's Summer of Friendship. We are talking about some of the themes in the book and also some topics that we didn't get to in the course of reporting and writing it. Whew. What are we talking about today?
Aminatou: Today we are talking about the very powerful concept of the story of sameness.
[Theme Song]
(2:38)
Ann: Okay this sounds like a fable, like some sort of anthropomorphic animals are going to teach me a lesson about what is the story of sameness?
Aminatou: I'll give you one better. In the course of researching our book we came across the work of Deborah Tannen who has written many, many, many books but the book that we want to focus on today is called You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships. And it was a real touchstone for us because so much of it was immediately recognizable and also because, you know, as we've talked about before on the show it was really hard to find real social science stuff about friendship that was not about friendship between children or like, you know, weird studies about college kids or like people in dorms or whatever. [Laughs] And so Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. This is like a huge area of work for her and in this book about the language of women's friendships she explains this concept of the story of sameness which is how through language in friendships and more pronounced in friendships between women we have this tendency to just really glom onto the things that we have in common and so, you know, a classic example of this is you say "I like strawberry ice cream" and then the other person says "Oh my god, me too."
(4:00)
Not to reduce it to small things like that but I think I found it very recognizable over the course of my friendship with you that of course we focus a lot on similarity. Like that's very normal. You know, it's very discomforting and it is a way to become friends with someone. And Deborah Tannen writes about this so much as it relates to the story of sameness being a bonding tool but also in a lot of places a very divisive kind of competitive tool that women will use against each other. And so it was just a really fascinating thing to talk about.
Ann: Yeah. And I think it's worth talking a little bit about the fact that Tannen's research in this book in particular is really centered on relationships between women who identify as -- and I think in particular women who were socialized as women -- that they have these hallmarks, right? Like friendships between women have these hallmarks.
And I think to your point about I forget the phrasing you use but essentially how these things are maybe a little bit more present in women's friendships but not exclusive to them, in writing the book we really try to walk this line where we are centering our story and both of us identify as women. And so there is a natural pull I guess toward friendships between women as the center of this book.
However we also want to avoid falling into the trap of saying that certain things are the province of one gender. And I think when I read a lot of Tannen's work in terms of the dynamics that can crop up between women, particularly things around conflict avoidance and not saying exactly what you mean in a direct way, like those are things that have cropped up in my friendships with men. Those are things that when I had friends of mine who aren't women read the book they were like oh yeah, that feels really familiar to me too.
(5:55)
And so I just kind of want to note that even though we in our book sort of by default center our friendship, a friendship between women, and that Tannen's work centers friendships between women, we really don't think everything applies to all friendships that feature women. And it's not like none of this features friendships that do not involve women, right? Like the whole thing is a mixed bag and everything is, much like gender itself, much more complex than simply saying women's friendships are X and other friendships are Y.
So that feels like an important caveat, I mean especially because of the way the book marketing machine I think we both really felt wants us to talk about our book as women's friendships, or even worse, air-quote "female friendships." That is both in some ways true and also something we're really trying to resist.
Aminatou: That thing you're saying about our friends that don't identify as women, also recognizing that there is one thousand percent differences in conversational sides or there are differences in how head-on or how avoidant someone is about conflict. The reason I was really fascinated by this work that Dr. Tannen does is because it's one of the very few places that, you know, there is introspection about how adults are doing friendship in general.
Ann: Hmm.
Aminatou: So that was really mind-expanding for me right? And so it was less about the, you know, who is doing this and rather the oh, wow, someone is taking this very seriously and someone is applying this very serious frame of essentially like language research to really figure out how are we talking to each other? Because even for two people who are doing a podcast, and maybe especially for two people who do a podcast, it was really telling to me that so much of the conflicts that you and I have had is really like profound misunderstandings about what we meant and what our intentions were, you know? And it seems so mundane but this is truly what is always at stake when people are missing each other or not understanding each other.
(8:10)
Ann: It's true. And, you know, especially when it comes to the conversation about communication in friendship. I find myself thinking about the phrase actions speak louder than words because I do think that is true in many contexts, you know? When it comes to being an ally or an accomplice in a social justice context or when it comes to following through on obligation that's 100 percent true. But when it comes to reaching a point of mutual understanding with a friend we have both been in the situation where we are observing each other's actions and making meaning without asking about it in literal words, without turning it into a point of conversation.
