I found out later that most men in his village are like that. A lot of feelings are being swallowed in silence and not talked about. A real "word gap". I wonder if it has to do with poverty (it's a poor village) like the article says.
Most emotions seem to just hold you back. Why cry about a situation when you should more likely focus your energy into finding a solution?
For me it's not that emotions are so much "swallowed in silence and not talked about"... it's that they're fundamentally not useful.
If I'm stressed out or sad or etc about something, that's something to be solved, not something to be sad about. Why be sad about something you can either solve or ignore?
To put it another way: You can either solve it or you can't. If you can solve it, do so. If you can't, why put energy/emotion into it?
That's only if you have those emotions to begin with. It's very reasonable to train yourself to not have those emotions and therefore not carry that baggage.
And that doesn't mean being a brick wall. That just means not caring as much. Going with the flow. Being happy regardless. However you want to word it.
But that's just because nothing truly bad happened to me. Or at least, nothing bad enough to make me pity myself. Just that nothing has forced me to put energy/emotion in it, that hurt my ego enough that I'd feel worse about myself.
I think it's naive to believe that something like that could never happen to you, and it happens regularly to people around you. The universe is ruthless and cruel, and we are often helpless in the face of it. Sure some people are stronger, and some are weaker, but everyone could be broken.
Many people value different things. My girlfriend might cry if she thinks a person she met didn't like her. I'd never cry over such a thing, but that's because I don't value myself as a likeable person as much as she does. If she wouldn't cry about it, she'd feel worse as a person and I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't comfort her.
Anyway, to answer the question, because being emotional and sharing those emotions could help them deal with their pain or frustration. It's not good if we've got all these people walking around with their pain and frustration and no healthy outlet.
There are many who romanticize the idea of men crying over small things, and I think that's not healthy or productive. I know many people who will cry when they lose a game in their hobby of choice, for example. That kind of thing is too much IMO.
Instead of learning to have a "healthy outlet" I think people need to learn to control their emotions better.
> I don't value myself as a likeable person as much as she does. If she wouldn't cry about it, she'd feel worse as a person and I wouldn't know, and I wouldn't comfort her.
Isn't that a huge vulnerability, though? Going through life caring so much about people liking you, that you cry every time you think someone doesn't?
IMO it's way better to figure out how to not care as much in this kind of situation, than to accept that crying is a "healthy outlet". Instead of being sad and crying to release your emotions, you could instead learn to be happy regardless.
We need to talk to other people about our problems, bitch, rant, shout, cry, do all sort of emotional things to relieve stress, even if that does objectively nothing to solve our problems.
Even more so since some things just can't be solved. We're not all powerful, at the end of the day.
Not handling emotions is harmful to our mental health (including the rational machinery), to our life expectancy (especially the case for men), and also to our close ones.
That's not completely true. There is an option to not have those negative emotions in the first place.
I tend to find that experiencing negative emotions like sadness heightens my later perception of positive emotions like gratitude.
A lot of people romanticize the idea of men crying over smaller things. For example, someone below said that their SO cries then they even think someone doesn't like them. I've seen people cry when they mess up in their hobby of choice. These things are just not healthy to cry about. They need to control their emotions better than that.
First up I'm not talking about performative emo culture. I'm saying that authentic expression of your true feelings is a key part of being a healthy human being no matter your gender. You don't have to make a scene. Just be honest. I'm also not saying you shouldn't use that energy to work towards a solution. Doing so is good and healthy.
Saying that emotions are fundamentally not useful displays, I believe, a deep lack of understanding of what emotions actually are. They're not some arbitrary human frailty, they're a finely tuned mode selection / behaviour modifier heuristic that is deeply embedded in the psyche of all mammals and (to varying degrees) all life. Emotions are deeply useful and can act as a communication channel between your conscious and subconscious.
In my own experience there's no such thing as "ignoring" emotions in the long term. You might consciously convince yourself that you're doing so but you're still building up an emotional payload based on what's happening to you and that payload will come out in some other, far less controlled way eventually. Certainly it's possible to cultivate some degree of detachment and so be less affected by the world around you but that just alters the balance, it doesn't remove emotions from your life.
To respond to a couple of your comments in posts below:
> There are many who romanticize the idea of men crying over small things, and I think that's not healthy or productive. I know many people who will cry when they lose a game in their hobby of choice, for example. That kind of thing is too much IMO.
My experience differs here and I feel this is a bit of a distraction/strawman. Being able to play games without getting overly emotionally affected by the outcome is a baseline measure of maturity for everyone regardless of gender and we're not talking about party games here. We're talking about, to paraphrase the GP of my post, "My dad [...] doesn't know how to talk intimately or how to reveal emotions." Being emotionally stunted in this way genuinely impacts your ability to live a fulfilling life.
> It's very reasonable to train yourself to not have those emotions and therefore not carry that baggage.
This is not only not reasonable, I don't believe it's even possible for most people. Either you're wired significantly differently to every human I know (which is possible) or you're not "training yourself not to have emotions", you're just in denial.
> There is an option to not have those negative emotions in the first place.
Again, unless you are very, very far from baseline this is not true.
> That's an extreme example that I'm not really referencing here. Of course I feel sad when something extreme happens, like a loved one dies.
This kind of thing is what the original conversation was talking about.