SecondVoice

Like straight men are capable of maybe a quarter of the indepth emotional labor and support women do for each other. Like men can literally have one friend named Bob that they go fishing with once a year and still be content for life. Then they think it’s cute and girlish that their wives have these long term, integrated, emotionally intense relationships with women but like…LOL, it’s not because men don’t need those kinds of relationships, it’s just that they get it all from their wives while offering peanuts in return. PEANUTS.

I’ve read articles and personal stories about and by men, talking about experiences they’ve had that have shown them how painfully out of touch they are with their own emotions and their own ability to open up and connect with people, including themselves.

They throw all their eggs in one basket with a significant other, or at times a parent, and when problems arise in that relationship, because they have no other relationships to speak of, they quickly turn to destruction.

This is why I often give out advice that people need to expand on their relationships. You literally CAN’T have it all hinge on a single person, it is a horrific idea and it will destroy you and the things and people you love. You HAVE to have relationships with other people.

Anyone with any mental health issue can tell you that the inability to talk it out, the lack of having someone to turn to, makes things go careening downhill, faster than we can catch them back.

Somehow this is considered an acceptable way of being for men, and their lashing out is “just how men are”. It’s more masculine to shoot yourself than to take medication. It’s more masculine to beat your partners than to have a conversation with them. It’s more masculine to bottle everything up until it erupts and people die, than it is to simply ask for help.

And people want to blame women and feminism for it, for “making men afraid”, or simply try to list the likelihood of surviving suicide and avoiding drug abuse as “female privilege” or something that is a nature-given trick of “biological sex”, rather than address the very serious issue of toxic masculinity and extreme, self-destructive hatred of being perceived as anything like women.