And I do think that sometimes words speak louder than actions, you know what I mean, when it comes to missing each other in an important relationship or misinterpreting each other. Sometimes you really do need words to contextualize actions. And that's what's been powerful to me about Deborah Tannen's work not just in this context of friendship but, you know, in other areas that she's studied as well. She has a book about mother/daughter communication. She has a couple books about communication between romantic partners. So today's episode is really a words and communication episode, would you say?
Aminatou: I would say. Are you saying that words and actions together constitute [Laughs] a larger meaning?
Ann: Wow, what?
Aminatou: Wow, galaxy brain explosion. Words and actions together communicating what you want and need.
Ann: And then acting to follow through.
Aminatou: I think that there was something really reassuring for me that I was not the only one who is struggling to just say what I think at all times. It sounds really dumb and stupid but that was a very profound like -- I arrived at a profound thing when I realized that for myself.
(10:15)
Ann: Yes, like sometimes words are 100 percent necessary because even your closest friend can be emotionally obtuse speaking for 100 percent myself in this context, in this situation.
Aminatou: Well here's some good news Ann. I called up Dr. Tannen to talk to her about some of this stuff: the story of sameness, conflict avoidance, difference in conversational styles, and also we had, you know, a little chat about how women's friendships end in ways that are not very healthy and I think you might be interested in some of this stuff. Do you want to listen?
Ann: I can't wait.
[Interview Starts]
Dr. Tannen: I'm Deborah Tannen. I'm the author of a bunch of books but I guess the one I'm talking about today is You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships.
Aminatou: It's so wonderful to have you on the show, Dr. Tannen. We have read a lot of your work while Ann and I were writing our own book so in a way it feels like you've been a guiding voice for us all along. [Laughs]
Dr. Tannen: Thank you.
Aminatou: Ann and I have written a book about friendship. It really is a memoir about our own friendship. We've been friends for ten years. We are also long-time collaborators and we've just been really puzzling through this question of how do we stay in each other's life forever? Because as you know people grow older and they change and life's priorities just come to a head in all sorts of different ways. You address a lot of this in You're the Only One I Can Tell. The ways that women talk to each other is actually very, very important in deciphering a lot of the answers to these questions.
(11:55)
Dr. Tannen: Yeah, I would just say as a kind of footnote that talk is in a way the glue that holds women's friendships together and that is in contrast to how typically -- nothing is true of all women or all men -- typically men's friendships which often tend to be built more around doing things together.
Aminatou: You know I'm really curious to talk to you about that because we wondered about this so much is so much of what we're talking about, is it really gendered? And how are the gender dynamics different?
Dr. Tannen: Yeah. There's a conversation that to me captures some of the main differences and again it's not all women, all men, but it does seem to be a pattern for many women and many men. A friend was telling me that she had been talking to her son. Her son recently graduated from college and he lived in a distant city. So in the conversation she asked him about his good friend who he knew pretty well and the conversation went something like this. She asked "Have you talked to Mike lately?" and he said "Yeah, I talked to him yesterday." And she asked "How's he doing?" and he said "I don't know."
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Dr. Tannen: She said "But you just talked to him, didn't he say?" "Nope." "Well how's his job?" "I don't know." "How's his girlfriend?" "Don't know." "Well what did you talk about?" "Football." "Did you only talk about football?" "No, soccer too."
Aminatou: The two kinds of football. [Laughs]
Dr. Tannen: So this would be very unusual for really close women friends. Talking about what's going on in your life would be step one [Laughs] in your conversation. But it didn't seem to work that way for her son and many of his friends. Now it's not that they don't care but it is a difference in what you assume is going to be the subject of your -- in fact I've given this as an example in talks I've given. After one talk an older man came up to me, he was probably in his 60s I would think, and he said "You know, that's true for me and my wife too. There's this couple, we're both friends with them as a couple then we're friends with them separately." Then the other day my wife said to me "Isn't that terrible that they're getting a divorce?" And he had no idea.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
(14:30)
Dr. Tannen: He said "We play tennis every week but the subject of his marriage never came up."
