Men who do not have support for handling difficult emotional situations often do terrible things when faced with difficult emotional situations. I don’t really think this is saying anything new or insightful, but it is an important starting place for understanding why men’s emotional support networks are important and worth talking about on a collective level.
It is a pretty common stereotype that Men are bad at feelings. This is often represented in media as men having difficulty talking about things or experiences that they want or desire, as well as tending to avoid conversations or situations where other people expect them to express their feelings. This stereotype typically arises from the idea that men are supposed to portray strength at all times, and strength is often interpreted to mean independence and not needing help from anyone. I think this is a terrible definition of strength, but independence, especially in the United States is seen as core social virtue, and being the opposite, dependent upon others, is not only a sign of weakness, it is a sign of subservience.
Even as someone that is highly critical of Independence as strength, because people pretending to be independent are just ignoring or deliberately hiding the ways they get help from others, it is very difficult not to let the desire to “handle my own shit,” and not burden others with my problems. One reason for this is experience. Even when your friends and family are amazing people, big problems are difficult to deal with, and there are only so many difficult problems that people have the emotional, mental and physical capacity to deal with at once. Having problems, and sharing those problems with others is undeniably increasing the burden that those people face. (I will come back to this specific idea in just a minute because this is both true, and also often exaggerated, or made worse more by how the sharing occurs than by the sharing of the problems in the first place).
One time, I was in a relationship that created a lot stressful and difficult situations for me to handle emotionally, which I mention in Post 9 of 100. This was a romantic relationship with a cisgendered woman who had very bad experiences with emotional men acting out violently, and thus she would immediately get incredibly uncomfortable and upset around men expressing difficult emotions. This is a very rational response to the trauma she had experienced, but it also made it really difficult for me to process some of the more challenging emotional experiences of that relationship, especially because I was young, and not as emotionally mature as I imagined myself to be. I also was mistakenly trying to contain all of my difficult feelings in that relationship to that relationship because I was afraid of being judged by others, both for the situations I was creating for myself and how I wasn’t capable of handing myself in them. After one difficult in person conversation, I started crying pretty intensely, and she told me I needed to leave. This wasn’t a relationship ending “get out,” even if it kind of felt like it to me at the time, it was more like “I can’t feel safe talking to you about this while you are having such intense feelings,” which is something that I want all of my partners to be able to say when it is necessary. At the same time, it put me in a real bind as I was not in my home city, and I was broke as shit. So the emotional difficulty and intensity of the situation was really only getting amplified for both of us (and I am now much more sympathetic now to how dangerous it can be for someone to be in a romantic relationship with someone socialized as a man who doesn’t have a strong economic safety net, but that is a little off topic for this conversation).
It is incredibly dangerous, for everyone, when people socialized as men are afraid to talk to anyone except their romantic partners about difficult emotional experiences, for many reasons, but especially because romantic relationships often become the source of difficult emotional experiences. According to National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men, 18 and older, have been the victims of severe intimate partner violence, and that more than 12 million people in the US experience intimate partner violence each year. Almost half of both men and women have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime, and more than half of women killed by gun violence in the US are killed by family members or intimate partners. It is very unlikely to me that most of the men that end up engaging in intimate partner violence plan on ever having to use physical violence in their relationships, but it does seem incredibly likely to me that men tend to resort to physical violence when they have no other plan for handling difficult emotional situations in their lives, especially when they can point to one person in their life causing the emotional difficulty. This doesn’t excuse any violent behavior, but it strongly indicates to me that there is a large number of men who end up engaging in intimate partner violence that probably wouldn’t, if they had other ways of handling difficult emotional situations and people to help train them to use those other means before the situations escalate.
Cue: Men can’t expect women to do their difficult emotional labor for them. It is not healthy for men, and it is incredibly dangerous for women. This isn’t to say that folks socialized as men shouldn’t have any friends that women, or that they can’t share emotional difficulties with their friends, family and partners who are women, but, especially for straight men, when the women they are close to are the only ones they talk to about their emotions, there is a very real danger of creating a situation of creating a situation where a source of emotional difficulty is the only person the man trusts to talk to about their emotions.
We, folks socialized as men or in the process of becoming men, really need to step up and supporting each other. It would be great if seeking professional mental health support were normalized, destigmatized and freely available, and that is a worth-while goal to work towards in the future. At the same time, our friends and family members are alive now, in a country that tends to criminalize and scorn anyone presenting any signs of potential mental or emotional distress, and that only increases the risk of the people we care about getting hurt or hurting others when they, or someone in their life can’t handle the emotional difficulties in their life. Men need to stop repeating lies that tend to lead to harm down the road, like “men need to be able to exert control and authority over their families and their partners or they aren’t really men,” but also lies like “real men sacrifice everything for the benefit of their family,” and “having a relationship end before you are ready is a sign of weakness and failure.” Men need, instead, to make sure that their friends know that it is normal to talk to each other about emotional difficult situations from a place of vulnerability and uncertainty without being judged as weak, or just needing to toughen up. If men aren’t sure they can offer that support to each other, it is probably a good idea to make sure that you know what free and low cost resources are available to people struggling with difficult emotional situations in their lives, in their area, and they really should practice getting better at being a supportive friend. It is ok to feel like you are not good at talking to people about emotions or providing support to people struggling with emotional stresses. Being up front about that at the start of conversations, and trying to avoid assuming that providing support requires you to act like you know everything about someone else’s situation or how they should respond is a very, very good place to start getting better at providing emotional support. In fact, most of the time, a person experience intense emotional distress really is not capable of having someone else “solve” the cause of their distress for them, and what they really need is someone to listen to them make sure that they are considering potential actions or reactions that they might be capable of taking to respond to the distressing situation if they don’t rush into doing something brash, or based off of socialized patriarchal instincts.
It is ok for friends to practice providing emotional support to each other. In fact, if we want to live in a world with much less intimate partner violence, it is probably essential. Figuring out how to do that is a great idea, but one that each of us is going to have to do together, with the people we want to be able to count on for providing us support, and who want us to be there providing support to them as well.