ELLENESS BEAUTY
t had no name, but it was everywhere. I would hear about
the crisis affecting men and women’s intimate relationships
wherever I turned. I saw it in my group texts with women,
in the conversations I would overhear in coffee shops, and
even on my Instagram feed. Women had always complained
about difficulties in their romantic relationships with men,
but something felt different. Suddenly it seemed like women were
done. They had put up with men who were emotionally inconsistent or
unavailable for too long. They were desperate to love men, but accord-
ing to them, men had become impossible to love. Men were frustrated,
too. The women in their lives were
asking them to be more sensitive in
private, but men were still expected
to hide the fact that they were even
capable of having feelings in pub-
lic. Their girlfriends were telling
them to open up, but society was
still telling them to “man up.” They
didn’t know which man to be and,
honestly, I didn’t blame them.
One friend left her husband be-
cause he would tune out and watch
television every night, refusing to
go on a date or to couples therapy.
Another left because he had hid-
den a drug problem from her and,
once found out, refused to get help.
One husband refused to take anti-
anxiety medication. He was of-
fended it had even been prescribed.
These were more than emotional
problems. These women were left
dealing with their husband’s unre-
solved mental health issues.
“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 man-
ifests 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’d 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 undiag-
nosed 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 him to have a
real conversation was after he had had 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 experienc-
ing emotional and, in some cases, mental health turmoil and didn’t have
the language to understand, 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 disowning
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 reprimand-
ed. 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 feelings, they don’t
simply go away; they just come out in different 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 practice them as often as
women. He breaks down modern
masculinity into four components—
autonomy, achievement, aggression,
and stoicism—and concludes that
stoicism particularly encourages a
disconnection from feelings, vul-
nerability, and pain, which increases
the disconnection from emotion-
al states for men. Jansz’s research
shows that this blocked emotional
state has disproportionate impacts
on men’s health. And now that their
female partners are no longer will-
ing to do men’s emotional labor for
them, it’s costing them their rela-
tionships, too.
What women are asking for
from men is pretty simple: emotion-
al labor. A study from the University
of Virginia examined 5,000 hetero-
sexual couples and found that this
skill set in men led to the most sat-
isfied women partners. Researchers
found that a woman’s happiness in
a marriage is correlated with how
much “emotional work” her hus-
band performs. Feeling understood
and emotionally connected to her
husband was the strongest predic-
tor for a woman’s level of marital satisfaction. But for many women, that
just wasn’t happening in their relationships or marriage. And while many
of their mothers had put up with their partner’s 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 color still make far less than white 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 role in the
dating world. In my many years of sipping frighteningly overpriced vodka
sodas in the company of questionable yet carefully selected members of
the straight-male community, I’ve noticed several interesting trends, like
our collective insistence on one gender paying for the other gender as
an ultimate sign of respect. I’m not exactly sure when we all agreed that
men who are on dates with women should foot the bill, but I know for a
fact that it wasn’t when women were allowed to have opinions or creditLIZ PLANKI
PLANK: D. PICARD.
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