Aminatou: Man, you know, I hear you saying that. I think sometimes it's tough to understand that beyond anecdotes because obviously the divorce is a huge -- you know, it's a huge glaring omission. But I think what your reading this book really illustrated for me is just that people have really different conversational styles. And I know I have definitely been the friend who's been "Well I talked to so-and-so" then I can't actually tell you what the thing was. But I don't know that that lines up exactly with gender as much as it lines up with my own kind of conflict avoidance. And so I think why we really wanted to talk to you also is while we were writing this book and we were looking for expert voices it was really hard to find a really concrete body of work on friendship. It is not an area that a lot of people are studying and so we were just really grateful that you had given it a lot of like depth and the heft that the research you bring to the table had.
Dr. Tannen: You know I'm so glad you brought up this issue of conversational style. I think many people when they think of me they think of my book You Just Don't Understand and they think that gender is my only interest and certainly my main interest. And actually it never was. My field of research was cross-cultural differences in ways of speaking and for me cross-cultural didn't mean only other countries although it certainly could be different countries, different languages, different ethnic backgrounds, but Americans of different backgrounds, different parts of the country and age and just personality.
(16:15)
And yeah I think that that is often confusing to us. We know that women and men might have different styles. We know if you have a friend who was born in a different country whose native language is different you know there's going to be a difference there.
Aminatou: Right.
Dr. Tannen: But any two people can have these really different conversational styles. And it could be what you think is appropriate to talk about right there. For example two friends that I interviewed, they were friends from college and they pretty much thought that they were on the same wavelength. And then after college they're living in different cities and one got really upset. She was texting her friend about a problem and the friend's responses were so minimal. You know, where was her empathetic friend that she loved? It turned out they had different assumptions about texting. Her friend didn't think a text was the appropriate way to talk about a serious problem. They should talk on the phone if it's something like that. Differences about how direct or indirect you are. So many people might not tell you directly they don't like something or they don't want you to do something but you're supposed to pick up the hint.
Aminatou: Ugh, man, I feel like you're talking about . . . [Laughs] I feel like you're talking about me specifically right in that instance. It's just so illuminating. Well, you know, I want to take you a little bit back and see if you can elaborate a little bit more on this concept that you call the story of sameness because I think that as we were writing Big Friendship, our book, it became so clear that Ann and I had constructed the story of sameness in a way that is actually very normal and so many people do. And I think that I would just love to hear you kind of expand a little bit more on that and what kind of role it plays in friendships between two people.
(18:05)
Dr. Tannen: Yes. Every relationship is balancing the question "How are we the same and how are we different?" Many women, and again this is something about women's friendships in particular, feel comfort in reassurance that you're the same. It's almost a classic conversation. You tell your friend something happened to you and she says "Oh, I know how you feel. The same thing happened to me. I would feel the same way. I did the same thing." And somehow that makes both of them feel better.
At the same time women that I interviewed with this book sometimes told me -- they were in the minority, but it wasn't just one or two -- said "I find friendships with women difficult." And one of the things they sometimes said was they don't let you be different. My women friends don't let me be different. I'm thinking of one woman who said "I kind of prefer men as friends because if I tell a guy I have a different perspective, I don't see it that way, he accepts that. He even likes it. There's an expectation people are different. But my women friends, they get offended if they say I don't agree. I don't see it that way. That's not true of me." And it's kind of fascinating often the same things that are the most gratifying about a friendship can also be things that at other times can be frustrating and this emphasis placed on sameness which does seem to be more typical of women than men, that really is something that comes up a lot.
(19:45)
Aminatou: Yeah, I was not even recognizing that was something I was doing in so many of my friendships, and you're right, particularly with women and particularly my friendship with Ann. It took us years to realize how different we were and it sounds silly if you know us because literally one of us is white, the other one of us is black. One of us is American, the other is not. We grew up in two completely different cultures. It's . . . you know, it's actually a small miracle that we have so many things in common but we clung onto those things so tightly. And you write about how that story of sameness can be competitive sometimes where, you know, someone will say -- you're telling a friend a story like oh, this thing happened to me and they're so quick to say "Oh, me too. Me too."
