正文
Male-female conversation is cross-cultural communication. Culture is simply a network of habits and patterns gleaned from past experience, and women and men have different past experiences. These cultural differences include different expectations about the role of talk in relationships and how it fulfills that role.
两性之间的交流是跨文化交流。文化只不过是由以往的经验获得的习惯与模式系统，而女人和男人有不同的过往经历。这些文化差异包括，人们对交往中的谈话角色及如何履行这一角色的不同期待。
Everyone knows that as a relationship becomes long-term, its terms change. But women and men often differ in how they expect them to change. Many women feel, “After all this time, you should know what I want without my telling you.” Many men feel, “After all this time, we should be able to tell each other what we want.”
每个人都知道，当一种长期关系得以确立以后，它的条件也会改变，但女人与男人对变化的方式总是有不同的期待。许多女人觉得，“相处了这么长时间，我不说你也应该知道我需要什么。”而许多男人却认为，“相处了这么长时间，我们完全可以告诉彼此所需要的。”
These incongruent expectations capture one of the key differences between men and women. Communication is always a matter of balancing conflicting needs for involvement and independence. Being understood without saying what you mean gives a payoff in involvement, and that is why women value it so highly.
这些不一致的期待捕捉到了男女之间的关键区别之一。交流永远都是对牵连和独立的一种平衡冲突的需要。“不言而喻”是对牵连的回报，这就是女人十分看重这一点的原因。
If you want to be understood without saying what you mean explicitly in words, you must convey meaning somewhere else—in how words are spoken, or by metamessages. Thus it stands to reason that women are often more attuned than men to the metamessages of talk. When women surmise meaning in this way, it seems mysterious to men, who call it “women’s intuition” (if they think it’s right) or “reading things in” (if they think it’s wrong). Indeed, it could be wrong, since metamessages are not on record. And even if it is right, there is still the question of scale: How significance are the metamessages that are there?
