Each underestimates her own power and overestimates the other's.
— Deborah Tannen
Each person's life is lived as a series of conversations.
Communication is a continual balancing act, juggling the conflicting needs for intimacy and independence. To survive in the world, we have to act in concert with others, but to survive as ourselves, rather than simply as cogs in a wheel, we have to act alone.
For most women, the language of conversation is primarily a language of rapport: a way of establishing connections and negotiating relationships.
