Michael Daxon, give me one chance, one chance to dance.

Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Jan Black.

And I'm Laura Owens.

Are women's friendships different than men's?

Do women friends talk more and about more personal things than men do? How do you define

a close friend? Those are among the questions we're exploring right now with our guest, Deborah

Tannen, who spent her career studying the language of everyday conversation. Deborah is a

professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of many books, the latest of which is called

You're the Only One I Can Tell Inside the Language of Women's Friendships.

Deborah, thank you so much for joining us today. How did you decide on the title of your book,

you're the only one I can tell? It typifies close relationships for many women.

Your best friend is the one you tell everything to women that I interviewed, and I should say I interviewed 80 girls and women ranging in age from 9 to 97.

And I often heard comments like, if she's a close friend, I tell her

everything I think and everything I feel. Or she knows things about me. Nobody else knows. So this

feeling that a friend is someone you can tell things to you is a big part of friendship for many women.

And I think there's a lot of pressure on girls at an early age to have a best friend.

There's kind of societal pressure and peer pressure to, oh, you need to have a best friend.

Yeah, it's so true.

And people who have studied girls and women as compared to boys,

and I wrote about this quite a bit in the book I wrote called You Just Don't Understand

conversations between women and men, that little girls, you find them whispering to each other

...