Follow This One Simple Rule to Improve Your Relationship

Women Tend To Process Their Thoughts Verbally.

We women already tend to be more verbal than our husbands, but we also tend to process our thoughts out loud. If we’re not careful, that can trigger an all-too-common problem. In our research with men, it was clear that one of a man’s most painful feelings comes when he tries to do something (fix the sink, dress the kids, find a new route around construction to the restaurant) and then gets the sense that he’s inadequate—that his wife has examined him and found him wanting. But in our research with women, it was clear that women think things through by talking them through; in other words, they start the process of examination by jumping in and analyzing it verbally.

See the problem? All too often, we women casually throw something out there (“Why’d you go down Main Street? All these stoplights will make us late.”) and we think we’re opening a conversation. After all, another woman would catch the conversational ball and say “Oh, I’m only going to be on Main Street two blocks. There’s a parallel road I’m going to try in a second, and that should be faster.” But because most men don’t generally process out loud, our man hears what we blurt out—our conversational starting point—and thinks it’s an ending point.