UF study: divorce can be conversation stopper or subject of gaffes

June 12, 2001

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Breaking up is hard to do when the divorced person must endure to rude remarks and flippant observations, says a University of Florida researcher whose own marriage break-up led her to study the subject.

Usually the offenders put their feet in their mouths simply because they don’t know how to react to news of a divorce. The gaffe extra-troubling for people from other countries who are trying to sort out an unfamiliar language and culture, said Jodi Nelms, a recent doctoral graduate in linguistics who did the research while at UF.

“People would express comments like ‘Oh, you’ll find someone again soon,” Nelms said. “I thought, ‘Hmmm, do I need to?’ Or they would try to make light of the situation — ‘Oh, boy, now you can eat garlic!’”

Nelms studied 81 e-mail, telephone and face-to-face responses from professors, students and friends to news of her divorce in 2000. She wanted to learn more about the social impact of such communication breakdowns by evaluating what people intended to say and the way their words were perceived.

All in all, Nelms, who will become a linguistics professor at Georgia State University this fall, found out a lot more about her friends and co-workers than she bargained for.

“Instead of just saying in a sentence or two that they had also gotten divorced, some felt it was OK to tell me all about their current marriage, ex-spouse or whatever bad relationship they were in,” she said.

Surprisingly, men, who have a reputation for being closemouthed about their personal lives, were more candid than women in their responses, Nelms said. “I’d even get comments like ‘Oh, so you’re on the market again — I wish I wasn’t such a happily married man.’”

The most tongue-tied and awkward — and facing some of the biggest challenges — were people from other countries. Nelms, who teaches English as a second language to international graduate students on campus who are teaching assistants, finds as a general rule these students are extremely uncomfortable with touchy disclosures.

“They walk into class and say, ‘My professor’s wife died and I don’t know what to say’ or ‘My professor got a divorce and I don’t know how to respond,’” said Nelms, whose students come from Japan, Bosnia, Poland, China, Spain and other countries.

Because of their positions, teaching assistants know more than undergraduates about their professors’ personal lives and stand to lose a lot careerwise by offending them, she said.

Other cultures often have a formulaic expression for a particular kind of personal misfortune, she said. By contrast, people in the United States are caught off guard by the expectation of having to say something new or different.

With some life transitions, such as divorce, outsiders may not even know whether to say ‘Congratulations’ or ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

“They’re in a particularly vulnerable situation because they have a language barrier, and on top of that they don’t know the social ramifications of using language in another culture,” Nelms said. “So they come out sounding like a foreigner — and sometimes a rude foreigner at that.”

Learning how to reply to sensitive news is important because unlike revealing information, people don’t have power over someone else’s unloading, she said.

If a friend divorces or dies, you can simply keep it to yourself, Nelms said. “I don’t have any control if someone comes up and tells me, ‘I’m getting a divorce,’ and it seems that Americans divulge personal information more than people from other cultures.”

UF linguistics professor Diana Boxer said Nelms’ focus on a delicate issue such as divorce is an unexplored area of sociolinguistics, yet one that is vital to non-native populations in negotiating the interactions of day-to-day life.

Because the field of sociolinguistics is only about 30 years old, many of its applications to social and work life have not been studied, said Boxer, author of the new book “Applying Socio-linguistics: Domains and Face-to-Face Interaction.” “Yet knowing what to say or what not to say is crucial for not only non-native speakers of any language,” she said. “We all certainly know of native speakers who are simply at a loss for what to say at difficult times. They don’t want to say something that makes people feel they are in a face-threatening situation.”