Interpreting Silence
This summer I was invited by my friend, Larry, to drive down to Tennessee and stay with him for a few days during my vacation. He is one of my best friends, and I wanted to spend some time with him as he has been struggling with a messy divorce. The trip was completely his idea, and he began pestering me about it in July, even though I was not actually taking my vacation until September.
We talked every day, even if it was just for a few minutes. However, as September neared, the phone calls on his part became fewer. When I called him, he would not always answer the phone and never called me back when I left messages. Finally, two weeks before my vacation was to start, I decided to postpone it and take it later in the year.
I left it up to him to contact me if he wanted the friendship to continue. The day before I should have arrived, he wrote me and told me that he cut himself off from me because he was, in his words, freaking out, about me coming to visit because he did not know what my expectations were. He said his way of dealing with difficult things was avoiding them altogether, hence the silent treatment. Those comments left me scratching my head in confusion, particularly since the trip was his idea in the first place.
In this paper, I will use Deborah Tannen’s genderlect styles, Sandra Harding’s and Julia T. Wood’s standpoint theory and Cheris Kramarae’s muted group theory to analyze his silence from the woman’s perspective.
Genderlect Tannen believed that the male and female styles of communication are best described as two distinct cultural dialects rather than one form inferior to the other (Griffin, 2003, p. 464). Up until this event, Larry and I would kid each other that the only difference in the way we talked was his southern accent and my Michigan accent, as he called it. Up until this event, differences in communication never seemed to be an issue. Our friendship was such that neither of us had a problem telling the other what was on our mind.
Women tend to focus on intimacy in relationships, while men tend to focus on independence (Tannen, 1990, p. 26). That results in attempted communication between the world of connection and the world of status. I interpreted Larry’s silence as a breakdown in our friendship. He viewed his silence as his own coping mechanism that had no impact on other people. He didn’t realize that his personal avoidance of a situation still affected others involved. One of the many conversational tasks that men and women view differently, according to Tannen, is talking about troubles (p. 26).
Those different views are what can cause trouble in conversations between them. The trouble with Larry and I is that I tried to talk about what the trouble may be, but he wouldn’t even talk to me, not even to tell me to leave him alone. That was the difference – he avoided trouble instead of talking about it. I preferred talking about it to work toward some resolution.
Standpoint theory Another way to analyze the possible reasons for Larry’s silence is to put myself in his shoes and look at the situation from his perspective, or standpoint. As Harding and Wood state, one of the best ways to discover how the world works is to begin with the standpoint of women and other groups on the margins of society, (Griffin, 2003, p. 475). The theory could apply to anyone trying to understand a situation from a different angle.
Larry went from being a happily married 37-year-old man with three children to a man forced to live in his van after his wife threw him out of the house, a man who learned his wife had been cheating on him throughout their entire marriage, and a man who now was questioning the paternity of his children. He has come a long way from there. He found a place to live with spare rooms for his children, found a church family in his new hometown, found a steady job and is sharing custody of the children with his wife.
However, there is one obstacle he has not overcome. He does not completely trust women. He is afraid to open himself up. As he often says, he is waiting for the other shoe to fall. He started feeling closer to me and depending on my friendship and it scared him, because it was becoming something that would hurt if it was gone. When it was a long-distance friendship, it was easy to keep it at arms length and at the surface.
Ecclesiastes 4:7-12 (NIV) discusses the importance of friendship and the theory that two are better than one. “If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up,” (4:10). Larry had that friend willing to help him up. His fear was of falling and discovering that person was no longer there to catch him. So his response was to keep the friendship at a distance. In a way, we do that with God also. He is there to catch us when we fall. However, our fear of dependence causes us to doubt that he will always be there when we need him.
Tannen indirectly referred to the standpoint theory when she stated that men and women regard their landscape from contrasting vantage points and therefore view the same scene differently, resulting in different interpretations (Tannen, 1990, p. 38). It never occurred to me that Larry’s silence was the result of realizing he had something he viewed as having the potential to lose someday. Instead, I conjured up other reasons: he did not want to be friends anymore; he had a girlfriend who did not want me there; he was reconciling with his wife. So many thoughts were running through my head. However, the one thought that never hit was the fact that he was scared of being hurt by me, by letting me in, like he’d been hurt before.
Much like Tannen, standpoint theorists see men as seeking autonomy, while women seek connectedness (Griffin, 2003, p. 478). While Larry valued our friendship, he wanted to be in control of where it went. It was slipping out of his control, which caused him to shut down. Tannen (1994, p. 251) also believed that men and women, as groups, tend to dismiss the other’s deep fears as unlikely to occur. Their own fears, however, thrive on the awareness of possibility. Larry did not realize that his silence would cause me to think our friendship was ending. At the same time, I did not realize his silence was because he was afraid our friendship was becoming something he did not want to lose.
Muted group theory Kramarae would see the situation as Larry’s attempt to devalue my thoughts and demonstrate his masculine control of the communication in our relationship (Griffin, 2003, p. 487). She would view his silence as an attempt to exert control over the situation. While he was trying to control the chain of events, it was to protect him, not to assert his dominance and put me in my place.
Eakins and Eakins (1978) believed that male and female behaviors parallel the differences between superior and subordinate relationships, with an imbalance in communication behavior reflecting a difference in status (p. 23). Simply because our communication styles are different, there is no perceived status difference between Larry and me. I do not see myself as the subordinate person in our relationship, no do I wish to be superior to him.
Tannen would disagree with the assumption that Larry was using the silent treatment to try and control me. He was trying to control the situation, but I never saw it as him trying to control me. Tannen did believe that differences in communication styles between men and women occasionally lead to power imbalances, but she believed those imbalances are caused by the different styles, not because men are always seeking control over women (p. 497).
Conclusion Larry and I do have a strong friendship, but it is important to realize that we are two different people, whose different experiences will affect our communication styles and our responses to each other. I now understand, somewhat, why he chooses silence over words, and I hope he understands why it is important for him to clue the other person in as to what is going on. As for my trip to Tennessee, I’ll be packing my bags and heading south the week after Thanksgiving. At least, that’s the plan as of today.
References
Eakins, Barbara Westbrook & Eakins, R. Gene. (1978). Sex differences in human communication. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Griffin, Em. (2003). A first look at communication theory. (5th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
The Student Bible. (New International Version.) (1996). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House.
Tannen, Deborah, Ph.D. (1990). You just don’t understand: Women and men in communication. New York: Ballantine Books.
Tannen, Deborah, Ph.D. (1994). Talking from 9 to 5: How women’s and men’s conversational styles affect who gets heard, who gets credit and what gets done at work. New York: William Morrow and Company Inc.
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