Years ago, I took a sociology class, and one of the things they covered (briefly) was the differences in communication styles between genders. This is something I’ve always remembered:

You know how there are these old-time stereotypes about your spouse, where the wife always complains that her husband never listens to her and the husband claims that his wife is always changing her mind? Turns out that (in a general sense) when women are listening to someone speak, they tend to nod their heads, whereas men don’t nod.

The thing is that the women were nodding to show that they were listening to what the other person was saying, while the husbands were interpreting the nods as agreement to what was being said. The wives were interpreting their husbands’ lack of response as “he never listens” and the husbands were interpreting the mods followed by disagreement as “she’s always changing her mind”. Such a simple stylistic difference on how we communicate, and it’s led to so much misunderstanding over the years.

I’ve been thinking of that difference a lot these past few months, where so many right-wing men are absolutely convinced that they’re right and everyone obviously agrees with them, and how they’re always blindsided and confused when that turns out to not be the case. And I wonder how much miscommunication (or not-correcting misunderstandings) is going on between couples these days.