Why Do Men Not Open Up

Comment by https://old.reddit.com/user/TheBananaKing:

From my personal experience:

1. They will weaponize your vulnerabilities against you.
2. They will lose sexual attraction.
3. They will tell their friends.

You think you’re ready. You’re not ready.

You’re ready for a few manly tears, like Grey Worm admitting he was afraid to lose Missandei. You’re not ready for ugly-crying, lying in the fetal position and rocking, going to pieces, being unable to function. You’re not ready for horizonless grey depression that you can’t ‘cheer him up’ to dispel. You’re not ready for crippling anxiety. You’re not ready for incoherent anger at everything and nothing for no reason. You’re not ready for him to be lost and helpless and afraid, hanging out over the abyss with no way back.

Women in our society tend to have huge social support networks, and wide societal acceptance, indeed positive encouragement, for displays of vulnerability and pain. Men… do not. They don’t get support or affection from friends and co-workers - and displays of vulnerability are absolute suicide, both professionally and socially.

Inside Out is true only for girls. If a boy had been on a tree branch, crying because his team had lost… it wouldn’t have summoned an outpouring of love and support from the people closest to him. He’d have been pulled out of that tree, shamed, abused, mocked and made a pariah for it. And that’s just by the mother.

There is no socially-acceptable outlet for any of it, so we just have to tank the damage and bottle it up until we break.

Men in this society are valued for capability, reliability and durability. Anything that threatens their productivity, or could render them a liability rather than an asset in any given situation… makes them widely considered to be worthless (Barbie).

It sucks absolute donkey balls, it’s profoundly destructive, and it shouldn’t be this way, but it is. And on top of that, guys get told they’re not being intimate enough if they don’t ‘open up’, so they have to carefully craft a second mask, over the top of the first one, simulating just a little tiny but of emotional leakage, but not enough to threaten their perceived usefulness.

Of course they dare not let anything real slip out; for one thing they get no opportunity to practice a controlled release at any point in their lives, and for a second the sheer quantity of shit they’re holding back will destroy the entire dam if they poke a little hole in it.

So they’re left in the extremely stressful and burdensome position of having to perform fake vulnerability for your benefit, while keeping the lid screwed down even harder on the real thing. Because that’s fun and enjoyable, no ma’am it is not.

And every one of us has made the mistake, once in our lives, of thinking that this person is different, this person is safe and trustworthy and close enough to see what’s really under the armor. And every one of us has seen love and admiration die in their eyes in real time, and convert into disgust and contempt. Has heard their partner forming exit strategies in their head, and felt the whole relationship wither and die shortly thereafter.

It’s like watching someone who just signed on a home discover that it’s riddled with termites. Something vital dies there and then; instead of it being home/security/stability/future, it becomes a betrayal and a liability in their eyes - and even if the problems get patched up, they’l never feel the same way about it again.

None of us make that mistake twice.

Again: this is not how things should be. It’s a dire imprecation of everything that’s wrong with our culture, and the profoundly maladaptive coping mechanisms that result are damaging in the extreme.

This needs profound cultural change from the ground up. It needs vulnerability for men and boys presented as normal and acceptable, right from early childhood. It needs representation and role models, it needs interactions played out and healthy modes of support and just plain tolerance portrayed as the norm - and not just unworkable direct transplants from female-support-network models either.

Asking guys to just go throw themselves in the fire so you can feel more valued (before deciding that you’d rather feel valued by someone more resilient instead) is not an option.