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Sunday, August 3, 2008

Communicating-Part Two






Communications
Part Two
Men and Women

The Great Architect seems to have deliberately designed the world to include the different languages as a challenge for humans. It’s simply a geographical accident of birth that will determine the language that you speak as your native tongue.

With that beginning a child is surrounded by his tribe, and he will know his tribe anywhere in the world just by the words spoken. If no-one bothered to learn another language we would be stuck in our tribal lands forever.

Perhaps one of the most ambitious projects to try and overcome the language barrier is the European Airbus. As an experiment in communicating it’s about as bold as it gets. The object was to build an airplane that would actually fly safely as a cooperative endeavour between several nations. Primarily it involved an agreement between Germany, France, Britain, and Spain. It employed 57,000 people working over 16 sites, and ultimately extended participation to the U.S, Holland, Japan and China.

France made the cockpit, flight control and lower middle section of the fuselage.
Britain made the wings and provided the Rolls Royce engines.
Germany made the forward and rear fuselage, and the upper centre fuselage.
Holland made the flaps and spoilers.
Spain made the horizontal tail plane.

Even if there was one common language, say French or English, given that so many people would not be totally proficient because it was not their mother tongue, there would be a lot of room for misunderstanding. In spite of that the airplane does fly and is rated safe. I consider that to be an absolutely amazing success story.

So, in the light of such an outstanding achievement why then do men and women have so much trouble in understanding one another. The popular book, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” points out the very large divide between the two sexes. Most men will likely have had the experience of explaining our thinking on some subject to the women in our lives, only to have had it replayed back to us as something completely different. Supposedly we are speaking the same language, but somehow what comes from our mouths is not what enters the female ear.

Not that this is a one-way problem. Men suffer from the very same thing with the added complication that we’re supposed to only listen and not insert our own annoying solutions. Nor can we read the newspaper or watch tv while listening.

The standard joke goes something like this:

She: Darling, did you realise that today marks the six-month anniversary of our relationship?
He: Really! Six months already!
He thinks: Time for me to take the car in for its six month’s service. He then trains his thoughts on what has to be done for the car, while she is thinking romantic thoughts about the past six months, and the future.

Problem is, this is no joke. The divide between the genders is so wide it’s just an everyday miracle that we are able to achieve anything at all. Supposedly we want the same things from life. Love, security, family, respect, comfort, prestige, friends, community, money. Acquiring those things is where the problems are to be found. As someone said, the devil is in the details.

Most men probably find themselves in hot water with their women through quite inadvertent actions. We don’t deliberately set out to annoy our women, unless we enjoy that sort of thing, in which case we should run, not walk to have our heads examined. We try to please our women and to ensure peace in the family, but no matter how hard we try we are committed to get it wrong.

I once heard a woman friend describe her man as being perfect. I should have had her explain in detail what that meant.

In the next instalment I shall present some classic misunderstandings between the genders.



Copyright © 2008 Eugene Carmichael