But for us the truth was that it was never competitive but it was a huge bonding. It was a huge bonding experience and I think it was really reassuring and it also meant that for years we were not seeing what the differences were that we had. And that ultimately was where a lot of problems started cropping up is we just always assumed that we were agreed on everything because we were the exact same person which is not possible.
Dr. Tannen: Yeah, I mean you're putting it so well. I think on some level we all want to be seen. We want to be seen for who we are and when we feel that a friend -- the word many people used -- "gets me". You know, she gets me. It's really special and gratifying. So you balance that with a desire to be the same. Sometimes constantly saying yeah, me too, I'm the same does seem to be not seeing you, not getting who you actually are because there are ways you're different. So we're all balancing those how are we the same? How are we different?
Aminatou: Yeah. You know, I'm also curious about what you have to say about women and conflict avoidance specifically because again I think if you had asked me, you know, "Tell me about your conflict style," I would've said I'm the queen of real talk and I am not shy about having a conflict with someone and I can fully self-express myself, you know? And that's the story that I tell myself about myself. And it turns out that that's true in some relationships but in this particular relationship with someone who was my closest friend I was completely conflict-avoidant and she was completely conflict-avoidant because we just didn't know how to even address the fact that we were having a conflict because we were supposed to be the same person.
(22:24)
Ann: Yeah, that is so fascinating. I think issues of conflict are very close to issues of difference and you can be very direct about conflict. So if it came out you wouldn't beat around the bush; you would say what's on your mind. But that's different from what your friend was with conflict avoidance. The very existence of a conflict can be threatening, and I hate to use the word threatening, it's more psychology than linguistics. And I try to stick to ways of speaking, not try to get inside people's heads.
But I think there is a way that if you -- for many people, again for many people, if we can fight that shows we're really good friends. We can have a fight and then we get over it. But for other people or maybe other topics or other relationships the very fact that you're having a fight makes you think there's something wrong. This relationship isn't working if we have to keep working it over as compared to as long as we can work on it the relationship is working.
So in everything we talk about there are these individual differences that complicate things, especially if we're close and we think we shouldn't have differences. And the fact that we have these differences puts in question our beliefs about the relationship.
Aminatou: Right. And as you write a difference in conversation style specifically is often the invisible culprit when trouble arises between friends who are women because even just talking about it then becomes fraught because we're not -- we are not necessarily hearing each other or we're not understanding what the other person means or we are being avoidant in our language. And so, you know, it's like the layers of complication are just there.
(24:10)
Dr. Tannen: Yeah, people don't want to be bad and they don't want to be wrong. None of us wants to be wrong or bad and so defensiveness is always a big risk. If we feel that we'd better explain why we weren't bad that means denying what the other person just told us. And that's a whole other book I suppose, having you fight well and fight fair.
Aminatou: Oh wow I think you found your next book there. Let's take a break. You know the example you give in the book is so simple and to me I think was such a -- it was such an a-ha moment, the depth of the problem that we're talking about here, and so I'm paraphrasing greatly but the example was the difference between telling someone "Hey, I'm cold, can you turn the air conditioning down?" And you can say that or you can do what most people do, which is what I do, which is "Hmm, are you cold? Is it feeling cold in here? Are you chilly?"
Dr. Tannen: [Laughs]
Aminatou: And, you know, never going straight to the heart of the matter of what the thing is that's bothering you. And I was like that is literally about air conditioning and there's already 10,000 ways that you can say that indirectly. And so bringing it back to actual conflict with someone you love is wow, the universe of words that you can use to avoid being direct about the thing that is bothering you is vast.
(26:00)
Dr. Tannen: No, I love that. I'm so glad you brought that up. I often say that many of my books my goal is to make the world safe for indirectness. Indirectness is the way people communicate all over the world but somehow Americans tend to think it's dishonest. You should come out and say what you want in so many words. But if it's understood then you have said it.
