My Favorite Station

The other day I was listening to my favorite station here, 106.7. It plays a good mix of 80's, 90's and contemporary stuff. The other day, the presenters of one of the programs (I think it's a program that broadcasts from Los Angeles) were talking about relationships (hetero) and how men don't express their feelings.

So the "expert" on the program (a woman) mentioned that men don't talk about their feelings because often they don't know how they feel. She talked about how girls and women would often say "I'm happy/sad/etc." in their conversations while men never seem to voice their emotions, and she attributes that to the fact that men are often unaware of how they actually feel.

I think that's crap.

OK, so maybe not every man is a sensitive or intelligent soul. But I don't express my feelings easily not because I don't know what they are -- in fact, I am completely utterly so aware of them sometimes they pain me. Surely it is because I feel so weak and vulnerable if I express my most private emotions, and few men like that.

We don't say "I'm so overjoyed/depressed/etc. today because my pet dog had puppies/had a bad tummy". We instead say "You know what's awesome/fucked up? Leila just gave me five small leilas/had the shits." It's almost obvious to us, when men say what we say, that we are, by association, feeling what we're feeling. There's almost no need to translate those feelings into words.

And maybe the reason we don't put feelings into words is that we know there's no point in doing so. If we feel on cloud nine when we're with guys we love, we almost prefer to live the moment for what it is, for fear that if we were to start telling each other those feelings, somehow the magic would be broken. If we feel like tearing ourselves apart, we prefer to keep things to ourselves because we know that even if we confide our feelings, we still have to pick up the pieces and deal with the problem after that.

Perhaps the most important reason is that we expect the people close to us to understand how we're feeling without the need to put them into words. To me at least, it is the stuff we don't say, the look in his eyes, the warm hug, the pat on the back, that speak the most.