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Notes -
"It's a big mistake for women to talk to men the same way they do among other women because then he often..." takes it as an attack or plea for him to do something.
My husband came home early from work yesterday because the internet was down. I took the opportunity to ask him to walk to get lunch with me (I work from home). On the walk, I first asked him about the internet situation - he was upset because the IT department didn't bother telling anyone the internet was down while they've known since 4 AM, some people have 1 hour commutes and essentially wasted prime work hours, etc.
Once that conversation topic ran its course, I told him that after lunch I had a lot of copy/pasting to do - someone made a workbook where I could input different values to get the quantities of items, and I needed to put in 50 or so values and copy/paste into a format a customer wanted. He immediately started asking me details about the workbooks, what format they where in, what format the customer wanted, trying to solve the problem. I had to tell him to stop - I didn't expect him to fix the excel copying problem any more than he expected I'd be able to fix his office internet situation.
Or sometimes I'll say something like, "Man, the kids are wild today," and he'll assume I'm asking him to go in there and yell at them, instead of just making small talk. And then he gets frustrated with me because he thinks I'm being lazy, or making him the bad guy who has to punish the kids. Sometimes I'm just talking to talk.
Possibly this wouldn't happen if women would just straightforwardly ask for help with things when they want it, instead of dropping hints and dancing around the subject, assuming their interlocutor will swoop in and fix their problems as a personal favor. With men, I simply don't offer help with anything unless they ask for it. With women, they will take this as gross indifference or deliberate rudeness.
Reminds me of this comedic (Informative?) sketch.
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