this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
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A big part of the slow burning men's mental health crisis is societal expectations of men.
Boys are conditioned at a young age to start cutting off outward expressions of most emotions (big exception for anger though), stifling them and striving towards some kind of emotionless state. So they learn not to seek emotional support when they need it. And to make matters worse, this also sets these boys to grow up to be less dependable as providers of emotional support.
So men start to rely on the women in their life for emotional support, which creates unhealthy dynamics for many men who don't have reliable women in their life, or forces them to depend exclusively on a wife for emotional support. Only having that one person, or zero people, in their lives that can provide emotional support is highly limiting, and can go wrong in all sorts of different ways.
Deep bonds in male friendship are important, but we're raised without the guidance and skills to build and foster those bonds. And those friendships can inform how to have healthy platonic friendships with women, and how to have healthy romantic and sexual relationships with women, too.
That's what toxic masculinity means to me: a societal expectation that men behave a particular way, and the negative consequences directly for those men and indirectly for the other people in their own lives, whether parents, siblings, spouses, friends, or children. We owe the younger men in our lives the opportunity to break that cycle and model what healthy behavior and emotions look like, so that they're not carrying their own baggage into adulthood, middle age, and beyond.
Any time I've attempted to be "vulnerable" its ended badly, as have friends that have tried the same thing. Women talk a big talk about opening up, but the last thing they want is a man that can't handle his own problems. Emotional support only goes one way from what I can tell.
Yes, that's part of the societal expectations and conditioning that I'm talking about. Men are told to keep their emotions completely hidden by most people around them.
It even sounds like you're describing one of the things I was alluding to in my comment, that it's stifling for heterosexual relationships when the man can only unload emotional burdens on their partner and nobody else. It's a burden on both sides when that happens, and men need emotional outlets through diverse relationships in their lives with friends, family members, and their significant other.
I'm sorry that's been your experience. I hope you find someone mature enough to handle the fact that men are humans and humans have feelings. It's garbage that you're held to these unrealistic standards.