Yesterday I heard it again: someone speaking about her marriage as "boring." My first instinct when I hear this about marriage and boredom is always to wonder if the couple has stopped talking. For I've long found that when talk goes, sex often follows. (Sex is, after all, a conversational connection, using bodies and voice.") So while magazines still talk about putting the "spark" back into marriage as though lacy thongs will do the trick, I still talk about where the "spark" first left. The talk. When Joan Didion said that the essence of her very alive and successful marriage was conversation, I thought, yeah, that's the thong that no lace can create.
We're grownups, so we know that familiarity can have its way with spark, but not until that familiarity erodes the daily conversation does it really put out the fire. Not till you realize that the three things you've said in a day are: "What time will you be home? Will you pick up dinner? And Is someone around here going to do the laundry, ever?" before the tv goes on at night, you realize you're gone; you've vanished; the content of conversation has become an exchange that either of you might have had with a new secretary.
Not that we don't try to keep talk alive. Generally speaking, though, women raise more topics of conversation with men than the reverse. Scholars have long studied this imbalance--and one, Pamela Fishman, pointed out that women "raise many more topics than men because so many of their topical attempts fail." This failure is not due to the content--which "is often indistinguishable from men's" but "due to the failure of men to respond, to work at turning the attempt into a developing conversation." She goes on to say that women use a variety of strategies to get men to listen--asking questions, for example, is the famous one, to force some kind of response--that men rarely have to use. Why don't they have to use it? Because women are so much more likely to want to engage in the first place, men needn't resort to devices. They just need to want to talk.
So it's no coincidence, if we follow this thread, to hear that married women are the most depressed population, and married men the least depressed. It's odd, when you think about it, since these happiness and depression figures refer to people who exist in the same marriages. It cannot all be problems with roles, this huge discrepancy in marital depression between men and women; because more and more couples are sharing roles that used to be divvied up. And yet the discrepancy remains. No, I believe it has to do with what happens over time to conversation.
We'll talk more about it next time!
Speak out, my darlings! Talk to each other!
TLG
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