When you’re not in a relationship, it’s easy to dream in
romantic film clips: zipping around sunny Italy with a swarthy fellow whose
sole desire is to take you off the market ( Roman
Holiday ) … or having a miraculously evolved man burst in on you and your
many angry female friends and proclaim, “You complete me” ( Jerry Maguire ). What we forget are the movies that capture the more
sober side of relationships, like Persona,
the Bergman film where two psychologically tortured characters exist in black
and white, inhabiting bleak, sparsely furnished rooms, muttering in Swedish,
one speaking in prolonged chunks as the other seems poised for insanity. The
film that perfectly captures what I think of as the “Relationship Talk.” The
talk that feels like the verbal equivalent of a hamster on a Habitrail wheel,
spinning away but going nowhere in a cage filled with various pieces of The New York Times and very little
water.
For many couples, talking has become the method of choice
when addressing bumps in the road. Believing that problems are caused by a lack
of communication, they turn to communication to fix them. Now, don’t get me
wrong; I support talking. I love a hearty, abstract discussion peppered with
lines that begin, “I just feel like …” or “It hurt me when….” But as I embark
on my second year of being absolutely and completely single, I look at my
friends struggling in relationships and think maybe they’re talking too much. I
used to talk that much-and now I’m absolutely and completely single.
Have we turned into a generation of talkaholics, who look to
words to solve every problem when other options might be better? Why are
couples talking so much these days?
“Women tend to be the instigators of the ‘talks-about-us,'”
said a female movie producer. “But most of us fight the urge to ask, ‘What are
you thinking?’-which we all know means, ‘What are you thinking about me ?'”
A petite blonde chopped the air as she made a similar point.
“When women talk, we’re giving certain signals that all we want is comfort.
Women pick that up; men don’t. When I say to a female friend, ‘I feel fat,’ she
knows to say, ‘You look amazing.’ When I say it to my boyfriend, he says, ‘Why
don’t you go on a diet?'”
An Internet guy who looks like a portly Matthew Broderick
agreed that women say one thing, but want something else. “The only talking
women want is for men to say, ‘I love you and cherish you and you are the
skinniest and prettiest.’ All men want women to say is, ‘I want to have sex
with another woman and you can watch.'” He continued, “Show me a woman of few
words and I’ll show you a Muslim.”
I did find one man-a friend who’s had “two serious
four-month relationships in nine years”-who said he’s usually the one who wants
to talk. “I like to talk about things,” he told me. “I’ve been accused of
liking to talk about things too much, but I guess I just talk until the other
person realizes I’m right.”
Like many New York men, he has only beer and Chinese-mustard
packets in his refrigerator.
Generally, the men I spoke with dreaded the heart-to-heart.
“If a woman tells me, ‘Let’s talk,'” a real estate broker said, “it’s my cue to
go in the other direction.”
“This requirement to ‘be honest’ about their feelings haunts
men, because men-honestly-simply do not know how they feel,” said a musician
who’s in analysis five days a week. “They will spend hours being grilled and
filleted by their female mates about how they feel, when some white lies and
some white wine make for a more pleasant evening.”
Sensing that so many men have come to fear “a talk” more
than debating china patterns, women say that while they once believed couples
should discuss everything, now they’re not so sure. A woman who asked to be
described as a “leggy model even though I’m not” said, “In the old days, when
sex roles were clearer, women didn’t expect men to be their best friends. Now I
realize it’s unfair to presume a man will fulfill so many roles. It’s not
realistic to make this man your lying-around friend, your going-to-the-movies
friend, your telling-the-minutiae-of-the-day friend.” When I asked another
woman how much couples should talk, she replied, “How much do you want to stay
in the relationship?”
Others felt that “laying everything on the table” was
putting women at a disadvantage. “Men need to be managed, ” a freelance magazine writer said. “You don’t want them to
see the strings.”
A divorcée who dresses in chic ski outfits believes men view
so much talk as excessively needy, and that “men smell need on a woman like bad
perfume.” She went on to say, “Men judge women for having needs because they
don’t think they have needs-because
women always anticipate them.”
Several women also said that, while they don’t think lots of
talking is necessarily helping, it’s tied into their idea of a strong woman.
“It seems somehow anti-feminist not to tell your mate everything these days,” a
book-store manager sighed, examining a pimple she said was caused by stress.
“But I have to tell you, the minute I stopped playing games, he got scared.”
An actress who worries that her biological clock is ticking
also mentioned the concept of the modern woman. “Women didn’t talk about
relationships this much before the pill,” she said. “Now they have control of
their bodies and when to have sex, so they can say what they want and walk away
if they have to.”
Privately, many women are saying they’re looking for
alternatives to the talkathon. “Men are uncomfortable with women coming at them
directly. They deal with that at work,” the freelance writer said. “Now, when I
want to talk about something with my boyfriend, I make him a cocktail. Relax
him a little and then pounce.”
Her friend smiled. “It’s
so ironic,” she said. “Men get women drunk to have sex with them and you’re
getting your boyfriend drunk to talk.”
When I asked for solutions, the only suggestion came from
the real estate broker: “More sex and silence.” Well, in silent films, couples
relate in brief placards. An “I am struggling with issues about my parents’
marriage and how that affects me” is reduced to a brief “Help!” on-screen.
Another possibility is Quest For Fire ,
where mud-covered singles wander the earth content to pick nits out of each
other’s fur and loiter in caves. Primitive, yes, but little need for couples’
counseling. Or maybe musicals have something to teach us. “My therapist says
you’re controlling” would sound much better set to Cole Porter.
Perhaps the problem is not talking at all, but instead the
truth behind why we talk. “Women don’t want talk
from talk,” the actress said. “They think that, through talk, they can get
a man to change . But men only change
through evolution. So we’ve got another three billion years.”