I read an article recently that said the men can't talk. Thinking it was something to do with the way that we behave, I read on. Instead it was about the fact that men aren't all that great at holding a conversation. Really!
I read on with interest. As we know, girls start talking earlier than boys. By the age of 3 girls have twice the vocabulary as boys. I just thought it was that boys didn't talk unless they had something important to say. Rather, it has to do with the fact that speech and language are not critical brain skills for us males. (We’ve got better things to do such as hunting, eating and sleeping).
Scientifically you would think that men had access to lots of words, MRI scans reveal that a male accesses the entire left hemisphere of their brain as they search for words. Turns out that there aren’t so many words rattling around inside our brain for us to use.
Another related yet useless fact is that men will pick out a Valentine’s Day card that has lots of words on it so that we have limited room in which to write. I think it is more that we like someone else to say in writing what we can’t say in person, maybe I am just a romantic at heart.
Back to words. When a women talks, she uses the front left hemisphere of her brain and another smaller area in the right hemisphere. By using both sides of their brain, women make great conversationalists. Observe conversations at your next social event, women do most of the talking and men just nod their heads a lot.
Men are comfortable talking quietly to themselves. We like to ponder over things without talking so that we can come to the right conclusion. Why speak when you have nothing important to say is our mantra. When we say that we are going for a quiet beer, that’s what it is, quiet. We can stand at a bar table for long periods without talking. By the way ladies, if we are thinking please leave us alone to ponder, we hate interruptions. Just know that we are working on something.
Women on the other had like to think aloud, that's how they work out their problems. They will talk amongst their friends, (often at the same time), without wanting to necessarily reach a conclusion. This frustrates us men, we want to go straight to problem solving. We fix things fast.
So what is today's lesson? Women are better conversationalists and love to talk, they think aloud, and they just want to talk. Men don't often say too much unless we have something important to say and we just want to be left alone to work it out in our heads.
And as we know, marriages have been ruined because men don't want to talk. Sorry guys, this has to change. If you want to save your marriage, and your sanity in some situations, we have to learn to talk more.