Men don’t cry - they compartmentalise
The Emotional Cost Of Masculine Conditioning
There’s a particular kind of man I meet in therapy.
You know him too.
Externally: capable, steady, competent, admired.
Internally: a small boy who was never permitted to feel a single human feeling without being punished for it.
These men arrive in my office with immaculate CVs and emotionally starving hearts.
They sit down, arms crossed, and say a version of:
“I’m not really sure what talking about it will achieve. I can’t fix it, so what’s the point?”
Ah.
There it is.
The male tragedy in one sentence.
Men are not taught to feel. They are taught to solve
Boys in our culture are conditioned early:
Sad? Fix it.
Angry? Control it.
Afraid? Hide it.
Hurt? Laugh it off.
Lonely? Work harder.
Falling apart? Go to the gym.
Dying inside? “Have a pint.”
It’s not that men don’t have emotions.
It’s that they’ve been trained - violently, consistently - to believe emotions are a threat to their identity.
To feel is to fail.
To need is to burden.
To cry is to risk humiliation.
So men do what men learn to do best:
They compartmentalise.
They intellectualise.
They cope by shutting the door on anything that might crack their armour.
Until the armour becomes the prison.
Men don’t talk - they apologise and make a joke
A client once told me:
“If I were honest about my feelings with my mates, they’d ridicule me.”
And he wasn’t wrong.
Masculine friendships often allow for banter, distraction, surface-level connection - but not vulnerability.
The moment things get existential or raw, someone deflects with a joke, or a sarcastic “you alright princess?”
It’s emotional hot-potato: nobody wants to be the one caught holding the truth.
And so men become fluent in everything except themselves.
The partner asks what he feels. He doesn’t know. And he panics
Female partners often misinterpret male emotional suppression as:
coldness
disinterest
selfishness
avoidance
emotional neglect
But the truth is far more tender:
Most men haven’t had enough emotional practice to articulate a feeling safely.
Not because they don’t feel deeply - but because feeling deeply triggers shame.
I recently asked a client:
“What would happen if, when you felt yourself getting emotional, you turned toward your partner instead of away?”
He paused.
“I’d collapse.”
That is the sentence women don’t hear.
That collapse is what men have been trained to avoid at all costs.
Not because they don’t trust her but because they don’t trust themselves with the vulnerability that would follow.
Men’s emotional lives are policed by two institutions:
The family:
“Stop crying.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
“Man up.”
“Sort yourself out.”The culture:
“Be strong.”
“Don’t rely on anyone.”
“Fix it.”
“Earn your worth.”
The result?
Men become masters of emotional suppression and experts in self-abandonment.
They can walk into war zones but can’t walk into their own grief.
They can hold a friend’s beer but not their own heartbreak.
They can face pressure and responsibility but not tenderness.
What women misunderstand:
Women often think men avoid emotional intimacy because they don’t care.
The truth?
Men avoid emotional intimacy because they care too much and were never given the tools to survive the exposure.
When a woman wants a man to open up, she’s asking him to do something he has never been rewarded for, but deeply needs:
To be witnessed.
To be fallible.
To be human.
Men aren’t afraid women will judge them.
They’re afraid women will finally see the fragile interior they’ve spent a lifetime hiding.
What it costs men to be emotionally alone:
Emotionally suppressed men suffer in silence:
depression masked as cynicism
anxiety masked as irritation
loneliness masked as work ethic
longing masked as detachment
shame masked as perfectionism
love masked as stoicism
A man who cannot feel becomes a man who cannot connect.
And so the relationship breaks down - not from lack of love, but from lack of permission.
The internet makes it worse
Between Andrew Tate and SheRa Seven, men are blasted with polarising narratives that reinforce the same primitive message:
There is no safe place in the world for a man to be emotionally honest.
So they fold.
They run.
They collapse inward.
They become shadows of themselves.
And the women beside them go mad trying to reach the man who’s barricaded behind his own shame.
The real solution is not telling men to open up
It’s giving them a world they can open up in.
Men don’t need softness.
They need safety.
They don’t need coddling.
They need emotional literacy.
They don’t need fixing.
They need permission.
To feel.
To collapse.
To surrender.
To be held.
Because no relationship - romantic, platonic, or with oneself - can thrive on emotional silence.
Men don’t need to be different.
They need to be human.