An example I love, this was written up by a student of mine, I teach cross-culture communication and they write up their own experiences. She had several roommates. She heard them talking about having a party and she realized that she had an exam Friday and she'd be studying for it and she didn't want them to have a party. Okay, why didn't she just say to them "I have an exam, you can't have a party?" Because that would make her seem demanding. She didn't want to be the difficult roommate. So she brought it up in another context, "Hey, what are you guys thinking of doing tonight?" and her friend said "We were thinking of having a party, how about you?" She said "I've got an exam Friday but . . ." She said "We're going to have a party Thursday night." She said "Well I've got an exam Friday." Her friend said "Oh, then we won't have a party." And she said "No, that's okay. You can have the party." And her friend said "No, no, no, we definitely won't." Then she said thanks.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Dr. Tannen: Now that was perfect communication. It was not devious in any way. And shortly after that happened, I was going to use that example in a talk I was giving. It was a conference for women in business and I arrived at the conference and the organizer said to me that a certain other person that I knew, another speaker, she said "Judy isn't going to come. She called me and she said I'm feeling horrible. I've got a fever. But if you really need me I'll come and give my paper at your conference."
(28:05)
And she told me -- the organizer told me -- and I told her I need you to stay home and take care of yourself. And I said "I love that, can I use that example in my lecture?" and she said yes. It was perfect, direct communication.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Dr. Tannen: She used that word because it was clear. Her friend knew she wasn't going to say "I don't care how sick you are, I need you as a speaker." So it's a way that they both end up feeling better about it. One doesn't make a demand. The other doesn't feel that she's fulfilling a demand. She feels she made a generous decision on her own. And yeah, that's another whole book I could write about indirectness because it is so universal and so I think unfair that so many of us, and I do hear it more from Americans than people from other cultures, though you yourself may have . . . I'd be curious if you think your preference -- if you have a preference for directness, if you think you picked it up in the United States or somewhere else. Because it seems to me Americans in particular think we should all be direct.
Aminatou: You know it's really funny to hear you say that because I grew up in an African context where people are a million percent indirect. No one ever says what they want. You are just supposed to infer from body language and from words and it used to drive me up the wall as a child. And I am a very direct person which causes a lot of conflict in my family because it comes across as very impolite.
Dr. Tannen: Yes, yes.
(29:45)
Aminatou: And I hear you. It's so interesting hearing you say what you said earlier about the example, you know, with the party and with the organizer of the conference and I think the key word there really is generosity. Like you said, oh, this is really generous. But I think there's still a place that people get in trouble when, you know -- it's like what happens if the organizer had said "No, actually I do need you to come." Or if the person who was throwing the party had said "No, actually I would love to throw my party." And so that is really the sticking point, you know, in why you should actually say what you want.
Dr. Tannen: It is. [Laughs]
Aminatou: You can find a gentle way of saying it but I think that for me at least I have found that it has served me better and it has served my relationships better if I find a constructive way of actually saying the outcome that I want because otherwise it's like the confusion is just prolonged. But I definitely agree that Americans are more direct than people in other cultures but I also know that, you know, it depends on the kind of American.
Dr. Tannen: Yes, yes.
Aminatou: A lot of Americans are not very direct.
Dr. Tannen: Absolutely. I mean I said Americans but as I said my first book, my doctor dissertation, so much of my work has been how different American styles are. What you just said is something I heard from a woman in the Midwest where in the United States they tend to be more indirect than the northeast. She mentioned she grew up in Michigan where people are indirect and she always felt out of place. Then she went to college where she ran into people from New York City and felt these are my people. [Laughter] Now why? Like you said it's just individual personality so that's always there too but I do have so many examples of how indirectness can fail. I was in the office of a colleague -- academic -- and her phone rang, she picked it up. This was before email was used as much as it is now. I heard her side of the conversation and she was saying "Oh, I don't see how I possibly could. I'm so overwhelmed this term. I'm teaching an overload class and I'm directing all these dissertations. There's no way I can possibly do it. But if you can't find anybody else of course I wouldn't leave you in the lurch."
Aminatou: Of course.
(32:05)
Dr. Tannen: She hung up and she looked at me with real shock and she said "I can't believe it. I told him I couldn't do it and he put me on the committee anyway."
Aminatou: [Laughs] I mean . . .
Dr. Tannen: And of course she told him but in a way that he was supposed to be generous and let her off the hook. Either he took advantage or he really missed it.
Aminatou: [Laughs] I love that example. You know, and I think that within the context of friendship specifically the solution is that you just have to find a way to talk to each other that works for the bounds of that specific friendship right?
Dr. Tannen: Yes, yes.
