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U2:Why Is It So Hard for Men and Women to Talk to Each Other?男女交谈为何如此困难 I was addressing a small gathering in a suburban Virginia living room -- a womens group that had invited men to join them. Throughout the evening, one man had been particularly talkative, frequently offering ideas and anecdotes, while his wife sat silently beside him on the couch. Toward the end of the evening, I commented that women frequently complain that their husbands dont talk to them. This man quickly concurred. He gestured toward his wife and said, Shes the talker in our family. The room burst into laughter; the man looked puzzled and hurt. Its true, he explained. When I come home from work I have nothing to say. If she didnt keep the conversation going, wed spend the whole evening in silence.那是在弗吉尼亚郊区一个住所的客厅里，我正在一次小型聚会上发言——这是一次女性的聚会，但也邀请了男性参加。整晚，一位男士表现得极为健谈，他不断地发表自己的看法，讲述奇闻轶事。而他的妻子却安静地坐在他身旁的沙发上。聚会接近尾声时，我说，一些妻子经常抱怨丈夫不与她们交谈，这位男士立刻表示同意。他指着妻子说：“在家里爱说话的是她。”于是满屋子哄堂大笑，这位男士一脸茫然和委屈。“这是真的，”他解释说，“我下班回家后总是无话可说，如果她不说话，我们会整晚沉默。” This episode crystallizes the irony that although American men tend to talk more than women in public situations, they often talk less at home. And this pattern is wreaking havoc with marriage.这段小插曲反映了一种具有讽刺意味的现象，即美国的男性尽管在公共场合比女性健谈，在家里却比女性说话少。而正是这一现象使婚姻受到严重威胁。 Sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman reports in her new book Divorce Talk that most of the women she interviewed -- but only a few of the men -- gave lack of communication as the reason for their divorces. 社会学家凯瑟琳?凯尔?里兹曼在她的新作《离婚谈》中说，她采访过的大多数女性将离婚的原因归咎于缺乏交谈，但只有少数男性将此当作离婚的理由。 In my own research, complaints from women about their husbands most often focused not on tangible inequities such as having given up the chance for a career to accompany a husband to his, or doing far more than their share of daily life-support work like cleaning, cooking, social arrangements and errands. Instead, they focused on communication: He doesnt listen to me, He doesnt talk to me. I found, as Hacker observed years before, that most wives wa