Tannen found, in her own research, that the complaints from women pertaining to their husbands were based upon communication instead of the stresses of too much house work, or having to give up their desires for a career so that they can support their husband in his career. The sacrifices that women made did not seem to matter; it was the problems with communication that caused the strife. Tannen found, as Andrew Hacker had in his research, that women exceedingly want their husbands to be "conversational partners-, yet most to most men this was not a priority.
To start off her subtopic "Linguistic Battle of the Sexes-, Tannen asks these two questions: "How can women and men have such different impressions of communication in marriage? Why the widespread imbalance in their interests and expectations?- She goes on to explain why the way adults normally develop as children plays a key role in the communication problems between men and women in a relationship. Tannen discovered that many actions and conversational habits of men and women were similar to the ways that children's groups communicated and formed conversational and social "norms-.
Tannen says that for women, and the same goes for girls, intimacy and closeness seems to be shown through conversation. From Tannen's studies she found that girls, as well as women, consider conversation the "cornerstone- of friendship. So, women expect their husbands to be a better version of their closest friend.
In her investigations of males Tannen found, that much like the girls, boys have their closest friends, but boys demonstrate their closeness to one another by doing things together instead of talking like the girls do. Since boys don't consider talk as important as the girls do, and don't practice it as a means of becoming closer to one another, boys do not know what a girl means when she wants talk. The girl wants intimacy, and they boy thinks she just wants to chat.