I don’t think that I communicate like women are supposed to; at the very least, I don’t feel like I primarily engage in conversation in order to maintain relationships. I’m pretty notoriously bad at communicating for the primary goal of maintaining relationships (just ask my mom). I tend to consider conversations as a means to exchange information between people--information can be anything from what the weather is like to finding out how the other person is feeling. I think you have to do things in order to have something to talk about, and the media image of women who sit around and gossip and talk about their feelings doesn’t appeal to me. I do think the media image of how women communicate is an exaggeration, however, and wouldn’t like to base my ideas of how women communicate on that image.
In my experience with communicating with men and women, there is a blending of these two conversational styles. I think some men and some women tend towards the extremes regarding communication styles, but I strongly disagree with the idea that differences between how the sexes communicate is a fundamental sex difference. I think how men and women communicate is dictated largely by social factors. This means that communicating for information or in order to maintain relationships isn’t inherent in being a man or a woman; all genders exhibit these qualities to some degree, and all genders are capable of learning how to communicate either for informational purposes or in order to maintain relationships. I find the idea that “women are inherently better at interpersonal conversation” deeply sexist, in that it implies the converse: that women are inherently bad at informational communication.
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