Poor Pitiful Men: The Martyr Complex of the American Husband
The Guy Code, which boys learn from their male peers and older men, prizes action rather than words. It teaches boys, as the sociologists Deborah David and Robert Brannon pointed out decades ago, to be highly competitive “sturdy oaks” with little vocabulary for anything other than ambition or anger. The Guy Code teaches men how to pursue women, how to court, and how to charm; it teaches us nothing about how to be in an actual relationship with a woman once we’ve succeeded in catching her. (If you’re getting an image of a dog who looks bewildered and helpless when he’s finally managed to catch the cat he’s been chasing, you’re not far off the mark.) Once in a relationship (much less a marriage) with a real-honest-to-goodness human being who didn’t grow up with the Guy Code (and thus wasn’t shamed out of her ability to articulate her feelings, as most of us were as boys), we’re often in awe of what seem like her “naturally” superior emotional abilities. Women seem to have this extraordinary capacity to describe their feelings with precision; they seem to be so much better at remembering the nuances of conversations we’ve long since forgotten.
Many young—and not-so-young—men feel overwhelmed by what seem to be the superior verbal and emotional skills of female romantic partners. When a man has grown up learning not to display feelings, or to talk about them, he may end up feeling as if he’s a first-year French student suddenly plunged into a conversation with fluent native speakers. He hasn’t got—or he feels he hasn’t got—the vocabulary with which to keep up. This isn’t because of testosterone, of course, or some inherent aspect of the human brain; it’s the hangover from growing up with the “guy code.” And the guy code, followed rigidly, leads to a kind of learned emotional helplessness.
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It’s tempting—oh, so tempting—to attribute our own comparative inarticulateness to our testosterone, or to our Y chromosome, to God’s plan for marriage, or anything that is sufficiently immutable so as to excuse us from having to engage with these heavily-armed wordsmiths as equals. Thanks to the Guy Code, we confuse what we weren’t given with what we can never learn. It’s an alluring mistake; if we buy into it, we can lapse into the grim satisfactions of martyrdom (I’m such a heroic knight, why can’t she appreciate me?) or we stray into emotional or physical affairs with women who seem so much more understanding (My secretary really gets me. She makes me feel like a man. Not like my shrew of a wife who cut my balls off and keeps them in her underwear drawer). And all the while, we submarine, self-deprecate, and endure. When men are raised with little sense of how to “fight fair,” particularly with romantic partners, they often lack the discernment to determine a legitimate criticism that ought to be taken to heart from an unfair attack. Women aren’t the only ones who fall for the myth that wives, girlfriends, and sisters know the guys they love better than they know themselves; for different reasons, men and women alike are attached to that sexist conceit.
This assumption that men are a mystery to themselves can function, for some men, to legitimize anything a woman says in anger. And sometimes in anger, we—men and women alike—say unfair things to our romantic partners. We speak from a place of pain, frustration, and rage, and we say what we know will wound. Women do this, men do this. The difference is that many men, thanks to their “learned obtuseness,” are particularly unlikely to be able to differentiate between the legitimate criticism uttered in a healthy fight and the unjust accusation blurted out in a moment of wrath.
http://thecurrentconscience.com/blog/2012/04/11/poor-pitiful-men/
i like hearing mens point of view. interesting. i have a son dating a girl. he was all over expressing how he felt, what he felt he was experiencing and her total lack of being able to express what she felt. drove him mad. and ultimately, was the painful part of the end of the relationship. now i watch him with another girl. and again, he express and discusses all feelings and thoughts. she is right there with him. such a mellow, comfortable, easy going relationship.
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