A common complaint heard by couples therapists involves some aspect of emotional detachment, generally leveled at men by their spouses.
The ladies want their men to open up and express their feelings the way...
well the way their girlfriends do.
And why not? Sharing feelings is a rich vein when it comes to bonding people together.
I can recall how surprising it was for me when, just out of college, I joined an encounter group.
We would stay up all night talking about the kind of innermost feelings that no one except our closest friends have any investment in hearing.
And for most guys, even our closest buddies have little interest in hearing the kinds of things we might feel that fall into categories like being "unmanly," "weak," or "feminine.
" Later I trained for a year as a Gestalt facilitator where we men were supposed not to repress our feelings, but feel instead of think - at least during group time.
It was another step toward liberating what sometime later was called my "inner child.
" Having grown up with rigidly enforced standards for being male, my journey toward wholeness included developing my "feminine side," so that I became more balanced.
So I can appreciate both the standardized masculine programming as well as how I turned out following years of working in the mental health field as both a professional and client.
If we get "normal" parenting, boys and girls turn out very different when it comes to being available or detached emotionally.
It isn't just the difference between pink or blue blankies in our cribs that make the differences.
Girls are expected to emote effusively and boys are expected to think, early on.
And never the twain shall meet.
So when it comes time for the little wife to begin raising her hubby according to her standards, it's a little late in his development for radical changes.
Following is a thumbnail primer for how boys get turned into men and girls into women along traditional lines in which we split up the entire spectrum of human traits with mutual exclusivity.
It gets so predictable that our therapists may even subscribe to books about how we come from different planets.
For boys it may surprise most of their wives that mothers are most instrumental in determining how masculine gets defined.
But what mothers are telling their boys about what men are like has a greater influence than what the dads say.
The age at which sex-based personality gets to the head of the line for us, developmentally, is around five years old.
Boys, like girls, are still attached more to mommies than daddies, therefore have much more at stake when it comes to pleasing one or the other parent.
So mommies say how to be a man, which gets modeled by the kind of man they chose.
That dynamic is apparent in just about any circumstance across the spectrum of mommy liking and respecting her choice in a man, to loathing him.
The programing remains just as effective when mommy says "be the kind of wonderful man and husband that your father is," as when she spits out "you're going to be the same kind of bum as your old man," when her boy disobeys her.
Her word becomes law even more profoundly than daddy's example.
The same is true for little girls, with the opposite sexed parent.
Daddy's affections and instructional comments have more impact than mommy's, despite the fact that he probably said a whole lot less to her than she did.
If he chose someone compatible, then there are few conflicts with their programming dynamic, with him telling her how to become a woman and she being the model mommy/wife.
This bit of knowledge finally explained to me why a family we knew turned out the way they did.
The mother was hard working, plain looking even to being frowsy.
The dad was a disabled veteran, unable to work and reputedly a heavy drinker.
Without the cross referencing dynamic, one would be hard pressed to explain why the boy children were capable, hard working from teen years, and turned out to be model parents.
The girls dressed inappropriately sexual at a young age, looked trashy and married poorly.
Mom's words to her boys had more apparent impact than the example of her husband, and his impact on the girls over ruled the mother's role modeling.
A major difference in this dynamic involves the switch that generally happens about the time we lay down our foundations for sex-based standards.
Girls remain primarily attached to mommies but boys are required to make the switch to their dads.
He may be giving instructions early on about doing guy stuff, playing rough sports, and being masculine, but those aren't taken in by boykins until we are ready to appreciate them.
The switch may be reluctantly made, especially when mommy doesn't like her husband, but still feels compelled to send her son to him to finish raising.
"Go be like him so I can despise both of you," will predictably create conflict, and produce the kind of unruly boy/teenager/man that she will later disclaim any notion of why he turned out that way.
A second tenant of turning boys into men has to do with repressing and protecting our feelings, particularly from fathers and other boys.
Throughout school age we turn peer abuse into art forms by focusing on any available vulnerability.
Feelings are vulnerable.
If we cop to loving our mothers, we can be engaged in physical combat when she is flagrantly insulted.
A standard challenge when we refuse to be called out with other kinds of insult would be to call us "scaredy cats," "cowards," "sissies," or "cry babies.
" Boy games often include things like socking a friend's arm to see if he flinches in pain.
If he does, there is a worse penalty with the idea that when he cannot be made to admit feeling the hurt, then he is more manly.
These kinds of abuses get institutionalized in college hazing practices and military training.
Boys become men by hiding their feelings from older boys and chevron striped superiors.
We are sent to these trainings with the socially accepted value of making us "real" men.
And by doing so, we have locked our emotions away as securely as we possibly can.
We could not be expected to do the mean, nasty things that soldiers do to other soldiers if we were actually able to feel about it at the same time.
Getting scared in the midst of battle isn't just a sign of weakness.
It will be the sort of thing that causes us to flinch long enough to be killed instead of killing them.
And we aren't even expected to feel the effects of traumatic events years later when they come back as nightmares and labeled PTSD.
Women like emotional detachment, at least initially.
They seek out the strong, silent types with little to say because we have only our thoughts to share and they don't go far when it comes to romance.
One of the major attractions during mate selection has to do with the juiciness of getting emotionally involved, especially for the first time in a decade or more.
Women like it when guys are aggressive, take what they want from the weaker sex, and can be expected to stand tall in the face of danger when it comes to protecting the family unit from outside threats.
So how can it be that with all this programming, particularly at the hands of mothers and wives, that at some point women want guys to open up and share their innermost feelings? We learned long ago not to fall for any kind of mental game that gets us pounded on or more subject to being killed or wounded.
Mommy stopped wanting to hear about our feminine side when we were five years old and we've been emotionality unavailable since then, so if we begin to share our feelings now-even if we could-the major conundrum begins with "which ones?" Where do we start? You may think its not rocket science because you've been doing it forever, without respite.
But we don't even know how to organize feelings into manageable lists with gold stars for the ones the wife wants to hear and black ones for what needs continued suppression.
Another need for guys to detach from their feelings gets tied in with sex roles.
Wives do the feeling for both of them and husbands do the thinking.
For either to encroach into the others territory violates sacred oaths sworn in front of God, the church and whomever was invited to the wedding.
As blurred as sex roles have become, there remains an underlying residue of socially programmed belief that guys need to remain guys and girls need to be girls.
How else can the tradition of competition between the sexes continue to be carried on? Since guys cannot be made to cry in public, the best weapon girls have continues to be tears.
What can he do but give in to whatever she wants when she bursts into tears? And she cries when she's hurt.
When she's sad.
When she's angry.
When she's scared.
Even when she's happy.
A guy's best weapon is angry intimidation, which loses every point like the game where paper covers rock.
How do we move from where we are to a place where a girl's best friend might be her guy? Mothers would have to begin raising their sons to be emotive too, not just the daughters.
Guys would have to start defining masculinity with the inclusion of our standard ration of emotions.
After all, being emotional doesn't automatically announce that we are gay, despite the stereotype.
Women have to stop having a double standard when it comes to choosing on the basis of a guy's strengths as defined by emotional detachment, then trying to remake him into an image of a sensitive husband later on.
It won't happen over night.
Nor will attitudes change easily, once they've been codified.
But it is encouraging to note that sex differences when it comes to emotional capacity are 90% programmable, rather than genetically determined.
There have been some cracks in the hardened shell of men's armor, comparable to the demonstrated capacity for the feminine sex to think for themselves.
Perhaps the "equal but different" standards are moving closer to "equal while less different," the new norm for future generations.