• rosymind@leminal.space
      0·
      1 year ago

      Agreed.

      My husband has had virtually no emotional support from anyone, so much so that he doesn’t understand how to communicate any of his feelings.

      “How do you feel?” “I don’t know” “Can I do something to help?” “I don’t know”

      I definitely don’t ignore his mental health but his lack of communication drives me up the pole. Often I have to just walk away out of frustration. I wish I understood how to get through to him without it making me want to bash my own skull against the wall. I think a big part of it is that he doesn’t want to admit that he has any emotions at all

      • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 year ago

        “How do you feel?” “I don’t know” “Can I do something to help?” “I don’t know”

        Yeah. That’s real fun isn’t it? And I really don’t know. I’m luckier than most men, in that I have an understanding wife who doesn’t use my emotions against me.

    • gjoel@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 year ago

      I hate this way of putting it, especially because it puts the blame on a single gender. It’s not JUST men who shoehorn people into gender roles, we all do it.

      It’s off putting to me and I tend to dismiss the entire thing because it basically says that men being bad also hurts men. Had it said that men also are victims of gender roles I would immediately agree, and I can’t imagine that I’m the only one who feels this way.

    • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      “You’re gay if you don’t like football”, “you’re wasting your life if you don’t want to get married and have kids”, “you’ll never find a husband if you don’t wear makeup”, “you’re not a real man if you cry”. The patriarchy is sexist to everyone, and that’s why everyone should give a shit.

    • CoggyMcFee@lemmy.world
      0·
      1 year ago

      As a father who is very involved in my kids’ life, I feel this frequently. At the start of each school year I submit my contact info as the primary contact info and yet sometimes emails will circulate among the class moms anyway. Or I’ll get a text from another kid’s mom asking for my wife’s number so they can plan something.

      When we started making friends with parents of my kid, all the moms in the group created a chat group which they still use to this day. The dads didn’t make one because that’s just not a thing you do, and I wasn’t invited to the moms group, even though I knew them at least as well as she did, and I am the extrovert and my wife is the introvert. So I frequently feel lonely and isolated (I also WFH) and my wife is socially overwhelmed.

      Yes I could just buck the system and try to get the dads to have a group, or have my wife add me into the moms group, or similar things in other areas of life. But that’s the point: any time I do that I’ll be going against the grain.

      • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
        0·
        1 year ago

        I have struggled so hard with this. My child’s school cannot seem to understand that I, the father, am the one who primarily takes care of my daughter. My wife and I have started to flat out refuse to give the school my wife’s contact info, even as an “emergency contact”, just to make them communicate with me. I did manage to make a bunch of faculty at her old school mad when I asked, publicly, why they felt the need to discriminate against me when trying to contact patents, and this had the unintended effect of making a bunch of other fathers in the group pop up and ask the same question. Now my daughter is old enough that she, herself, will call them out on it. Having a ten year old lose her shit and tell the teacher that she needs to contact the right parent is really funny, almost as funny as when they insisted on contacting my wife instead of me, again, to complain that my kid had yelled at them for not contacting me.

      • Waraugh@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        0·
        1 year ago

        I deal with this also except my ex abandoned us to move states away. She will still get notifications via email or text that she forwarded to me because they have her information on file. They have her information because I was forced to provide divorce paperwork showing I had custody of the kids to enroll them in school. Wonder how many moms get asked for paperwork proving custody when they try enrolling their kids in school. It’s reduced over the last three years but the first couple were ridiculous. Finally have a mom of one kid and dad of another kid that recognize I’m a parent to my children. Everything is stupid though. Every doctors apt, school visit, dentist apt, hell even trips to the store. Some BS content like “where’s mom” or “oh you’re filling in today”. I’m so sick of it. I cope by telling myself that at least it would be worse if the love of my life died horrifically instead of going bananas and abandoning us and I had to deal with this shit. At some point I’m worried I’ll snap at people but I never want to say anything negative about her around the kids.

  • Jake Farm@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    How did “grieve different” become don’t grieve at all? I’d be willing to bet that if men started grieving exactly like women, they still wouldn’t get the support they need.

  • Jax@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    1 year ago

    People always seem shocked when I’m offended by terms like “I hate men”.

    Like it’s somehow wrong of me to be offended by blatant misandry because I should just “know what they mean”. I’m one of “the good ones, they don’t mean me when they say it”. Horseshit.

  • Im_old@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 year ago

    Yesterday I had a comment from a woman friend along the line of “my daughter says you’re always serious but nice. You should work on that”. She didn’t think of asking me why I am always serious…

  • ferralcat@monyet.cc
    0·
    1 year ago

    I remember something similar to this when my mom died 15 years ago. Lots of aunt’s and friends reaching out to my sister to support her, traveling across the country to visit. I don’t think I ever even got a note.

    But I do have the thing where I probably wouldn’t have cared either, if not for watching the support my sister got, it never would have occurred to me someone could do those things. And I know those people aren’t my actual friends, so I really had zero expectations from them. I think it was more the insult on top of injury that bothered me. “Not only do we not care, but we’re going to show you what we would be doing if we did care.”

    I never took this as a boy/girl thing though. I never fit in in life, still to this day. Just sorta expected.

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
    0·
    1 year ago

    I am seeing a lot of pushback–presumably from feminists–towards men that are expressing their experiences.

    Guys it’s okay to cry.

    It’s ok to have emotions.

    It’s ok to not be ok.

    …But that has not been my experience.

    Should it be? Yes, absolutely. But is it now? No. And unfortunately, in my experience, the women that are saying such things–almost always self-identifying feminists–are also often then ones that are unaccepting of any display of emotion in men that aren’t coming from a place of strength. Men are e.g., expected to shrug off grief and depression and go back to work the day after a funeral. I shan’t be too specific for risk of doxxing myself, but I’ve noted that I’m expected to muscle through physical pain and mental exhaustion, while none of my partners–either current or former–will hold themselves to the same standard that I am held to by them.

    I cynically think that many self-identifying feminists don’t want to abolish patriarchy, they just want to be able to benefit from it the same way that men do, without paying any of the costs for that benefit that men shoulder.