BUILD BRIDGES NOT WALLS Essay

Deborah Tannen and William Lutz both discuss the difficulty of communicating. Their point of views may be different, but their conclusion is the same. Men and women have difficulties of communicating. Not because the two genders want to be complicated but simply because we don’t realize how or what we’re doing when it’s happening.

Having two people in love and getting married can change a lot about both lives. Lifestyles will change and adapting to each other will be one of the major goals. Not being able to adapt to each other will cause stress and great pain to each other. The key to marriage is being able to withstand each other and having patience for each other. Marriage in the twenty-first century today lacks the skills of withstanding each other and patience, especially couples who get married at an early age. A perfect marriage is to marry a person who loves you for who you are and what you are, not for you to be different or to change. “The best life partner might, I think, be the one who sees you as you are and loves that person-the person who is boring and anxious or blotchy from a weekly scrub mask-not the imaginary one who is poetic and broodingly smart and sexy and ecstatic all the time” (Miller 64). This statement wrote by Catherine Newman clearly shows that a couple getting married should pick that right partner that choose you because of you and nothing different. If you choose a partner to be different or act different and not for what he/she truly is, you will guaranteed to have a hard and stressful marriage. Both of you will have trouble understanding each other and it will cause you to have therapy. Marriage therapy is very common today and one the reason of them is not loving your partner for who he/she really is. Marrying somebody can be easy, but finding the right somebody is hard. It may take more than one try to find that right

Marriage is an adjustment between two people getting married Communication can cause a relationship to succeed or fail. If you do not share how you feel, it can cause your partner to withdraw. Listening can save a relationship. Schonberg (2011) found that “affective affirmation –basically, behavior that makes your partner feel loved cared for or special plays a role in a happy marriage and those men need it more than women. There are several factors and problems that can cause marriage to either succeed or fail. It is important to discuss problem things left unsaid can cause your partner to with draw.

Men and women communicate in very different ways. Men want to see the solution, they want to just get straight to the point and then be done with the situation. Women on the other hand tend to be more detail-oriented before they get to

The articles “Sex, Lies and Conversation: Why is it Hard for Men and Women to Talk to each other” by Deborah Tannen and “Speaking Different Languages” by John Gray are about how men and women often misunderstand each other which causes conflicts and or arguments. When a woman says something it usually has a deeper meaning, but men are usually more direct when speaking; this leads to conflicts and relationship problems. According to Tannen and Gray, men and women can adjust their thinking to minimize misunderstanding by translating each other’s dialect, by understanding their different ways of listening, and different body languages.

As time passes in a relationship, it is inevitable that confrontations are bound to occur. Whether small disagreements created from minor issues, to mediocre arguments based on daily matters, to serious incidents that can reflect relationship taboos, it is a couple’s perception and understanding of each other that can strengthen or weaken their union. The poem “How It Will End” by Denise Duhamel portrays two couples involved in similar matters as those previously described. One couple is having, what appears to be, an argument at the beach and the second couple is watching them from afar, as they’re on a boardwalk. As the poem progresses, the second couple’s assumptions of what

The second part of Franklins advice is equally crucial. Marriage is all about being forgiving, overlooking, and staying positive. The first is very critical when it comes to being in a marriage. Being forgiving is pretty much the same as being tolerant to towards one another. The dictionary definition of being tolerant from Oxford Dictionaries says that being tolerant is “showing willingness to allow opinions or a certain behavior that one does not necessarily agree with.” This definition explains why a lot of individuals who are married experience frustration towards their spouse. In many cases the person you are involved with will have a certain behavior or interest that the individuals you associate with won’t always agree with, but just because they have those certain behaviors or interests that others can’t seem to grasp doesn’t mean that it is going to ruin or even be the slightest bit harmful towards your marriage. A good example of this is say you are married to a man who has a habit of going to his favorite bar after work to have a drink. He

“Will Your Marriage Last?”, by Aviva Patz, is a cohesive article about marriage and divorce. Aviva Patz is the executive editor of Psychology Today. Patz narrates the story of Ted Huston, a professor at the University of Texas, who followed the lives of 168 couples for 13 years after their wedding date. She was then able to draw conclusions about what makes a couple stay together or end up filing divorce papers. Although marriages and divorce are the themes of this article, it is really about society’s pressure on young people to be perfect.

One could say that they become so close that they each become half of one heart. In the poem “Marriage of Many Years” by Dana Gioia, marriage is described as a way for two people to become closer than ever before. It is a process where the two mutually grow and share memories with one another. Through this process she says that her partner has become “a language I have learned by heart” (Gioia). By comparing their love to a language, shows how natural their relationship has become. Their love has allowed them to become one unit and understand each other like it is second nature. This contrasts greatly to how marriages used to work in the past. No longer are women expected to make changes for the man. Each partner makes changes to ensure that the other is content with the

In the essay Sex, Lies, and Conversation Deborah Tannen focuses on the differences and lack of communication between men and women though observations. She came to the conclusion that men were not lacking in their listening, but they were however listening in a different way than the women did. On the other hand, men aren’t the only people that have terrible communication skills. In many ways, these differences between the two genders can cause major conflict when not understood by the opposite side. A few examples of lack of communication may be when women don’t decide where they would like to eat, men who walk away from an argument rather than talking it out, and their decision making processes.

“’Yes, but how often the happiness of marriages founded on reason crumbles to dust because the very passion that was disregarded makes itself felt later.’ said Vronsky. ‘But by “marriages founded on reason”, we mean marriages between those who have both passed through that madness. It’s like scarlet fever: one has to get it over.’” (125)

connecting with others. Anything worth having is not easy to obtain, and for some people,

The stark divide between love and marriage shown right the way through cannot be comprehended fully by the twenty-first century reader: in today’s society marriage and love are mutually exclusive - you very rarely get one

As the age old saying goes, “Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus”. The conflicting views of men and women have been questioned for centuries, noting how men and women differ in emotion, affection, and communication.

Rather than giving up and ending the marriage, many couples could save the marriage by trying to work through the problems that arise. Many people do not realize how much hard work has to be put into a marriage for it to be successful. When planning a wedding, some couples spend a lot of time preparing the vows that will be exchanged during the ceremony, but sadly the partners fail to live by the vows day after day. Scores of married couples drift apart because their hectic lives do not allow them to spend enough quality time together, which is important for a healthy marriage. Communication is also an essential factor in working through problems in a marriage.