Gender consists of social, psychological, and cultural traits generally associated with one sex or the other (Canary, Emmers-Sommer, & Faulkner, 1997). Unlike biological sex, which we’re born with, gender is largely learned. Gender influences how people communicate interpersonally, but scholars disagree about how. For example, you may have read in popular magazines or heard on TV that women are more “open” communicators than men, and that men “have difficulty communicating their feelings.” But when these beliefs are compared with research and theory on gender and interpersonal communication, it turns out that differences (and similarities) between men and women are more complicated than the popular stereotypes suggest. Throughout this book, we discuss such stereotypes and look at scholarly research on the impact of gender on interpersonal communication.

Each of us also possesses a sexual orientation: an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectionate attraction to others that exists along a continuum ranging from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality and that includes various forms of bisexuality (APA Online, n.d.). You may have heard that gays and lesbians communicate in ways different from “straights,” or that each group builds, maintains, and ends relationships in distinct ways. But, as with common beliefs about gender, research shows that same-gender and opposite-gender relationships are formed, maintained, and dissolved in similar ways. We discuss assumptions about sexual orientation throughout this text.