Stories From The Office

I'm not sure where I'm going with this story or even why I'm telling it. I've convinced myself that it's okay to tell it, even though it's a real patient story, and I'll confabulate some details, but basically it's true. I haven't seen the patient in over ten years, I don't recall his name, I'm not sure if he's even alive. It's one of those stories, however, that sticks in my head; one I think about from time to time, one that makes me wish I could tell it to the people it involves.

So John (not his real name) was an elderly, but not old, gentleman. He laughed easily and found joy in many things. He and his wife of 53 years had many wonderful things going on in their lives.

He talked about his father who had come to this country from Europe. His father had very definitive ideas about how John should live his life and the rules were spelled out quite clearly. As a young man, John had fallen in love with a young woman and he'd wanted to propose-- his father disapproved and wanted him to put his education first. The young woman married someone else and my patient met his current, and only, wife. He'd long ago lost touch with his first love, but he did know what had become of her-- she'd become quite prominent in her own career and John knew that she still lived in town.

He had spent 54 years thinking about this woman, feeling he'd made a mistake, pining for the one that got away. His wife was kind and attentive, and they got along well, but he'd lived out his adult life quietly wondering 'What if?'

And why is this a blog-worthy story? In fact, I've wanted to write about it for 2 years, I' m not sure what has quite stopped me.

So the patient told me his first love's name. I knew this woman-- she is the mother of one of my friends. I didn't know her 54 years ago, but in the here and now, she's a cranky soul and, if you ask me, my patient is better off with the lovely wife he has. The funny thing is that my friend's dad is a lot like my patient.

I wondered then if I should say something. What would I say and would it help? I didn't, by the way-- I was afraid it might make things worse and that I would regret having opened this door. It's always a little awkward when my worlds intersect.

Do Women Talk Too Much?

Contrary to popular myth, it turns out that women and men tend to talk about the same amounts. A soon-to-be-published study described in Science reported that Pennebaker, et al., "equipped 396 college students--210 of them women--for several days with voice recorders that automatically turned on every 12.5 minutes to record for 30 seconds during their waking hours. All words spoken by the wearer were transcribed, counted, and extrapolated to estimate a daily word count."

The results? Average number of words spoken per day:
Women: 16,215 . . . Men: 15,669.
The difference is not statistically significant.

Now, this does not prove or refute the long-held belief that Dinah speaks more than Clink or Roy, as there is a wide variability in how many words one speaks.

In the study, the variation ranged from a low of 700 to a high of 47,000 (that one was a man), according to John Grohol's post in PsychCentral.

While the study, which really only applies to college students and not the general population, failed to confirm the widely-held belief that women talk more than men, it did confirm another stereotype:

“Men talk more about technology, work, money. They also use more numbers,” he said. “Women talk more about fashion and about relationships.”

Here is the histogram showing the spread of spoken daily words among the study participants: