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Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden. Puzzling through some of this, and the parts that seem to apply and not apply to me, and why.

The first challenging part for me is how... I dunno, the implied claim that it is inevitable that big emotions are swilling around, and men are less good at dealing with them. The latter is probably true (on average, and with recognition that thinking in gender stereotypes needs to go with a big grain of salt) but the first part, and so the whole thing, kind of presumes that these emotions have to be big in the first place. That is to say, that emotions of that ferocity are just an inevitable feature of everyone's interior landscape, while for me there's a lot more of a "which wolf will win / the one you feed" aspect. I mean, every emotion that spontaneously appears should be accepted, and the ones that serve you can be focused on, and they're the ones that grow. And the ones that are negative, they should not be denied, but you shouldn't throw the old growlights on them, necessarily. For me sometimes the catharsis of working through, say, a sadness and weeping a bit or an anger and lashing out feels good... but recognizing these times as transient, and not necessarily reflecting the fullness of our interior landscape, seems like a good talent to have.

(Random, "just-so" story, half-baked theory: my friend had this theory that babies and toddlers get swamped by emotions, in part because of the smaller physical size of the brain relative to the parts generating emotional signals, like the amount of hormones or neurochemicals flowing over them. And I have always had this oversized cranium. Could that weirdly make it easier for me to keep from being swept away by emotions?)

I guess the other thing I don't readily absorb or accept are lines like "Since vulnerability is, unfortunately, still perceived as a weakness instead of a strength, having hard conversations that involve vulnerability is something men often try to avoid." Like, part of that seems absurd? Almost by definition, "vulnerability" is a weakness. I mean, it might be a worthwhile weakness - like building up too much resiliency might lead to too bigger negative problems and inability to connect with others. And you want to be strong and secure enough in your life as a whole that you're able to admit to specific vulnerabilities - if you're having to disguise vulnerabilities, that sucks! If you are overall vulnerable, if that is the truth of the matter, you should always be able to accept that. But "vulnerability is a strength" seems like a paradoxical phrase that needs a lot of caveats.