Lost in Translation

On my eighteenth birthday, a very good male friend of mine treated me to lunch as a present. He traveled up from Tuscon for the weekend and had me chose the restaurant (we went to Mi Amgios, their chips and salsa are out of this world!) which made it clear that he was trying hard to make it a fun present. Everything was going great and the food was amazing. Our conversation points were light and fast paced, we covered tons of topics from his band to my upcoming Prom.

Then, Nick asked me where I thought that I was going to go to college in the Fall, and from my point of view the day pretty much took a nose-dive. The question was a serious one for me as I was torn between a couple of schools, one of which being the university that he attends. My girl friends and I had talked about college non-stop since the start of our senior year, analyzing everything from distance to majors offered. Naturally, I expected that our conversation would be equally in depth and thought out. I figured that we would run through the pros and cons of my final options and that he would be able to give me some useful insight, share his own experiences and reasons for making his choice. Instead, what I got was a guy glancing at everything but my eyes and responses that, when forced out, consisted of “Yeah.”

I was so irritated, I could not stand it! I felt incredibly frustrated that he cared so little about such a big decision and that he would not help me at all to make up my mind. Not to mention, that his body language and rapid-eye movements gave me the overall impression that he was about as interested in what I was saying as watching paint dry. However, after reading Tannen’s “Sex, Lies, and Conversation” our talk now seems much clearer, and a lot less aggravating. For instance, I was expecting him to offer feedback and ask probing questions which he most certainly did not. Thankfully, Tannen explores this very phenomenon when she writes, “Now, then a girl told a friend about a problem, the friend responded by asking probing questions and expressing agreement and understanding. But the boys dismissed each other’s problems” (Tannen 243). Furthermore, his lack of eye contact made me feel like he was disinterested in what I was saying, but again Tannen investigates this very practice, “I found that at every age, the girls and women faced each other directly, their eyes anchored on each other’s faces. At every age, the boys and men sat at angles to each other and looked elsewhere in the room, periodically glancing at each other” (Tannen 242). Thus, as Tannen explains it was our differing styles of conversation that lead to my feelings of frustration about our conversation. We both have very different ideas of what our roles in a conversation should be, though neither is better than the other.