The idea is correct, at least in the general. Woman place a premium on discussing their feelings, even as they change continuously over the course of a day. While men, given the same opportunity are more apt to recite information they’ve learned. Does this mean then, either that men don’t have feelings, or rather, that they don’t talk about them?

Actually, no. It turns out that while men don’t talk about feelings the same way that women do, doesn’t mean that men don’t talk about feelings. In fact, men talk about feelings a lot.

To explain how and why, perhaps it’s best to begin with what exactly feelings are.

Feelings Are Information
To separate “feelings” from “information” is to fundamentally ignore that feelings are information. They are a record of a particular state. To say that “I am angry” possesses just as much information as when a physicist states that “This water is hot.” Or more accurately, that this water is hotter than room temperature.

While “heat” is a specific measure in that it expresses the average kinetic energy of a group of atoms (in this case, water molecules), feelings work the same way, in that they capture the relative state of the human animal. We can be “angry” or “sad” or “happy”, just like water can be ice or vapor.

But why would an animal care about understanding its relative states? For the same reason that it needs to be able to sense that water is hot. And by “sensing”, I mean experiencing pain.    

Pain is a feeling that helps one navigate the natural world. You avoid danger, stay alive long enough to procreate. Conversely, pleasure also helps. You find food that tastes good (meaning it has high nutritional quality), and have sex which, is sort of the way you procreate. More or less.

“Emotional” feelings are bit more complicated. By emotional, I mean “sadness” and “happiness” and “guilt”, and by those three what I really mean is “social” feelings. We can think of Pain and Pleasure as “Survival” feelings to navigate the natural, physical world, and Social feelings to navigate the human, interpersonal world.

Because it is vital for human beings to be members of a group—we cannot, as point of fact, survive on our own—we have developed Social emotions to stay in the group, and more importantly, to prevent being ostracized from the group. We feel Guilt when we do something wrong against others. We are motivated by Conformity to act like others. We express Benevolence to prove that we belong. And we feel Moral Outrage when someone else breaks these rules.

Together, these four basic vectors compose the majority of our “social” emotions. What we feel are often tinges or hues of these basic feelings. For instance, moral outrage is determined not just by a wrong, but how severe the wrong is. The emotion compensates and to tell us exactly how hot the water is.

Of course, these are generalizations. I don’t mean to demean human emotion. What I am attempting here is to frame why feelings exist in the first place and therefore what function they serve.

Women Have Feelings
I believe Tannen was right to describe women as social animals concerned with connection with others, while men are hierarchically biased and hence obsessed with status. (That is not to say that women do not have hierarchies and status and that men are not interested in maintaining relationships, only that it’s obvious how each gender prioritizes these basic social needs.)

I mean this is the evolutionary sense that men, as a reproductive strategy, have more to gain from moving up a hierarchy, and women more to gain from maintaining strong interpersonal relationships. Of course, men also have much to gain from these interpersonal relationships, and women from hierarchy, but when evolution was making trade-offs it was this ranking of priorities that made sense.

As Tannen described women’s Social emotions, it was a constant stream of helping others to understand how they were feeling at a given moment, in response to a specific situation, and in mood in general. Women need this because it is these feelings in which they saw their world, the same way we are constantly using pain and pleasure to walk around the physical world.

Women will therefore express feelings as a way of mapping out their social world. This is where the ice patches are, be careful when you walk there. Those are the hot vapor stretches, avoid at all cost. And here, where we get along and our feelings match, is the cool lake where we can take a dip.

To demean female communication as just about feelings is to ignore the incredible amount of information that goes into this emotional cartography. This is no different than playing chess blindfolded and understanding where all the different pieces are stationed and what strategy your opponent tends to use.

Remember, feelings are information too.

The Stoic Warrior
Women often make fun of men for thinking that expressing emotion is a sign of weakness. But actually, it sort of is.

To show emotion is to lack fortitude. It is to be susceptible to outside influences. Someone that responds to emotions can be manipulated, and someone who can be manipulated makes for a terrible leader.

In fact, the only emotion that a leader should possess, is not actually an emotion of its own. It’s sympathy, which is the acknowledgement of someone else’s emotion. Otherwise, the leader should be resolute in the face of adversity. He must not be intimidated or sad or even happy, which connotes simple-mindedness. A leader is usually expected to mostly devoid of personal emotions.

Passion, sure. But not elation.

Women know that showing emotion is a sign of weakness, because they are constantly provoking men in an attempt to elicit an emotion. An authority no less accomplished than my own mother will regularly make outrageous claims in an effort to bother, annoy, or otherwise harass me.

If I respond to her, if I show emotion, I have lost. This is the rules of hierarchy. Conversely, in an interpersonal world, to not show emotion is to be callous and therefore, to be cruel. One loses by not showing emotion. 

Men Have Feelings Too
Men on the other hand, if they are obsessed with status, would be interested in sharing emotions that were concerned with status. I happened to notice this rather accidentally while watching, of all stereotypically male media outlets, a baseball preview show. The panelists were wondering whether teams that had been “embarrassed” in the previous season, would come out “strong” to open this one.

The announcers obviously were making a connection between a team’s emotional state and their on-field performance. It turns out that not all Social emotions are created equal. Some have to do with how we feel as moods—happiness, sadness—and others as we respond to attack. Are we “embarrassed” or “frustrated”?

Men are constantly talking about the emotion of “embarrassment”, especially in sports where one can be sent home to their mother, or served a facial, or kicked off the field. Therefore, men are constantly talking about feelings, just in general, different ones that women usually talk about.

You see, not only do the sexes not understand each other when it comes to the difference between communicating for the purpose of information versus feelings, but they do not even understand that often they are both communicating feelings, just different types in different ways.