"We want men to show emotion. But not like that. Or that. Or that."

Some thoughts from the perspective of Low Human Capital™

One continual source of confusion for a lot of women is why men seem to be so “emotionally stunted”…

…or, why they have such a hard time sharing their feelings, the same way that women do.

Biological reasons aside, for most men, the answer to this is obvious: They’ve attempted to open up to someone in the past, and had it backfire so spectacularly that they realized they should probably never do it again.

Specifically, a lot of young men realize that in order to be a functional participant in society, it requires them to regularly stuff down their emotions and carry on with the tasks of their daily lives.

Much of the rhetoric around wanting more emotionally vulnerable men therefore comes across as vacuous, because many men subconsciously realize that people (both men and women) only want these emotions at specific times, and in specific contexts.

Women want to see the man who cries at the end of the Disney movie, not the man who’s so depressed that he’s in bed for 18 hours a day. Obviously this is an extreme case, but it’s something that pretty much every man has experienced to some degree or another.

Feminists like to abstract this problem, and say that it’s a function of the “patriarchy”…

But this hides the fact that women themselves are just as responsible for creating this incentive structure, if not more. For as much as women want a guy who opens up and shares his feelings, this usually comes after the man has developed some degree of competency in all the other relevant domains of life — education, career, finances, looks, etc.

Again, many men have to learn this lesson the hard way; they have indeed attempted to open up, only to find that it hurt their relationship prospects, or otherwise made them less attractive to women. As such, he realizes he has to “win” the game of the patriarchy before he's given the opportunity of subverting the rules of the game.

In other words, emotions are reserved for the elite — for the rest of us low human capital™, we need to shut the fuck up and get good at tensorflow and B2B sales before we even think about having a hard time.

Now here’s the trick…

Whenever women read the above passages, they assume the judgmental or unempathetic woman in that scenario is completely different to them.

When they hear about the woman who emasculated her boyfriend or spouse for showing emotion, they assume it’s some sort of shallow woman who has a completely different psychological profile than themselves.

But this is the lie.

Many of the women who ultimately get repulsed by their man’s emotions are “compassionate” types — the type of people who “unpack” everything and use therapy speak as part of their regular lexicon. In fact, if you went back and asked these same women whether they like an emotional man, they would still say yes.

So if you’re a woman and you’re reading this, and you’re confused as to why men don’t open up, it’s because there was a woman very similar to you who once asked for the same thing, and completely punished him for it. I cannot stress this enough; the woman in question was not some superficial bimbo, but rather some Liz Plank/Celeste Davis type.

As such, many men come to realize that, the moment his emotions actually become inconvenient, women will deploy an arsenal of stock phrases to get them out of the situation:

• “Oh, he’s trauma dumping on me.”

• “Oh, I needed to set boundaries.”

• “If he wants a mommy, he needs to find someone else.”

• “I thought I was your girlfriend, not your therapist.”

• “I’m carrying all of the emotional labor in this relationship.”

• “I refuse to be a man keeper.”

Now if your response is that you're hoping he would open up in a convenient manner, I can only ask: what exactly were you expecting? Asking many of these emotionally stunted men to open up, and expecting them to do it in a nice and gentle way is like asking a guy who's been constipated for six weeks to take a “gentle shit” after drinking a gallon of laxatives.

And so, the ultimate message that so many men hear is…

“Of course we want men to show emotion — but not like that. Or that. Or that. Or that.”

So the next time you find yourself asking: why doesn't he open up? To answer that, I leave you with the wise words of one of the greatest minds of our generation —

That's right, I'm talking about George W Bush.

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on…

shame on you…

Fool me…

you can't get fooled again.

Or, to put it in my own words, which totally came from me and absolutely nowhere else:

Fool me one time, shame on you

Fool me twice, can't put the blame on you

Fool me three times, fuck the peace sign

Load the chopper, let it rain on you