Aminatou: Because the communication patterns that you have with other people whether it's the committee member or that you have with your own family members is not necessarily a successful communication style for your friend and a lot of it is trial and error.
Dr. Tannen: Yes. No, that's so true and in fact I came across a friendship that really foundered on this. One had called the other. Somebody they knew from somewhere else was in town. She called her town and said "He's here, do you want to see him?" and the friend said yes and so she brought him over. And it turned out the way she said yes was intended to let her know she didn't really want it.
Aminatou: Well . . .
Dr. Tannen: And that seems so unfair to the other friend that she really thought pretty much I'm done. And I think they both felt that, that you could be so insensitive to me. So yeah, there's a word I sometimes use, meta communication, talking about the communication. And sometimes you really have to do that. It can be tough because most people feel it as criticism if you call attention to the way they said something. But sometimes that's the only way to navigate the minefield.
Aminatou: And what a minefield it is. [Laughs] I am wondering if you could talk a little bit about this concept that you call complementary schismogenesis.
(34:10)
Dr. Tannen: Yes, I love that term. [Laughs] So a schism is a split and genesis is creation so it's the creation of the split where two people have different styles but each one reacts to the other style in a way that drives them into more extreme versions of this different style. So very simple example: two friends. One seems to talk a bit too loudly for the other's sensibility when they're in a restaurant. And so they go to a restaurant. This one friend is talking just a little bit too loudly for her friend and so the friend lowers her voice kind of to set a good example, you're talking too loud, and then the one who's talking too loudly is thinking why doesn't she speak up? And so she talks even louder. [Laughter] So you end up with one shouting and one whispering.
So one is speaking more loudly, the other more softly than they normally would in reaction to each other when it was their difference in how loudly they thought it was appropriate to speak that created the problem in the first place. And you can see that with indirectness as well, one friend tries to get the other to say be direct about whether or not she wants to have lunch hypothetically. You ask your friend does she want to have lunch. The friend says "You know, I'm kind of busy these days. Maybe in a couple weeks would be better." And so you ask in a couple weeks, "You know, there's a lot going on right now." And then you ask her again and she says "I'm feeling a little bit under the weather." And you start thinking does she want to -- she's trying to tell me she doesn't have lunch.
(36:00)
And so the direct person is going to say "You keep coming up with reasons. If you don't want to have lunch with me ever just tell me." Well somebody tending to be indirect will not be able to do that. She's going to get even more into it and that's going to be again frustrating on both sides. So one is trying to get the other to be more direct and the other is trying to get the friend to listen to and react to and interpret what was pretty clear -- what she figured was pretty clear.
Aminatou: Right. And this brings me to one of my last questions for you is how all of this plays a role in how women's friendships just end. Sometimes there tends to be no resolution. There's not really -- you know, there's not a way to have a friendship divorce with someone. No one gets served papers but there's just this deep understanding sometimes of this person has really hurt me or this person never really got me or we were never communicating the same way and then next thing you know there's a very abrupt end to the friendship.
Dr. Tannen: Yeah. And of course that's very sad and can be really, really upsetting if it was a close friendship. Something that came up in a number of the interviews that I conducted for this book, cutoffs, ghosting I think is more a recent term for the same thing, seem to be pretty common among women and when women told me about having been ghosted or told me about cutoffs if they told me why they cut somebody off they could always tell me the reason and what led up to it. And usually it was a series of frustrations that finally came to a head.
(37:45)
When people told me they had been cut off almost invariably part of the pain was they didn't know why. Now these are the same people. Someone ghosted them and they didn't know why. They cut off another friend and didn't tell her why. [Laughs] So why would we behave so inconsistently? And I think it comes down perhaps to what you said earlier about avoidance of conflict but also if you start to tell somebody why you don't want to be friends anymore you are enacting the friendship by discussing the relationship.
So when you've decided this is it, I really don't want to be friends anymore, you don't want to talk to them even if talking to them means explaining why you're ending it. It's almost an invitation to defend yourself, say why they shouldn't take it that way if you start telling them the reasons so I think that's what's going on. So it's very complicated and very again more common among women because we talk more. We talk about more personal topics at greater lengths and so we have more opportunity to say the wrong thing.
