Should Men Talk About Their Feelings?

The big problem with a lot of Redpill ideas isn’t that they are false. The problem is that they are half true. Instead of offering well thought through guidance to men, much Redpill thinking remains at the level of slogan, of shibboleth, of cliche. 

This all became clear again recently when I received a question from a reader.

He writes:

“My wife wants me to share my feelings more as she thinks sometimes my outbursts of emotion are because I bottle up my feelings.

But often in church I've been told ‘men shouldn't talk about their feelings, it isn't very Christlike’. 

What would your take be?”

The question is complex, and answering it fully would go far beyond the scope of a single post. So I will just attempt to get to the core of this issue which has nothing to do with his wife, but with the reader himself.

To start, let’s break the question down. The reader’s situation has two parts, first his wife’s wanting him to share his feelings, and second, his emotional outbursts. 

Let’s tackle the second part first.

This guy’s wife isn’t stupid. If he is “sometimes” having “outbursts of emotion”, she is going to be looking for a way to stop those. Women experience greater baseline fear than men.  This means they don’t like men to have “outbursts of emotion.” Men’s outbursts scare women. This guy’s wife is asking him to do something, to take some kind of action to stop these frightening scenes. 

He should listen. He must understand that her asking him to “share his feelings more” is her coded way of asking him to stop losing emotional control. If she believed that his talking about his feelings less would lead to fewer emotional outbursts, she would be asking him to talk about his feelings less. This isn’t because she is fickle. It’s because she sees his talking about his feelings as a means to an end, and, for her, any means will do so long as it gets her to the desired end which is peace and safety.

This reader’s confusion makes him reluctant to do what his wife asks, and that brings us to the first part of his question. In general, Redpill thinking convinces men that talking about our feelings makes us look weak. So, the thinking goes, since your wife won’t respect you if you look weak and talking about your feelings makes you look weak, don’t talk about your feelings. 

The problem in this particular scenario is that talking about his feelings isn’t making him look weak. What makes him look weak are his emotional outbursts. Contrary to what the most ardent Redpill gurus would say, this guy’s wife is actually asking him to develop the emotional strength and fortitude to talk openly about his inner experience and to renounce the weakness that causes him to explode. 

To understand why, we must return to the fact that women experience more baseline fear than men do. What this means for many women is that they are affected to a greater extent by their spouse’s anxieties. A man who piles his worries on his wife will first find her distant, then indifferent, and finally cold. His use of her as a dumping ground for every fleeting concern will kill her desire to be near him as she begins to view him as someone more concerned with being comforted than comforting, more concerned with being protected than protecting. She will feel a need to be the strongest one in the relationship, and she will armor up. 

Things are different for the man who has learned to process his feelings in a way that does not allow them to control him. The man not mastered by his feelings can talk about them, because he knows they are just feelings. His wife knows it too. Of the mature man, the wife will say “Sure, he has moods and sometimes he gets down, but those moods never last. He snaps out of them quickly.” 

The reader should strive for this: that his wife should know something of her husband’s inner emotional life, but does not have to fear his emotional weakness. Because, in the end, it is not hearing about his feelings that repulses and frightens her, it is the weakness conveyed by a man who is a slave to his feelings. How, she will wonder, can he be in charge of anything if he can’t be master of his moods.

No man’s goal should not be to figure out if he can talk about his feelings with a wife or girlfriend, his goal should be to figure out how to arrive at emotional peace, and maturity for his own sake.  When he has done this, the need to talk about his feeling will be much lower. No one trumpets news of a sea with no storms, after all.  Arriving at that kind of stability should be his quest, and when he has completed it, the answer to how much he should talk about his feelings will be self-evident.