The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [99]
Language style matching (LSM) scores between the works of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The higher the LSM score, the more similarly the two poets used function words.
SYLVIA PLATH AND TED HUGHES
Whereas the Brownings’ marriage is often idealized by modern writers, the relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is not. Plath was born in Boston and met the British-born Hughes while she was on a Fulbright scholarship at Cambridge University. Both were considered rising young stars in the poetry world. Her writing was often emotional, confessional, and occasionally whimsical. His was more cerebral, often dealing with nature and myth. Four months after meeting at a party, they married—she was twenty-four; he was twenty-six.
During the first four years of their marriage, both experienced personal and professional success. Relative to Plath, Hughes’s writing came easily and he won several awards. About five years into the marriage, Plath’s health started to fail, including several bouts with influenza, an appendectomy, and a miscarriage. She accurately suspected Hughes of being unfaithful—often causing her to fly into violent fits of rage. Within a year, Hughes left Plath for another woman. Plath, who had a history of depression before her marriage, sank into a period of despondency. Even though she continued with her writing, she became increasingly isolated from her friends. Less than a year after her separation from Hughes, at the age of thirty, she committed suicide.
It is interesting to compare the language styles of Plath and Hughes over the course of their relationship—especially in comparison with the Brownings. As is apparent in the figure, Plath and Hughes had very different linguistic styles before they met. Hers was far more personal and immediate compared to his more objective, distanced style. During their relatively happy years, their styles converged to some degree before veering apart during the last three years of her life.
It is also interesting to see how the two couples differed in their language style overall. The much happier marriage of the Brownings was associated with greater language style matching across all phases of their lives compared with the Plath-Hughes relationship. It would be a mistake to conclude that language style matching was the cause of the Brownings’ success or the Plath-Hughes’s marital failure. Instead, the matching of function words between two people merely reflects the fact that the two people tend to think alike. It is even riskier to make bold statements about LSM and relationships by looking at people’s professional writing—especially when the two may be writing about very different topics aimed at different audiences.
BEYOND LOVE: ADMIRATION AND CONTEMPT BETWEEN FREUD AND JUNG
LSM analyses can tell us something about close intimate relationships. The instant messages between dating couples helped reveal which couples were most likely to succeed and fail. The more esoteric poetry analyses allowed us to infer the similarity in thinking between married poets, and, by extension, pointed to the high and low spots in their relationships.
But there is much more to LSM than romantic love and heartbreak. The analysis of function words can be applied to any kind of relationship between two people. As long as we have ongoing communications between people—letters, e-mails, Twitter interactions—we can use the LSM technology to assess the degree to which the correspondents are in synchrony with each other. After studying the language and marital relationships of poets, Molly Ireland and I turned our attention to relationships