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：主旨题，本题需要结合全文意思进行分析。文章开头以一次小聚会为例，揭示男女之间交流方式的不同，女性经常抱怨丈夫在家不和她们交谈。第二段指出了男女在谈话模式上的不同，可知男性在公共场合更健谈，而女性在家里更健谈。三、四两段描述了这种沟通差异会给婚姻造成伤害，最后一段又再次强调了这一差异。由此可知，本文的主题一直是围绕着男女谈话的差异进行讨论的，故正确答案为D。

错项排除：A项中的moral decaying（道德败坏）在原文中并未出现，文章也没有对其进行讨论，A项属于无中生有，故排除。原文第四段出现了tangible inequalities作为B项的干扰词，但原文是说大多数妻子认为导致离婚的重要因素是缺乏沟通，并非性别上的不平等，故B项错误。第四段最后一句说到，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，这其实说的还是由于谈话模式上的不同，造成了这种期望差异，C项过于片面，故排除。