There's nothing wrong with your son

On gendered communication styles.

When I was an infant, I didn’t say my first words for long enough that my parents got worried. They asked the doctors: “Is there something wrong with our son?”

When I did start talking, though, almost immediately it was in full sentences. Naturally, my parents stopped worrying. All that time, they reckoned, I must have understood more than I let on. Maybe it just seemed scary and complicated, so I wanted to make sure I had it down first.

Adult me is the same way when it comes to talking through his emotions.

It does not come naturally. It takes practice even to notice feelings, much less name and express them. And we all make mistakes when practicing, so practice is scary when the stakes feel high (ex: in a big group, or in a serious relationship). I’m afraid of making a scene, or hurting people I love. I’m afraid of seeming weak or childish. I’m afraid of snide comments behind my back, teasing the 32-year-old man who still sputters over his jumbled feelings.

So typically, I practice in private. I blurt through my fingers. I write it down, then heavily edit it, then organize it like one of my essays: in full fucking sentences, that become paragraphs and pages until I’m certain it’s how I actually feel and why. My love language is English.

And when it’s done? Not to toot my own horn as a writer, but I can express my emotions as precisely as anyone. I just need time to find the words.

The problem with that is in the transmission. Oddly, most friends and partners don’t seem to want your emotions expressed via email.¹ Once you’ve written it out, you have to condense it to bullets, rehearse the delivery, and unload it—typically, all at once. Unloading pages at once can feel sudden and overwhelming to speaker and listener alike.

That leads to scheduling the conversation, and dreading the conversation, and communication as an ugh field. It leads to conversations that spark defensiveness and go poorly, no matter how perfectly you chose the words the night before. It leads to consoling the listener for valid but negative emotions that the communication provoked in them. It leads to frustration that the whole process is more trouble than it’s worth and temptation to keep feelings swallowed—or worse, to drown them in booze, or brain rot, or other addictive distractions.

The ability I lack

Not everyone seems to have my problem. There is an ability I lack, but notice in others: to express emotions immediately and unmistakably, in real time.

People with this skill are mainly women, but not entirely. They do it through body language, eye contact, and sharp inhales—but also, they do it in words. Imprecise words, said right away, that don’t seem chosen or calculated at all! You can read them like a book. And you can tell, just watching them, that they’ve never had to practice.

I can also tell, just watching them, that I could never do that in a million years.²

It isn’t just that these people display their emotions more vividly than I do. They also seem to feel emotions more strongly than I do in the first place. I cannot relate to spontaneously cooing because I saw a cute dog or baby. I can’t fathom loudly gasping at what Kate told Sara. And when I’m insecure, or mad at a friend, or bothered by something in my relationship, I can’t imagine just saying so without a script prepared. I can imagine trying, but not that it would go well. By nature or nurture, some filter in my brain interrupts that impulse. It’s pretty deep in there. There is only so much you can rewire me.

Mysoginists will sometimes denigrate this skill, as if it were somehow a mark of lower intelligence. Not me: I envy this skill. People who have it can connect with others naturally and immediately. Unless they’re vain or selfish, they are rarely short of friends, and their friendships seem stronger and more self-sustaining than mine. Their social lives are more fulfilling and recharging. They report less stress. They live longer.

In other words, they have something in their knapsack that I don’t have in mine. They enjoy a contentment—a community, a support network, an extra decade—that I have to work harder to achieve and maintain, as a direct consequence of the gendered stigmas men have to deal with. That’s something I often wish that progressives, so taken with unpacking these invisible knapsacks, would acknowledge more explicitly.

Fault, responsibility, and empathy

One difficulty with discussing identity issues is that not everyone grasps the difference between fault and responsibility. Here is a simple way to explain it. If you are a lifeguard, and some kid shits in the pool, that is not your fault—but it is damn sure your responsibility to do something about it.

So it is with men and emotional expression. It is not our fault that we often struggle to communicate our emotions. That is the fault of unfair social stigmas that shaped our brains and habits from infancy. Still, it remains our responsibility to deal with that challenge by finding constructive ways to sit with, understand, and express our emotions when needed.

Empathy is a third thing. Just because men’s issues are not women’s responsibility does not mean they shouldn’t empathize with them.³ And it especially doesn’t mean it’s okay for women to reinforce the unfair stigmas that leave men trapped.⁴ Destigmatizing men’s emotional expression means showing empathy and patience for men who try, even if the ways we find to express our emotions are not the ways women are attuned to receive them.

There is no wrong way to express one’s emotions—at least, so long as it isn’t mean or destructive. The natural mechanisms of people with The Skill are not universal. Meeting in the middle may require both sexes to stretch themselves a little. If this feels like “emotional labor” to the woman, it probably feels even more so to the man!

I don’t have a super neat takeaway from all this, and don’t want to sound self-pitying. (Self-pity, I’ve found, is one of those emotions women don’t want me to express after all). Again: the responsibility is ours. Maybe all I’m trying to say is, there’s nothing wrong with your son. Men’s difficulty expressing emotion is their burden, but not a flaw, defect, or inadequacy. Portraying it that way—mocking it, rolling your eyes at it, blaming us for it—makes the stigma stronger and the difficulty greater.

So when a man in your life tries to express himself in a way that strikes you as clumsy—as either sputtering or dumping—give him some grace. He’s practicing! It’s hard, and scary, and probably takes him more effort than it takes you. The effort alone is courageous, and likelier to be repeated if you make it as painless as possible.

1. I’m the lucky exception, with a girlfriend as flexible and understanding as they come. The problems I document here are mainly from prior relationships.

2. Maybe I could improve a little, but for the most part, I’m not convinced this skill is learnable.

3. Just as we might feel empathy for the lifeguard forced to scrape up poop!

4. This is kind of analogous to body image issues in women (or men, but let’s say women because it’s more common). It is not women’s fault they often suffer insecurity surrounding their natural bodies. That is the fault of unfair social stigmas, unrealistic beauty standards reinforced by media and peer pressure, and other complex factors that shaped their self-esteem and perception from a young age. Dealing with those issues and overcoming their possible effects (ex: an eating disorder) is nobody’s responsibility but the affected woman’s—except insofar as everyone shares a responsibility to avoid perpetuating the stigmas.