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“Depression in men often doesn’t look like depression in
women,” journalist Julie Scelfo told me. She’d begun studying
the issue nearly two decades earlier. “It manifests itself in other
ways, like anger, drug use or alcoholism.” In 2007, she wrote a
lengthy cover story for Newsweek on men and depression. One
conclusion she’d reached was that men were suffering from
mental illness but were unaware of it. She’d been intrigued by
a study undertaken by Michael Addis at Clark University in
Massachusetts in response to the fact that men were reluctant to
admit they were depressed. Instead of advertising support groups
for those “suffering from depression,” researchers told her, they
hung up signs describing a meeting designed to help with the
“stresses of living.” The result? Men from all walks of life showed
up in droves. “Men don’t admit they are depressed,” Scelfo
said. “But stress doesn’t have the same negative connotations.”
In other words, for many women, their relationship problems
were actually undiagnosed mental illness.
Many women said that when they tried to bring this up, men
would either get angry or shut down. “The only time I could get
h i m to h ave a rea l conver sat ion w it h me wa s a f ter he’d h ad a few
drinks,” one woman told me. All these different women’s stories
sounded eerily familiar. In fact, I kept hearing the same thing
over and over again. Men were experiencing emotional and, in
some cases, mental-health turmoil and didn’t have the language
to understand it, let alone talk about it with their partners. The
male code has instructed them to keep it all on the inside, and
that’s exactly what they were doing.
I call this crisis “the great suppression.” Men grow up dis-
owning their emotions. It’s a kind of emotional estrangement so
pernicious and so embedded in the way we raise them it’s almost
invisible until it’s too late. No wonder men aren’t able to manage
their feelings: As boys, they’re taught that they don’t have any.
Emotional expression and management is a crucial skill men
aren’t taught. In fact, boys who show it get reprimanded. Boys
don’t cry. Be strong. Don’t let him know it hurt you. If you like
her, pull her pigtails. Of course, when you don’t share your
feel i n g s , t hey don’t si mply go away ; t hey ju st come out i n d i ff erent
ways. Research by clinical psychiatrist Jeroen Jansz from the
University of Amsterdam found that it’s not that men don’t have
as many emotional abilities but rather that they don’t practise
them as often as women. He breaks down model masculinity
into four components: autonomy, achievement, aggression and
stoicism—and concludes that stoicism particularly encourages
disconnection from feelings, vulnerability and pain, which
increases the disconnection from emotional states for men.
Jansz’s research shows that this blocked emotional state has a
disproportionate impact on men’s health. And now that their
female partners are no longer willing to do men’s emotional
labour for them, it’s costing them their relationships too.
What women are asking for from men is pretty simple: emo-
tional labour. A study from the University of Virginia examined
5,000 heterosexual couples and found that the skill set in men led
to the most satisfied women partners. Researchers found that a
woman’s happiness in a marriage is correlated with how much
“emotional work” her husband performs. Feeling understood
and emotionally connected to her husband was the strongest
predictor for a woman’s level of marital satisfaction. But for
ma ny women, t hat just wa sn’t happen i ng i n t hei r relat ionsh ips
or marriage. And while many of their mothers had put up with
their partners’ unwillingness to address their emotional turmoil
and take responsibility for their mental health, this generation
of women was beginning to wonder why they should. Women
were walking away from emotionally abusive and deficient
relationships because, for the first time in history, they could.
Women are more educated and more employed today than at
any other time in history. Single women without children have
the smallest wage gap with men, although women of colour
still make far less than other women. The more independent
women become, the less likely they are to tolerate relationships
that don’t meet their needs.
While women are demanding that men be more emotionally
fluent, men are still receiving a very different message about their
WHEN YOU IMAGINE WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE IF WE
ASSIGNED ROLES IN RELATIONSHIPS BASED ON ARBITRARY