Men don't talk

When I wrote this piece, only women reached out offering their learnings/ experiences with casual encounters. Not one man with any answers or insights. Sigh. So, I’m taking the liberty to generalise further - men don’t talk about anything, not just sex.

I was watching this random video on youtube of a dude interviewing youngsters on Church Street in Bangalore asking their suggestions for people in committed relationships. Most girls said “trust each other, and talk it out when there are issues” and most men said “spend well on your partner” (definitely merits its own post).

It got me wondering - is an overt need for communication a woman thing? Not sure about any biological predisposition to do so, but social conditioning definitely feeds this stereotype.

While I know plenty of women who are closed off, and not very communicative, most of the time, I’ve only seen them in relationships where the male partner isn’t particularly perturbed by this. I have seen fewer cases of husbands struggling to cope with a wife who speaks less.

How does this differential need for communication impact relationships though?

I can think of a few different situations to illustrate the impact. While I may say women talk more, and men less, the genders are easily interchangeable depending on what your individual experience has been, just in case you feel triggered.

Feeling alienated at home

30s and 40s are stressful years for both men and women. But when men don’t talk about it, it’s easy for their partners to assume that everything is ok in their individual life and that should be contributing more to the relationship or house or whatever.

For instance, you could be watching late night football or movies to bust some steam off, because you don’t have more evolved coping mechanisms, while the kitchen sink is filling up with dishes, that only seems to bother the wife.

Only when prodded and investigated for hours, days or even years, some men might open up and admit to feeling overwhelmed by stress at work or in life. But most often, men don’t communicate.

Fear of judgement? Rejection? Social conditioning? I don’t know.

Over a period of time, this leads to men feeling lonely, misunderstood and alienated from their own homes, which is counterproductive to actually being in a relationship. I heard this scary statistic about men above 45 being more susceptible to suicide than women the same age, due to loneliness and the inability to form deep relationships.

While in a relationship, the wife can attempt to investigate, but if she can’t collect sufficient evidence, the case shall be dismissed. Ultimately, nobody wins.

Marital Explosives and Misfiring

Women are constantly expressing, articulating their feelings and communicating with their partners without much filter, and rightfully so. Because of their limited need for communication, men don’t react to everything they “hear”, but they have some superpowers for selective hearing and retention, that you don’t find out about until much later.

Also, husbands have an incredible ability to present you with insights based on information you may have fed them with the slightest clue that its been heard, retained, processed or that it’ll be presented back to you at a future moment, devoid of all context, potentially triggering the wife.

This misfiring leaves the man further doubting whether he must speak up or not. If only a man’s mental processor was open source, like a woman’s, half the marital explosives in the world could be safely detonated before any real damage.

Mental overload and burnout

A friend who got married recently told me that marriage has resulted in a life upgrade by providing him a COO for life. Most men will not acknowledge this, years into their marriage, even if they benefit from it. But I can’t tell you how many households run with this org structure. At best, the man will be CFO, thanks to social conditioning.

This is borne out of, and continues to be nurtured by limited communication by the husband. Thanks to a woman’s need for communication, she steps in with ideas, even when not required to do so. A lot of times to fill the awkward silences, and then over time it just becomes a habit.

Here, even if a man is willing to take the lead, he steps back because he assumes the woman’s need to chime in for an interest to lead and take complete control (which may or may not be true). I mean, why bother when someone else is keen on taking all the workload and it doesn’t necessarily affect any appraisals, promotions or bonuses?

Before you know it, the woman is managing every single project in the house where the man could’ve potentially contributed. This leaves so many women, especially those who also work outside of home, completely burnt out by their 30s or 40s, unable to juggle the mental workload of running a household, raising children independently despite being in a partnership and working full-time jobs.

Marital Fatigue

Unless men have faced repeated failures, rejections or scarcity in his early years, they don’t see the value in their efforts to change things, unlike with an average woman. So when things aren’t great in a marriage, such men refrains from expressing their disappointment.

Unfortunately, their partners miss out on early signals, and the couple misses out on the opportunity to fix problems when they matter. Women with their need to communicate will analyse, discuss and concoct all possible explanations for the couples’ predicament only making things worse.

Sometimes, the woman trying to talk it out much more than the man can also be overwhelming for men. The more a woman talks, the more a man might shut down. It’s a vicious cycle, despite not being any one person’s fault.

Without being able to nail down on any real specific problems, the couple just exist together crouched in their indifference. Over time, fatigue sets in from both sides, and the overall quality of the relationship deteriorates.

As I keep penning my thoughts down, I can’t help but wonder what the solutions to some of these real life problems are. Can we avoid them altogether as a society? If so, how? Should men change? Should women change?

Or are these patterns inevitable in a heterosexual relationship? and so should we just work on equipping ourselves better as a society through some sort of formal training in early adulthood, just as we do with sex-ed in adoloscence?

This brings me to another more basic question - how do we prepare people for relationships? Is this supposed to happen by witnessing your parents’ relationship? Isn’t that fairly dangerous to rely on a singular experience, especially if your parents had dysfunctional relationships?

why isn’t there a mandatory life school for young adults before they become responsible for others’ lives?

oh so many questions.