Chloe Root

I am terrified of becoming someone’s anger dump. I have had to work so hard to expunge all the negative shit that’s been dumped in me up to now, I can’t go and let someone just fill me up again. I can’t keep going to therapy, and yoga to allow whoever I’m dating the privilege of dumping in me.

I’ve been having a lot of anxiety about dating men again in a way I don’t get about dating women. And, I’ve been trying to understand that and… it’s like, this feeling like my life will be a life of perpetual drudgery or somehow permanently grey. I associate dating men with being forced to do a lot more menial tasks than I do when I date women. And, I see flashes of this when I go on dates with men. They’ll start bitching about work, say, and I’ll be expected to reflect back their emotions and process this with them. Women do this less frequently, and if they do, they tend to be appreciative of the effort I’ve put into listening to them. Men often won’t even acknowledge that I’ve done anything. They’re probably unaware that I even did.

It’s kind of a stereotype that men have trouble “expressing their feelings” but there’s some truth to that stereotype. Clinical psychiatrists have noticed that some of their male clients have trouble expressing their emotional reality, and have even given it a name “normative male alexithymia.” I’m not going to get into the cultural causes of this, but personally I believe this has a lot to d…