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.

This results in men and women having trouble communicating with the opposite sex later in life. She has been McGraw DistinguiDeborah Tannend Lecturer at Princeton University and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences following a term in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ.

C. Deborah Frances Tannen (born June 7 1945) is an American academic and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington D.