> because they aren't sharing in a way that women recognize

Agreed. The conspiracy theory part of me wonders if this is a natural way of challenging and verifying perceived strength, thus the trope of a wife accusing the husband of not talking about his feelings enough.

Not to say that's the only time it happens (I've asked my wife basically just this), but I think part of being human is to want a stable, emotional foundation so to speak. And once we've tested and verified a leader/friend/family member who appears to be strong in ways we are not we then rely on them to help us in that regard.

Every social issue has islands where it's nonexistent, islands where it's bad, and islands in-between. Groups alleging unfair treatment are usually both right and wrong depending on where you look, for example there are places where everybody is racist and places where nobody is. By analogy, a person lucky enough to live somewhere that nobody was racist would probably not see any point for affirmative action. Does the NYT have a birds-eye view that can see every island? No, absolutely not, their articles are all written by individual people with normal human-sized social networks. But stories like these can provide some insight as to what other people's lives are like.

Men aren't sharing feelings in a way I understand most of the time, and I'm one of them. I could never get my friends to truly open up unless it was a one on one conversation.

That's not how men process things. Men process things by trying to eliminate perceived unnecessary information and take action. Women are more inclined to want to sit down and discuss all the details of whatever is going on, many of those details the man would not perceive as useful.

This is the age old men vs women problem where women feel like men don't want to talk about problems/feelings and men feel like women just want to blabber on without ever solving anything.

> That's not how men process things. Men process things by trying to eliminate perceived unnecessary information and take action. Women are more inclined to want to sit down and discuss all the details of whatever is going on, many of those details the man would not perceive as useful.

I'm a man. Sometimes I do the former, more often the latter. And I do feel shamed for that, sometimes.

Expecting men and women to fit into neat, stereotyped boxes like this is a big part of the problem.

I didn't mean every single man on the planet any more than the article did. It's not helpful to change conversations from one level of abstraction to another.

If you're going to draw the line that way, then I'm more on what you call the 'man' side in not liking to talk about problems/feelings much. But if that leads you (speaking generally—I don't mean you personally) to deny your pain and avoid your demons, then you are doomed to repeat the same painful loop forever, and ultimately to inflict your unprocessed pain on those closest to you. That's a situation that calls for eliminating unnecessary information and taking action if ever there was one. What's needed are ways of taking that action, i.e. processing things, i.e. facing-healing-overcoming rather than denying, which actually work.

I think the difference, in purely the speaking aspect is that men are more hierarchical while women are more communal. A man will ask a trusted man, usually higher in that particular hierarchy, for advice. Women will gather in groups and complain as a mechanism for problem solving, emotional release, and bonding. Men bond and have emotional release in different ways. I think both groups tend to have similar benefits from their respective actions.