ABSTRACT
Problem with your relationship? For those who eschew the Internet’s ready advice, a cruise down the aisle of any bookstore will reveal a plethora of books aimed at helping the lovelorn sort out all nature of relationship dilemmas. Even 8-year-old authors are adding their advice to the shelves. A closer look at the titles of some of the most successful books on relationships gives us an idea about what many popular writers perceive to be the root cause of all relationship problems. Deborah Tannen’s You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (1990) and Talking from 9 to 5-Women in the Workplace: Language, Sex, and Power (1994a) clearly suggest that improving communication between men and women might be the key to healthy and mutually rewarding relationships. John Gray’s wildly successful Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), along with 13 equally successful
sequels (from Mars and Venus in the Bedroom to The Mars and Venus Exercise Solution), did not mean to propose that the battle of the sexes had turned into intergalactic warfare. Rather, he echoed in a much-amplified voice what researchers in psychology have known for some time. First, there are relatively stable differences in the ways men and women communicate. Second, these gender differences have traceable origins. Third, gender-based communication differences are at the heart of most relationship problems.
