It’s a cruel game we play with our boys. We say to them: “Be brave”… “Don’t cry”… “Take it like a man”… We teach our boys to ignore, minimize, disregard and to overcome feelings of weakness. We teach them to be strong and not flinch in the face of danger. We teach them not to have certain “unmanly” feelings.

Then, twenty-five years later, we marry one of them and we say to him: “Talk to me… Tell me your feelings… I want to be close to you...”

We wonder why it’s hard for this lovely man to open up and share his feelings with the person he most loves. We complain that “this man doesn’t know a feeling from a barn door.” Small wonder!

Most men were not rewarded as children for being sensitive and for sharing their feelings. They were bred for bravery, for not being in touch with their feelings, for denying this part of themselves.

Moreover, adult men continue to be reinforced for being strong and capable, for keeping a steady hand on the tiller, for being able to “overcome their feelings.” This is the culture of the workplace where men thrive. As Warren Farrell puts it in “Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say” (see references), a man receives his pay by becoming a “human doing,” not a human being.

To compound matters, a great many women still look to men to take care of them—as human doings who retain the Neanderthal ability to be successful killer-protectors. Like women, who are often weighed as potential partners on the basis of their physical beauty, men are often considered attractive for their professional accomplishments: The beauty queen and the millionaire. Neither standard does much to encourage the humanity of the people involved.

The societal pressure to be successfully strong is very powerful and it exerts a subtle, persistent pressure on boys/men to disown certain “troublesome” aspects of their internal experience. The tragedy of this is that when you deny parts of yourself, as millions of boys around the world are taught to do, these parts eventually become unavailable. Anything that is “stuffed down” and not allowed to be experienced, becomes either denied or repressed. The unfortunate by-product of years of denial and repression is that it eventually walls off important parts of your self, making them hard, if not impossible to access. A man who has always believed it was unacceptable to show his “weaker” side—feelings of fear, aloneness, uncertainty—eventually won’t have any sense of having these feelings. When asked if he’s worried or upset about something, he’s likely to answer: “Not particularly.”

He’s not lying. He’s not minimizing. He simply doesn’t feel this feeling. He’s been taught that those kinds of feelings aren’t acceptable for him to have and he’s been thoroughly enough socialized that he believes he no longer has these troubling feelings. Nothing seems to bother him. He can even go into battle without showing his fear. This is what we ask of our men and our men learn to do it. To ask this man to “share,” is to cause frustration for both of you.

Oh, yes, it may be inside him somewhere, but it will not be easy for him to get access to it, and it may be impossible, short of intensive therapy.