The Secret Language of Women’s Friendships
Deborah Tannen’s “You’re The Only One I Can Tell”
In my quest to become a more well-rounded reader and writer, I tried to make it my business to read books written by women. I began with literary giants Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison. I picked up Atwood’s Surfacing and Morrison’s Song of Solomon. I made it to about eighty pages into each and stopped. Neither novel compelled me to read further or held my interest. I resumed other reading that held a more organic hold over my taste. But something started to nag at me.
Why did books by these celebrated women authors fail to grab me? My awareness of women’s issues at the time was rather cursory. I knew I did not have a conscious prejudice against reading work by women. I enjoyed platonic friendships with women over the years. Being a heterosexual man, you could say I had a built-in reason to empathize with and understand women. Yet, books by women were failing to interest me on an organic level. I began wondering about some vague notion of innate gender bias.
I knew that, in my own fiction, if I intended to credibly write women characters, I needed a good read on the female psyche. I also knew that women being more internally and emotionally driven than men were better readers. That meant, on some level, I was going to be writing for women, directly or indirectly. The question of navigating their internal world became an object of mystery, even intrigue. It is with this motivation, that I picked up Deborah Tannen’s, You’re The Only One I Can Tell.
Tannen’s field of study is interactional sociolinguistics. In her research, she interviewed over eighty women about their friendships. Some subjects stated that their women friends were what sustained them over the course of their lives and were as important to their survival as oxygen. Others found female friendships difficult terrain, expressing an open mistrust of their gender. Others found it difficult to ascertain who their women friends were and referred to categories like couples friends.
Unlike men who, when under stress, respond with the fight or flight mechanism, women tend to stay put and bond with one another. Friendship troubles aggrieve women more severely than men to the point of physical symptoms like higher blood pressure. Male friendships are centered around a shared activity. Talk of feelings is seldom, if ever, shared. Women express shock over men’s lack of sharing between friends. The currency of women’s friendships is the sharing of intimate secrets.
The seriousness and exclusivity of intimate female friendships carry all the elements of a social contract. The failure to share intimacies of similarly escalating vulnerability constitutes betrayal. If there is a childhood prep school for the sharing of secrets, it is the sleepover. What was once called the slumber party is the perfect setting for building trust between friends through nocturnal whispers of shared experience. Such exchanges travel better by night in the trusted confines of shared space.
Conversely, men, whose value is measured through action and labour, see the sharing of problems only through the guise of seeking advice on what to do. Guys are ordered, “Don’t just stand there, do something.” If you are not going to attempt to resolve a personal problem, why share an intimacy? Whereas women share problems not to solicit advice but to satisfy their part of the friendship bargain.
Moreover, women take considerable offense at being offered a solution after revealing a problem. This signals, not the prelude to resolution, but an end to the intimate exchange of friendship. For women, the shared exchange is what matters. For men, helping by repairing damage through shared knowledge or assistive labour is what drives their value as friends. Understanding this profound difference holds the promise of better communication than dismissively stereotypical labels like Mansplaining.
While the currency of female friendship is shared secrets, the implied contractual obligation creates its own challenges. When one friend discloses a personal problem, the other feels compelled to produce something in solidarity. The pressure to do so can have unintended consequences. If one friend is having relationship challenges while the other is in a long-term marriage, the secret sharing can signal a breakup. A female friend related being unceremoniously dumped by her coupled friends after splitting from her partner.
Feminism has stridently sought to elevate women’s self worth separately and distinctly from reproductive capacity. Still, for women pursuing family, the ability to bear children is a matter of precipitous emotional gravity. The instinctive sharing between women through the odyssey of pregnancy and childbirth can be fraught with hazard. One obstetrician/gynecologist went as far as to advise her patients against joining women in conversation until after delivery.
Sharing pregnancy and delivery disaster stories in assumed solidarity can have emotionally devastating effects on expectant women with the slightest complications or uncertainties. The need to belong and contribute to the discussion can lead some women to embellish, even horrify. Accounts of stillbirths, caesarian sections and post partum depression can be sufficiently upsetting as to warrant mental health intervention if internalized.
Secret sharing as the currency of female friendship opens the possibility of and vulnerability to betrayal. One woman using another’s secrets to advance her status is not out of the question. Women are often warned against joining gossipy groups. When the members run out their own stories, they will share yours. As men pursue friendships, they do not traffic in secrets similarly. Unsurprisingly, many women profess a preference for male friends.
As the father of two daughters, I continue to be amazed by the emotion driven lives they lead. Their freedom to be demonstrative enables an emotional fluency and self-knowledge that was foreign, even forbidden, to me in my upbringing. In a house full of women who enjoy a freedom of expression that I have never felt safe to demonstrate, I see that my emotional life is only permitted to be expressed as it relates to them.
To the rest of the world, I must put on my game face of performative masculinity. With these and other constraints on men, it is no surprise that we are in an era of the ascendant woman. This is not to say that I do not treasure my male friendships. I most certainly do. Yet, I cannot escape the notion that my value as a man is measured by the happiness I bring others, not anything I am entitled to create for myself. Only now as a retiree, am I indulging my internal life by writing.
I eventually found women writers I liked in Harper Lee, Carson McCullers and Virginia Woolf and enthusiastically rode out their books to the end. Doing so has added to my emotional fluency and understanding of women. The intensity of women’s friendships is everywhere and always closer than you think. My mother and my late aunt lived a continent apart yet spoke by phone every day.
Tannen writes that some women value friendships in great quantity while others were happy with but a few. No one wanted none. Friendship, like any other human venture, involves an inescapable aspect of risk. Having friends can inflict hurt on others and expose us to the risk of incurring hurt. The mental health fallout from the Covid 19 pandemic has taught us the hard way that we are social creatures. Avoiding friendships altogether is to risk not living at all.
Sources:
Tannen, Deborah. You’re The Only One I Can Tell. Ballantine Books. 2017
