I was addressing a small gathering in a suburban Virginia living room—a women’s group that had invited men to join them. Throughout the evening, one man had been particularly talkative, frequently offering ideas and anecdotes, while his wife sat silently beside him on the couch. Toward the end of the evening, I commented that women frequently complain that their husbands don’t talk to them. This man quickly nodded in agreement. He gestured toward his wife and said, “She’s the talker in our family.” The room burst into laughter; the man looked puzzled and hurt. “It’s true,” he explained. “When I come home from work, I have nothing to say. If she didn’t keep the conversation going, we’d spend the whole evening in silence.”

    This episode crystallizes the irony that although American men tend to talk more than women in public situations, they often talk less at home. And this pattern is wreaking havoc with marriage.

    The pattern was observed by political scientist Andrew Hacker in the late 1970s. Sociologist Catherine Kohler Riessman reports in her new book Divorce Talk that most of the women she interviewed—but only a few of the men—gave lack of communication as the reason for their divorces. Given the current divorce rate of nearly 50 percent, that amounts to millions of cases in the United States every year—a virtual epidemic of failed conversation.

    In my own research, complaints from women about their husbands most often focused not on tangible inequities such as having given up the chance for a career to accompany a husband to his, or doing far more than their share of daily life-support work like cleaning, cooking and social arrangements. Instead, they focused on communication: “He doesn’t listen to me.” “He doesn’t talk to me.” I found, as Hacker observed years before, that most wives want their husbands to be, first and foremost, conversational partners, but few husbands share this expectation of their wives.

    In short, the image that best represents the current crisis is the stereotypical cartoon scene of a man sitting at the breakfast table with a newspaper held up in front of his face, while a woman glares at the back of it, wanting to talk.

答案精析：根据题干中的most wives和expectation可定位至原文第四段最后一句。该句提到，大多数妻子都希望自己的丈夫首先是一个可以谈话的对象，但很少有丈夫会对自己的妻子抱有这种期望。该段前半部分也说到，通常女性对丈夫的抱怨不在于自己对家庭付出的多少，而在于她们的丈夫在家是否能和她们进行沟通。由此可推断，大多数妻子对丈夫的主要期望是能和她们交谈，故正确答案为A。本题定位句较为靠后，通过文章首段第三句，女士们经常抱怨她们的丈夫不跟她们说话，以及第三段提到的缺乏沟通会导致离婚，同样可以推断出妻子希望的是丈夫能和她们交谈。

错项排除：全文并未提到有关trust（信任）的相关信息，B项属于无中生有，故排除。原文第四段第一句出现了career, daily life-support work等词作为C、D两项的干扰词，但该句说的是女性对丈夫的抱怨通常不是集中在实际的不平等上，比如放弃工作陪伴丈夫，或者做了更多的家务活。她们更重视的是夫妻之间的交流。所以妻子对丈夫的期望并不在于“支持她们的事业”或“分担家务”，故C、D两项错误。