Gender Differences in Relationship Communication: New Survey

If you’ve ever wondered why you and your partner seem to avoid completely different topics, you’re not imagining it. Our survey of 2,300+ adults found real, measurable gender differences in relationship communication, though the gaps are often smaller than the stereotypes suggest.

A quick note before the data: these patterns describe average tendencies across everyone we surveyed who identified as a man or a woman, not a rule for every couple.

Many men and women fall outside these averages entirely, and this isn’t about heterosexual couples specifically.

If you’re in a same-sex or non-binary relationship, the same underlying skills apply even where these particular percentages don’t. For more on why couples go quiet in the first place, our piece on difficult conversations couples avoid covers the broader pattern beyond gender.

What the Survey Found, at a Glance

Pattern	Men	Women
Avoid conversations about sex or intimacy	37%	32%
Avoid conversations about emotions	33%	35%
Cite fear of their partner's reaction as a reason for staying silent	28%	31%
Report one partner shutting down during conflict	34%	38%
Report one partner usually "getting their way"	20%	19%

None of these gaps is large. Most sit within a few percentage points of each other. That in itself says something: communication avoidance is a shared, human pattern, not a man’s problem or a woman’s problem.

According to Kristen Failla, LMFT, “Although individual communication styles vary significantly among people of all gender identities, the common issues and obstacles experienced within such interactions are universal, with a united front being that communication is a concept that impacts and involves everyone.”

4 Ways Men and Women Tend to Avoid Difficult Conversations Differently

These are the four clearest gaps in our data, along with what might be underneath each one and a starting point for narrowing it.

1. Men are somewhat more likely to avoid sex and intimacy

In our survey, 37% of men avoided conversations about sex or physical intimacy, compared to 32% of women. It’s a modest gap, but a consistent one.

One possible explanation comes from research on how men are socialized around emotional expression. 

This doesn’t mean men feel less about these topics. The research above is about emotional expression broadly, not intimacy conversations specifically, but it suggests a plausible reason: less practice putting feelings into words in general could make the vulnerability that comes up around intimacy harder to navigate too.

If this sounds like your relationship, starting smaller can help. A short, low-pressure check-in about what feels good or doesn’t, separate from an actual intimate moment, tends to feel less exposing than an emotionally loaded conversation.

2. Women are slightly more likely to avoid emotional conversations, too

This one runs against a common assumption. If you searched for why women bring up emotions more, our data doesn’t fully back that up: 35% of women avoided conversations about emotions, compared to 33% of men. That’s close to even, with women marginally higher.

Our survey didn’t ask why, so we don’t want to guess at a cause that isn’t in the data. What we can say is that avoiding an emotional conversation doesn’t necessarily mean someone feels less.

It may mean they’re worried about how the conversation will land, or don’t yet have the words for what they’re feeling.

Kristen Failla highlights, “Through the study of social psychology, I have hypothesized that modern women might consciously (often as a defense or self-protective coping mechanism) be outwardly less emotional than history would suggest, potentially because they have had to be this way for so long.
A common, yet emotionally exhaustive instance of this is women being responsible for others’ emotions. This could be an example of the pendulum (of traditional gender roles and expectations) swinging over time, now allowing for people to communicate in ways that are more liberated and less restrictive.”

Either way, this pattern is a reminder not to assume your partner is the “avoidant one” just because of their gender. The data suggests both partners are about equally likely to be dodging the emotional topics.

Kristen Failla mentions, “Another example of the pendulum swinging through compensation (or overcorrecting) is noticing that traditional gender roles greatly impact and influence communication styles.
From a young age, girls are taught to be emotionally compassionate through play, while boys are taught to be competitive problem solvers. The differences we notice now within gender and emotionality can, to some degree, be related to no longer identifying with rigid roles and branching from them.”

3. Women are slightly more likely to cite fear of their partner’s reaction

Among the reasons couples gave for staying silent, 31% of women cited fear of their partner’s reaction, compared to 28% of men. Again, a modest but real gap.

This lines up with decades of research on how couples raise difficult topics. 

Later research on the same pattern found that power in the relationship, not gender itself, best predicts who ends up in the position of asking for change. Gender and power are so often entangled that a gendered pattern still shows up in the data anyway.

4. Conflict style splits along gender lines, too

In our survey, 38% of women reported that one partner shuts down during conflict, compared to 34% of men, a real if modest gap.

“One partner usually gets their way” was reported by 20% of men and 19% of women, too close to call a meaningful gender difference.

Here’s a closer look at what actually happens during a fight.

