The trouble with men.

A friend of mine under his nom de nette posted a comment that he believes may be the most popular thing he ever wrote:

Wife: Open up about your emotions

Husband: [Does so]

Wife: [Disgusted and nervous about the needy weakling she married]

He's been getting a steady stream of Likes for it, and it isn't even the post, just a comment he made on a gag post about marital relations. It seems like he hit a nerve.

Men of my dad's generation were of the old "never complain, never explain" school, a.k.a. "one mood, all the time." It's not to say this was true for all men; comedy characters through history have shown men acting crazed, hysterical, weird, silly, terrified, bombastic, and in a word, overcommunicative. But those aren't usually the men we want to be when we grow up -- at least, not in front of wives and children. We want them to know they can rely on us, that we won't go to pieces in the face of danger or lesser trouble. Part of assuring them is putting on a brave face -- maybe just in the hope of convincing ourselves we are brave -- and part of the brave face means not opening up about our emotions. 

But there's a big downside to that of course, the most ghastly being that while women may attempt suicide more often than men, men succeed more often. It's not even close. It's not even in the same league. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says that "In 2021, men died by suicide 3.90x more than women". News reports about suicide statistics make it sound like the perpetrators are all trans kids or heartsick Mesdames Bovarys, but most are middle-aged white men. Even in a wealthy and relatively peaceful nation like the United States, men can feel desperate from failure, betrayal, loss, or just medically diagnosable depression, and there's a good chance no one will know until it's too late. That's partly because no one wants to know. 

Women are not blind to the fact that the men in their lives may not be sharing all their feelings. But they don't always want us to. I have a friend who's a terrific lady, very funny, checks all the boxes for proper modern liberal attitudes, and she once shocked me by saying she would lose respect for her husband if she ever saw him crying. I know she's not alone in that. 

There is that protection thing. It's a legitimate concern: Women who want to marry men want to know the man will be there for protection. Maybe the biggest threat to women is other men -- sorry to admit that's probably true -- so it's crucial to have one of her own to beat the snot out of some guy who makes trouble. So this husband had better not be some crying chickenhearted loser. 

What this means, though, is if she's asking for you to open up about your emotions, what she really wants is to know that you have an emotional connection (i.e., you feel the same way about something that she does), or maybe she just wants to know what the hell you're so doggone sore about. If you say you're haunted about something from childhood or frightened about a problem you can't solve, she'll lose interest -- or worse. 

So there we have it -- wives want husbands to be tough, and husbands want their wives to think of them as tough, and so we shut our mouths about any emotions except maybe anger or regret. This is foundational stuff, a deep part of the human condition, and seventy-odd years of pop psychology hasn't changed the problem. 

It does highlight the importance of men having male friends, and I mean real friends, not just golf pals or Dorito-sucking bodies in front of the football game or stooges to get stoopid with on Saturday night. If you're a man, your close male friends ought to be the ones you can go to without fearing loss of face. But of course, we have historically let one another down in that way, too. Looking like a coward to other men is almost as bad as looking like a coward to the women who rely on us. So we just eat it, until maybe we eat a bullet. 

Women don't have a monopoly on all the trouble in the world. Sometimes it seems that the best we men can hope for is to be able to take whatever comes like a man.