I think part of the reason men and women communicate differently is that they teach themselves to communicate differently. If you want to succeed in a social group of young males you need a very different skill set from young females. I should know. Most of my friends were girls; most of them still are. But as a boy and as a man I’ve loved inside the masculine world too, by necessity.

Young men teach each other to take a beating. And to give one. They play very rough and tumble, and their social interaction involves a lot of teasing and a focus on shared pursuits (like games). When boys talk they don’t do a lot of personal sharing, but they do engage in a lot of ribbing and testing to see whether you can take a joke and give it back in the same spirit.

It’s the same with their physical activity. And if they ever get involved in any serious conflict they shove each other around, and it gets very physical and explicit. But it’s very finite, generally. You make your displays, you show your teeth, you fight and then it’s over. Back to the game. This develops a very specific kind of approach and attitude, a very distinct idea of what the proper social game is and what’s acceptable and how you succeed in it. You have to be able to both take and give some hits to earn respect among boys. And even nice boys like to joke and tease a lot and like to compete a lot and focus on either things or on shared pursuits, not on each other.

As a father of two girls, I can attest that they inhabit radically different and way more complex social systems than I ever did. Systems that I am often overwhelmed and mystified and shocked by. Just as shocked as they sometimes are by what boys will do to each other.

For one thing, girls share a lot more; a lot more of their focus in on one another. Their conflicts are internal, more covert, longer lasting, more complicated, and often involve struggles and attacks on the other person’s status in the group. My daughters have often seen one of their friends try to cast another rival girl out of the group. The girls will take sides and sympathies and alliances will shift and sway. Fights play out over the course of a week, or a month, with few to no explicit or physical confrontations (a threat that is constantly looming in male conflicts). The various parties involved try to get the group on their side and cast the other girl out. It all becomes a very complex negotiation, with all kinds of risks, and constantly shifting loyalties and negotiation. Even the peacemakers, like my oldest, can suffer and become targets for their unwillingness to choose a side, failing the test of loyalty from both parties. It’s like watching the UN at work on the playground.

I never had to deal with that kind of complexity when I was a boy, and even being especially adept at relating to girls isn’t the same as being part of their structure. And I confess that I have often been a helpless outsider, despite spending most of my life around groups of girls. I just don’t have the same skills, the same understanding, the same motivations, or the same standing as the real members of the feminine hierarchy. For all that I understand and appreciate girls far more than the average guy, being in a social group of girls is a very different sort of education than being in a group of boys.

My niece was homeschooled along with four brothers. And when she joined public school in middle school one of her biggest challenges was that she fundamentally didn’t understand how to negotiate the female social structure and deal with and succeed with other girls. She learned fairly quickly, but she will always have a different perspective on it because she never took it for granted.

Most of us take whatever social system we grew up in for granted, as the default of what the world just is and how it works, with its respective rules and means and rituals for negotiation and success. And while all cultures are localized, there are big, broad tendencies that unite them as well, and one of the biggest unifying cultures is sex. Boys and girls, like many mammals, naturally seperate themselves into seperate cultures around age 6-8. And it’s in that seperation that they teach one another the rules for success in their respective hierarchies.

But as I said, the problem is that boys and girls don’t teach each other the same things. You only get half the story of how to succeed. And what boys and girls teach one another is both different from and independent from what adults teach children they need to do to succeed with adults. The influence of peers, the culture of the peer group, is a massive influence, perhaps the most important influence, on children once they reach school age. Stephen Pinker certainly posits this as being the case in The Blank Slate, that peer influence is the dominant force of social learning after young childhood. But that domain is largely out of the hands of the parents, except insofar as they can control where their children are and who their peers will be (which many parents do, either by at minimum choosing where to live, to encouraging or discouraging certain friends, or sending them to a specific school, or even keeping their kids at home with their siblings in home school).

Anyway, the point is that adults don’t actually have that much control or influence over what their children learn from their social groups once they reach school age. And those groups will be defined by many things, but especially by sex, by male and female peer groups, and within those groups by the local culture and dominant personalities. And those groups will test one another and teach one another and reinforce one another in very different skill sets. And that isn’t necessarily a great preparation for a world where we come together with the other sex quite often and have to inhabit vast amounts of overlapping territories and hierarchies. Both sexes are in for a rude awakening when they realize that their experiences with their same sex peers have been very insufficient in preparing them for understanding and living alongside the other sex in a shared world.

On a side note, I think it’s appropriate and informative how the terms “girls” and “boys” attach more to the internal group identities of males and females than “men” or “women” do. I noticed this while I was writing. When boys and girls seperate into their own culture it is as “boys and girls”. When they continue with those habits into adulthood we still use those unique terms. A “boys’ club”, a “girls’ night out”.

“Woman” and “man” are different terms linguistically and psychologically because they introduce, as puberty and sexual maturity does, the added element of the relationship of one sex to the other. A girl is a member of the female social structure, young or old. A woman is a member of the inter-sexual social structure. She has a relationship to men, a status within that structure, as well as in relation to other females. Men are men in relation to women. Women are women in relation to men.

Boys and girls stand in relation to themselves, to their own group. It’s also accurate to continue to use the terms boys and girls as diminutive, even for adult groupings. As single group identity is more confined and also arises in immaturity, there is a sense in which manhood and womanhood are inextricably from maturity. You can be with the boys, but you’re somehow less than a man, because you are limited to that level of identity. If you want to be a man, you have to rise out of boyhood into a larger, more complex world with very different and often more challenging demands and rules and relationships and responsibilities. You take on the burden of your relationship to the other sex in a larger society, with all the difficulty and judgement and potential that entails.

It’s one thing to succeed in your own particular sexual hierarchy. It’s another thing to take that identity into the larger world of humanity at large and the ongoing species life. It can be a pleasant respite, and a necessary one, to return to the world of the single sex world, to indulge in a girls’ or boys’ night. It’s not at all clear that we are meant to leave those worlds behind entirely. Rather, it seems we are to carry them up with us into the larger world of the next stage of development.

But we are meant to move up. Puberty, and the very real need to continue the species, drives the segregated social circles back together. And it’s often not a pretty sight. But a lot of work has taken place behind the scenes. Boys and girls have developed each other and taught each other within their circles. And they have established a certain sorting, figured out where individuals stand within the group. Then the young men and women meet and take in the results, and it helps them to choose and connect with one another. We know who the people in the other sex are because their group tells us. They’ve figured out who is dominant, who is dangerous, who is marginal, who is popular, who is admired, who is loved, who is quirky. We have an idea what sort of person they are, thanks to the testing and sorting and establishment of identity within each sex.

Learning how to interpret the results of the intra-sexual social group in a way that is useful for inter-sexual socialization is a pretty complex skill. One that your parents and culture have hopefully been able to give some input on, not only your peer group that lacks much actual experience.