About Boys and Emotional Well-Being

Okay so it's no lie. I've been sitting here reading advice blogs for about two days.

I feel much better for it. But I also feel sad because all these blogs are geared towards women.

I know I know, there are advice columns for men out there too, which I don't read, and maybe they give amazing advice about coming through sorrow, and living a life that is true to your values. Right next to reviews of the latest first-person shooter and a picture of a young woman wearing peacock feathers where her clothes should be.

My point is, I think as far as emotional health is concerned. The balance is tipped in women's favor. This may seem illogical, since women seem to do the most suffering, but look at it this way:

All my life I've been taught to think and analyze my feelings. All my life I've been taught to think about and assess the emotions of those closest to me. When shitty things happen I have all sorts of resources I can go to for support and it's not wrong for me to do this. Talking about feelings is all women do. You'd think we were hard-wired to do this. What's really happening is we're just expressing something both sides of the relationship are experiencing in their own ways.

Women are sad over-sharers, who see themselves as continual emotional fix-up jobs because we are allowed to be. We get to do that in exchange for giving up a certain amount of social power.

Sidetrack: I think women are secretly fine with this. If someone said hey Miriam next time you needed to have a good cry at lunchtime with a friend, you couldn't, but you'd make .25 cents more on every dollar of your salary I'd say 'uh... no I need those crying dates, they are more valuable then money, but thanks.'

I'd go so far as to suggest that it's set up like this so that the next time I go into a relationship I am that much better at being the emotional backbone. When you look at it that way it's really not fair. We do all the ' emotional homework', happily (because who doesn't love to get drunk and talk about feelings?) Then we wonder why no matter how much of this emotional exploring we do, our relationships are still odd, unequal, and to an extent unsatisfying, no matter how wonderful our partner.

The problem is men do not have the same set of options available for learning from their emotions.

The typical guy has been taught that to communicate their feelings with anyone who is not an emotional partner is an embarrassment. Which is shitty. Men have close support networks available, but a man's friends can only hear what he is capable of saying, which is a scary thought to me indeed.

Men have also been taught that to express feelings as anything other than rage or depression is shameful. Crying is shameful, grief is shameful. Unfortunately depression isn't shameful. Isolating yourself, taking chemicals that dull the immediate feeling only to reproduce it later as a hangover, is not shameful. Sitting in your room without moving for 24hrs has become par for the course in our fucked up culture. Men can do depression, they just can't do sorrow.

Anyways, back to my main point. If men are taught anything, they are taught to repress or sublimate their feelings into other things. They learn coping mechanisms. There are healthy ones like building a deck, or writing a song, and there are the unhealthy ones, like going on a booze-fueled porn fest (see point re: depression) or picking fights.

So right now, I am a little sad, thinking of this army of hurt men out there (in particular one of course), continuing to hold in their painful emotions, or sublimate in hurtful ways. Or in the best case, sublimate in productive ways.

In fact, when I think about run of the mill misogyny, that annoying prevalence of imagery and ideas about women that relegate us to second place status, I wonder if it doesn't have something to do with the lack of emotional literacy that is basically called 'being a man'.

If straight men have been consistently told the core of their emotional lives, is less valuable and fundamentally a little bit shameful, how can they not semi-hate women. They love us, they try for us, but occasionally they fail. Then they have no way to integrate this failure into their self-image. If their needs for closeness, trust and security, were already kind of shameful, how are they supposed to cope when they lose those very things?

I am getting too theoretical, but I will end this post by saying the next one is going to be some very brief pieces of advice for men, who love women, and feel pain for that reason.

I will also say that this post is actually about being a girl and trying for a new definition of emotional health.

Ladies, for the sake of everybody, let's stop 'working' on our relationships. Don't support the unequal balance of emotional responsibility anymore. Men need to be able to cry, and fail, be needy, feel shitty, build up an idea of who they are in terms of their feelings, what their feelings have to tell them, and finally start to wonder what they need to change to gain a woman's confidence.

It's only fair right? And I actually think it would be much more healthy.