Now if you're playing tennis you're not going to say the wrong thing. So I think that's part of why it is more common among women's friendships. I think the fact that we often do end a friendship in a way that ends up being more hurtful because you're not really saying why, that in itself grows out of the dynamics of women's friendships. And then of course there are many friendships that end simply because people's life circumstances change. One has children, the other doesn't. Many women with children develop friendships with mothers of their children's friends because they have opportunities to spend time together growing out of the kids' social lives. There are many, many reasons that friendships do sometimes peter out or maybe go into dormant state and then can be revived.
(40:05)
There are friends who don't talk to each other that often but when they do it's as if no time has passed. You just pick up where you left off, so there's a whole range. But cutoffs definitely were one of the more painful topics that came up in my interviews with women about their friends.
Aminatou: I think that that is something that is really painful that I know I have been on both sides of, both the person who has been the person who did the cutoff and the person who's been cut off.
Dr. Tannen: Yeah.
Aminatou: And I think that you're right. You can explain to yourself exactly why you did it then not talking to the other person about it exacerbates the problem of conflict avoidance altogether so that is really resonating with me.
Dr. Tannen: Yeah, yeah.
Aminatou: On a last note because I don't want to leave on the bummer of friend ghosting, not to make this about self-help or tips, I'm just wondering if there's one note that you want to leave our audience with or me with, like people who think a lot about friendship and think about how do you stay in the lives of the people who you're friends with? And how do you keep them in your life for a really, really long time? What is one piece of wisdom about that?
Dr. Tannen: Well I'd like to end with some of the more positive things that people said. I love lines like "My friendships with women are as essential as air." I guess -- and you're right, I always prefer to think of what I'm doing as helping shed light and give insight rather than give tips. However a tip I guess I could give is I think email and Instagram and texting have really been wonderful. They allow us to keep in touch even when there's a lot else going on and we can't see people face-to-face which often now we can't. But pick the phone sometimes. There's a kind of connection that comes from hearing each other's voices, and I'm saying phone rather than Zoom as well. We're getting a bit Zoomed out.
(42:10)
Aminatou: Oh I was Zoomed out day two of the pandemic so I'm with you on that. [Laughs]
Dr. Tannen: So maybe returning to that old standby of the telephone. I think part of why Zooming is so exhausting is the eye is a muscle.
Aminatou: Yeah.
Dr. Tannen: It gets tired. But the phone allows you to close your eyes, look anywhere you want, and just have a sense of that person's presence which you get from a voice that you may not get from words on the screen.
Aminatou: I love that. It's the premise of our entire show so thank you for unwittingly just reinforcing why we do what we do. Dr. Tannen thank you so much for your time. I can't tell you how much we appreciate it and we appreciate all of your books and I hope that you are doing well in the pandemic and that all of those that you love are healthy and safe.
Dr. Tannen: Thank you and same thing to you.
[Interview Ends]
Ann: Ugh, Dr. Tannen!
Aminatou: Iconic linguist. We love to hear it.
Ann: We love a linguist in this show. We really do.
Aminatou: We do. Like I said earlier Dr. Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Her latest book is Finding My Father: His Century-long Journey From World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow.
Ann: Ugh. And before we go a quick request actually. Later in the Summer of Friendship we are going to be featuring your voices and stories about your big friendships and so we would love it if you called and left us a voicemail about a big friendship that you are in. Maybe about a rough patch that you made it through or maybe about the moment that you knew this was a seriously big friendship, we want to hear about it. The number is 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. Or if you prefer you can record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at callyrgf@gmail.com. Also, hey, Big Friendship, the book that deals with this very topic is available to order now from wherever you buy books. We love an independent bookseller. And you can find links to purchase it along with information about virtual events that we are doing which will be very fun, like you know you want to see our faces on a Zoom right? Who would not want a virtual hangout at this point in the pandemic? I don't know. Anyway all of that is at bigfriendship.com.
Aminatou: See you on the Internet boo-boo.
Ann: See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet: callyourgirlfriend.com, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, we're on all your favs. Subscribe, rate, review, you know the drill. You can call us back, leave a voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. We're on Instagram and Twitter at @callyrgf and you can buy our book Big Friendship anywhere you buy books. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs. Our logos are by Kenesha Sneed. We have editorial support from Laura Bertocci. Our producer is Jordan Bailey. This podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.