Top Quotes: “You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships” — Deborah Tannen
“Just as with those family relationships — and in contrast to relationships among sons, fathers, and brothers — when women told me about being upset by friends, it was often because they hadn’t been included in something or hadn’t been told something. This reflects the sensitivity, common among women, to feeling left out or pushed away. (Men’s sensitivities tend to lie elsewhere: to feeling put down or pushed around.)”
“Shelley Taylor has shown one reason why friends are particularly important to women. For many years it was conventional wisdom, based on research conducted with men, that human beings under stress have two options: fight or flight. Taylor found that this is less true for women. In conditions of stress, her research shows, it is at least as common, maybe more common, for women to neither fight nor flee but to bond. Taylor calls this impulse “tend and befriend” — tending to offspring and affiliating with others. And there you have the enormous role that friends can play in women’s lives.
Taylor’s research also helps explain why troubles with friends can be more distressing for women than for men. Many hours of women’s conversations with friends are devoted to problems with other women friends — as are hours of their conversations with therapists. One woman remarked that 25 percent of her time — costly time! — in therapy is spent on her relationship with a friend. And the resulting damage can be not just emotional but physical. Carnegie Mellon researchers Rodlescia Sneed and Sheldon Cohen found that negative social encounters with friends were associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure — for women but not for men.”
“A friend — just one single friend — changed the life of a girl named Maya. At eleven, Maya had never had a friend. Though she badly wanted one, she simply did not know how to relate to other children. As her much older sister, Chana Joffe-Walt, explained on the radio show This American Life, Maya had many of the traits associated with the autism spectrum: “sensitivity to touch, lack of eye contact, obsessive and intense interest in one topic, and difficulty with social emotional reciprocity, what many of us call conversation.” Having struggled her entire young life, Maya “had amassed a team of therapists” and “a series of diagnoses that all seemed to take her most obvious character trait and add the word ‘disorder’ to it.” Despite the efforts of these experts, Maya “stopped asking for playdates altogether. She stopped reading. She stopped smiling, and sleeping. And she was on edge all the time, especially at school. A kid would take her pencil or brush up against her at the bus stop, and Maya would blow up. She had to be physically restrained. She broke a window. She was diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder. She got hospitalized for a brief period.”
Then the miracle happened. Maya went to a horse camp, race horses being her obsession. And there she met Charlotte, who became her friend. Charlotte and Maya had playdates. They laughed together. They had sleepovers. Until then, children had kept their distance from Maya. But Charlotte told her mother, “Maya is perfect.” Maya’s life changed so dramatically that her family referred to BC and AC, life Before Charlotte and After Charlotte. Maya herself explained that through Charlotte she learned how to relate to other people: “Be more flexible. Not just talk about what you want to talk about all the time. Do other stuff that your friend wants.” After two years of their friendship, Maya at thirteen “feels the feelings that come when you’re a girl and you have a friend who makes you laugh, and thinks about you when you’re apart, and gets you.” Maya was transformed. She “no longer regularly gets in trouble at school. She now does her homework and washes her hair without a struggle. She has not had one violent incident AC. She makes eye contact sometimes. She asks, ‘How are you?’ sometimes. She does chores. “That felt impossible BC. All of it seemed impossible BC.” A friend accomplished what a decade of experts and therapists couldn’t.”
“I’d always go on to add,
“For boys and men, it’s activities that are central. For girls, your best friend is the one you tell everything to. For boys, your best friend is the one you do everything with and the one who will stick up for you if there’s a fight.””
“If talk is the glue that holds a relationship together, you have to talk to your friend to maintain the friendship. If friendships are focused on activities, then there’s not much to gain by talking to friends who aren’t there.”
“It is almost an obligation for women to come up with matching troubles, to fulfill their part in this conversational ritual, even if, as one woman recounted, a friend’s troubles are difficult to sympathize with. Following a disastrous divorce, Hannah was living in subsidized public housing, so it was hard to feel sympathy for a friend who was complaining about the inconvenience caused by workers adding a screened-in porch to her house. Yet Hannah knew that she had to find a trouble to offer up in the conversation. Luckily, she could always find something about her son or her grandchildren to complain about. In a parallel way, a graduate student was relieved that she could always complain about school when her friend complained about a boyfriend’s thoughtlessness and other offenses that her own boyfriend was not guilty of. (“My boyfriend wouldn’t do that” is not an acceptable response.)”
“There’s a special closeness that comes from doing and talking in turn, or at once, like the two working mothers who had what they called cooking playdates. They’d get together every two weeks to plan and prepare their families’ meals. Each would choose two or three recipes-more complicated ones than they’d make on their own — then cook together at one or the other’s house, talking the whole time. And between cooking playdates, they’d stay connected by collaborating on when they’d serve the dishes they’d prepared together: “We’re having the fish tacos with mango sauce tonight.” “We will, too.” Doing and talking, each feeding into the other as they fed their families, allowed these mothers to feel less alone — to be less alone — while doing the otherwise one-person work of cooking for their families.”
“A Turkish friend recalled with nostalgia the many times in her childhood when she watched the women in her family gather to remove their body hair. They heated sugar till it melted, spread the burning hot liquid on their bodies, and waited while it cooled and hardened. Then they pulled it off, and the hair with it, leaving their skin perfectly smooth. My friend recalled watching in delight as the women worked together, talking and laughing. She longed for the day she’d be old enough to join their group. She wasn’t nearly as scared by the prospect of pain as she was enticed by the women’s palpable joy in each other’s company. The pain was a price worth paying to be so closely connected to the other women.”
“When I said that I had gained weight, she agreed with me. Pointing to my waist, to the very bulge that I worried over when I looked in the mirror, she said, “You can’t hide that.””
“”In American hearing culture, it is considered rude to make a personal remark about someone’s appearance, especially if it’s negative.” In contrast, “In Deaf culture, the rule is: if you can see it, you can comment on it.” That’s why Sue had never understood what I was saying about our own conversation. She also pointed out that her comment “You can’t hide that” wouldn’t have come across as blunt to a Deaf friend, who would see not only the words shaped by her hands but also her facial expression and body language, which would have shown empathy, much as tone of voice would if the words were spoken. And that metamessage of empathy might well have been lost as I heard the words in the voice of an interpreter.”
“In Tonga, usually only family members are invited into people’s homes. Others are greeted and entertained on the porch or close to their homes, but they generally don’t cross the threshold. (Philips did notice exceptions, such as older men with no women in their household allowing younger men to come in and hang out.) This doesn’t mean that women can’t socialize with other women they’re close to at home, because the norm in Tonga is for “friends” (Philips noted that this is not a commonly used term) to be drawn from relatives, so friends are welcome in family homes — as relatives.
In societies where friends cross the threshold, doing so can have a similar meaning. Fathiya Al Rashdi explains that close friends in Oman will be in each other’s homes often, maybe daily, and will say to each other, “Feel free. This is your house.” This sounds rather like the English expression “Make yourself at home,” but it seems to be meant more literally, as a close friend might open the refrigerator door to take food if she’s hungry; though she’ll probably ask first, she knows her friend will say, “Don’t ask. Just go and get it.””