Behavior during disagreements	Men	Women
Old arguments got dragged in	37%	41%
Felt completely overwhelmed	29%	41%
Insults or name-calling happened	25%	31%

Behavior during disagreements	Men	Women
Insults or name-calling happened	25%	31%
Took a break to cool off	14%	18%
Felt their partner understood their side	15%	17%
Nothing on this list happened	20%	14%
Stayed kind or playful	7%	9%

Two of these are worth naming directly. Feeling overwhelmed shows one of the largest gaps in this breakdown, with women reporting it well over 10 percentage points more often than men.

Insults or name-calling ran the opposite direction of what a lot of people would guess: women reported this slightly more often than men, not less. If you’ve heard the assumption that men are the more verbally aggressive ones in an argument, our data doesn’t back that up.

Men were also the more likely group to report that none of these behaviors happened at all, which fits with men also reporting less overwhelm. Our survey can’t tell us whether that reflects a genuinely calmer conflict style or just a different sense of what counts as “overwhelming.”

Psychologists call a related dynamic the demand-withdraw pattern: one partner presses to discuss an issue while the other retreats into defensiveness or silence.

In practice, this means the same couple can swap roles depending on the topic. Whoever wants the change is more likely to be the one pushing, and whoever feels comfortable with things as they are is more likely to be the one going quiet.

A Few More Topics Where the Gap Shows Up

Sex, emotions, and fear of reaction are the clearest gaps in our data, but they’re not the only ones. A handful of other topics show smaller gaps worth a quick look.

Topic	Men	Women
Money or spending	22%	27%
Personality quirks or habits	15%	20%
In-laws or extended family	20%	24%
Work or career stress	17%	15%

None of these gaps are large enough to build a rule around, but the pattern across them is worth naming honestly. Women reported avoiding money, personality quirks, and in-laws more often than men.

Work or career stress is the one topic here where that flips, with men avoiding it slightly more. Taken as a whole, this list is a reminder that “who avoids more” depends heavily on the specific topic, not a fixed trait of either gender.

Mistakes Couples Make When They Treat These Patterns as Rules

Averages are useful for spotting a pattern, but they are easy to misuse once you know them. Here are a few ways that happens.

• Assuming your partner fits the pattern. Many men and women fall outside these averages. Treating your specific partner as a stereotype rather than a person tends to create more distance, not less.
• Using the research to score points in an argument. “Studies show men do this” is rarely persuasive to the person you’re arguing with, and can come across as dismissive rather than informative.
• Assuming the more talkative partner is the healthier one. Bringing up a topic isn’t inherently better than staying quiet about it. Both silence and constant pursuit can be ways of avoiding real vulnerability.
• Ignoring your own role in a demand-withdraw cycle. If your partner tends to withdraw, pressing harder often deepens the withdrawal instead of resolving anything.

How to Bridge the Gap as a Couple

Start by naming the pattern together, not as blame, but as a shared observation. “I’ve noticed I tend to push and you tend to go quiet, and I don’t think either of us is doing that on purpose” lands better than “you always shut down.”

If one of you tends to avoid a specific topic, like intimacy or emotions, agree on a lower-stakes way to bring it up. A written note, a walk instead of a face-to-face conversation, or a scheduled time can lower the pressure enough to make the first attempt easier.

If you recognize the demand-withdraw pattern in your own relationship, it often helps to separate the topic from the timing. The partner who wants to talk can ask when the other feels ready, rather than raising it the moment it comes to mind.

The partner who tends to withdraw can commit to a specific time to come back to it, rather than letting it drop entirely.

It also helps to know that partners often aren’t starting from the same place. In our survey, men were the group most likely to say they’d thought about making a change but hadn’t acted on it, at 26% compared to 20% of women.

Women, meanwhile, were considerably more likely to have already tried self-help resources on their own, at 31% compared to 20% of men. If you’ve been meaning to bring something up, your partner may already be ahead of you. It’s worth asking rather than assuming.

For a broader set of starting points beyond gendered patterns, our guide on how to improve communication in a relationship covers what couples in our survey actually tried and what tends to hold up.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where This Leaves You and Your Partner

The gaps in this data are real, but they’re narrower than most stereotypes about men and women suggest. Somewhere between 3 and 6 percentage points separates most of these patterns, not a wide chasm.

What tends to matter more than which gender avoids what is whether a couple can name their specific pattern honestly and adjust it together. That’s true whether you match the averages here or not.

If a specific topic keeps getting avoided in your relationship, our survey on couples avoiding difficult conversations and our breakdown of why couples avoid difficult conversations in the first place go deeper into the reasons behind the silence.