Communication Requires Actual Talking

Many decades of self help books and pop psychology have told people that men and women communicate differently. The basic idea is that men speak frankly while burying their feelings, and women are more in touch with their emotions and communicate in more subtle ways.

Bullshit.

Anyone who has been in a relationship in the past 20 years knows exactly how big a pile of crap this is. Why? Because none of those things are true. The only form of communication that matters in a relationship is open, honest, overt, and truthful. Everything else is just playing a game.

The Lie of Communication

Now, I need to be clear right now in that I am a straight cisgender man. As such, what you’re about to read is written from that perspective. I am who I am and make no apologies for it, but I also think it’s important to acknowledge that other people’s perspectives and experiences are not my own. Still, I hope you get something from this.

I grew up in the 1980s and 90s, an era inundated with celebrity “psychologists” telling the world what men and women were like. Men were from Mars, women were from Venus. At the core of this was the idea that men and women communicated differently, a concept that is not as black and white as many Gen Xers and Millennials were raised to believe.

We were taught that men hide their emotions but shouldn’t, that women really wanted emotionally available men who like to talk. As such, there was a big push in this era to raise a generation of men who were in touch with their feelings and not afraid to show them.

At the same time, men we’re also raised to believe that women communicate in much more subtle ways. The concept is that men speak more overtly with less subtext and women may say one thing but mean another. Not in a duplicitous way, though. Just that they are more subtle.

All of this was reflected in books, TV shows, and movies, the idea that men are dimwitted lunks who have no idea whether they’re happy or sad. Women are more in tune with their emotions, and had to coax men into being the same for their own well being.

The problem with these concepts is that they are all complete and utter bullshit. In fact, this crock has completely destroyed generations of families, leaving North America in particular with an absolute crisis of men’s mental health.

The Sad Truth About Communication

Many modern women see men who are open and honest about their emotions as weak. I am a man who is very much open about his emotions and I can tell you from experience that many women DO NOT find it attractive at all. Not all women, of course, but enough that it’s a problem.

My experiences have also shown me that the “subtle form of communication” women supposedly use is a lie. If you don’t actually say what you mean, it’s not communication. It’s a cruel game, one designed to make your partner feel like a failure. It’s a way to put the blame on someone else for your mistakes and bad decisions.

We’ve all seen TikToks of women talking about what happens when other women end a relationship. They describe how women will drop hints that they’re unhappy and if the man doesn’t pick up on them, it’s their fault when the relationship ends.

Men shouldn’t be surprised.

Men were warned.

In too many of these cases, women move on long before the relationship ends, which can sometimes take the form of cheating. These TikTokers normalize this behavior, claiming it’s acceptable for women. Again, bullshit. It is, in fact, similar to the toxic behavior too many men have often been rightfully demonized for in the past.

The major problem is nowhere in most of these videos do these speakers ever say that a woman should openly tell a man that she’s unhappy. These women are quite literally telling other women to do everything but explicitly tell their partners they are having problems.

This is straight up abusive and cruel. I experienced it firsthand in my marriage. My wife was unhappy for a long time and I could tell. I would ask her what was wrong but she would just brush it off as being issues with work or having a headache. I didn’t know if it was about us or about something else entirely that didn’t involve me. Still, it was hard to ignore the growing distance between us.

Finally, after nearly 20 years together, she admitted to me that she was unhappy and had been cheating on me for some time.

I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know the severity of the situation. I loved her, respected her, and trusted her, and thought she felt the same about me. I believed that if she needed something more from me, she would tell me. I was wrong, and she completely broadsided me with even the small portion of the truth she was willing to tell me.

I think the thing that hurt the most was when she said she had been telling me in her own way she was unhappy. The irony was I had picked up on her unhappiness to an extent and tried to talk to her about it openly. She completely dismissed this every time, turning to other men for comfort.

Again, she did everything but actually talk to me about her concerns. To this day, she still won’t talk to me about what went wrong, though I have long since given up on getting closure in this situation. If she wasn’t going to talk to me about any of this when we were together, she’s certainly not going to talk to me about it now.

My story is not unique by any stretch of the imagination. Millions of men across North America have gone through comparable situations. These husbands would have done anything for their wives to make their marriages better. All they had to do was ask. But for whatever reason, these women didn’t and lives have been absolutely ruined because of it.

How to Communicate Correctly

All is not lost, though. There are couples who know how to do it correctly. I have two friends who have been married for damn near 30 years at this point. And they are the most wonderful people I have ever known. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have problems.

When he was going through a rough patch, he tried to self medicate with alcohol. It didn’t go well, and started tearing the family apart. Rather than playing games or worse, she told him she was unhappy with his drinking, giving him the choice of going sober or leaving. He chose sober and she stood by him while he got himself straight. They are still going strong.

This is how a couple should communicate. He was doing something that was hurting her. She told him. He fixed the problem. Both people are happy. I know plenty of couples who speak openly with each other about their concerns and they have the strongest marriages around.

While I have accepted the choices my ex-wife made and forgiven her for them, I still wonder what our lives would have been like if she had taken the path my friends did. If she had talked to me about her concerns, maybe we could have done something about them and been better off for it.

Instead, like many men in situations like this, I am still picking up the pieces of my life years later. Fortunately, I have a good support system around me, I have the means to constantly work on bettering myself, and I go to therapy regularly. Not every man has those same luxuries, though.

Men’s Mental Health Crisis

Many men are left sitting in the ashes of their lives wondering what went wrong. Far too many of them end up committing suicide because of it. The data shows that men are 50% of the population in the United States but make up 80% of annual suicide rate. This disparity is common in other parts of the world, too.

There are a lot of deep and complex reasons for this. But failing marriages combined with a culture that automatically puts a lot of the blame on men is definitely a contributing factor.

In the 80s and 90s, culture asked men to be in more in tune with their emotions. The problem is that same culture does not want to give men room to have emotions. Men are expected to feel but they also aren’t allowed to put those feelings first, and they are called selfish when they do. The result of that is an increased suicide rate.

The goal of this post is not to claim women are evil. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are a lot of amazing, intelligent, supportive women out there, some of whom I’m lucky to call friends. The best support I got and continue to get after my marriage ended was from my female friends. They have been an absolute blessing.

But I also learned from my male friends how many of them are in similar situations to mine. They can feel something wrong in their relationships with their partners and they want to talk about it with them. For reasons the men don’t understand, the women in their lives won’t talk. They keep brushing their husbands and boyfriends off, saying it’s nothing when everyone involved knows that’s not true.

I’m scared for those men. I’m scared for my friends.

The world spent decades asking men to be more open with their emotions, to listen to women and try to make relationships more equitable. And a lot of men have put that effort in. Now, it’s time to treat those same men with at least some semblance of basic human dignity.

Ladies, if you are unhappy in your relationship with your man, tell him. Don’t drop “subtle hints.” Openly discuss the problems. Try to fix them. If you can’t, go your separate ways. It’s hard work but it’s work worth doing. Well, unless your partner is an abusive lunatic. Then, just get the fuck out of there. No one should ever have to put up with that kind of crap.

Just don’t play cruel games with a good man because the damage you do might lead to something that can never be fixed.