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Men and women live in different worlds
I realized that I’d better learn how to talk with men. My career and my love life depended on it.
On the Chinese version of this post, which is here.
The world watched April 2011 as Prince William of England married his longtime sweetheart. But I once heard a story about the courtship of his grandmother, England’s beloved Queen Elizabeth II, which made a deep impression on me. The Queen confides that, before she got married, she in fact had two suitors to choose between:
Of Suitor #1, she said: “Whenever I was with him, I thought he was the most interesting person in the world!”
Of Suitor #2, she said: “Whenever I was with him, I thought I was the most interesting person in the world!”
Guess whom she married? You got it. Suitor #2 is now known to the world as her husband, Prince Philip, while Suitor #1 has been lost to history forever.
This is an important lesson for us all. Being the world’s most fascinating, beautiful, accomplished man or woman may help us achieve in the workplace, but it’s no guarantee of success in the love department. As Prince Phillip shows us, the key to catching your life partner – and indeed the key to any personal or professional relationship – is the ability to relate effectively to the other person.
This is easier said than done, because other people can be downright mystifying, and none more so than people of the other sex, who sometimes can seem like they’re from another species entirely.
Men and me
My own relationship with men got off to a slow start. As a kid in grade school in the States in the 1970s, my English was horrible, so I rarely ever spoke. I never knew what the kids at school were talking about anyway, since my parents were extremely conservative and didn’t allow TV in the house. The world saw China as monolithic, poor and backward, where people wore funny clothes. This image refracted onto me as well. I was the strange, silent Chinese girl with thick glasses and slant eyes.
All those years, more than anything, I just wished I was blonde.
In middle school and high school, boys ignored me entirely.
But things turned up for me as China opened up to the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Along with China’s economic fortunes rose my social prospects. Sometime during college, Americans’ perception of me changed from strange and ugly to exotic and beautiful.
Naturally I welcomed this twist of fortune. Just one problem.
I had no clue how to talk to men.
I had to learn fast because, after graduating from college, I chose a profession full of men. I wanted to be a real-estate developer, for a firm called Maguire Thomas Partners, which was famous for having built the tallest office buildings on the West Coast .
Sky-rise commercial development is a rarefied corner of the real-estate world. If you build little apartment buildings, you can build one, rent out the units, then reinvest your capital to build another. But you can’t build a 70-story office building in phases. As a result, each project involves a gigantic bet involving huge sums of money. And as a result of that, this corner of the real-estate world attracts the most aggressive, the most risk-taking, and the biggest-money men around. I don’t even need to go into the phallic nature of contests to build the world’s tallest building – the imagery speaks for itself.
I realized that I’d better learn how to talk with men. My career and my love life depended on it.
So, I set about learning about men the Chinese way: library research. Back then, there was no Internet, so research meant books. More than from anyone else, I found answers in the work of Georgetown University linguistics scientist Dr. Deborah Tannen.
Men and women live in different worlds
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