The game is asymmetrical. Life is not fair. Doesn't matter. Play to win the game.
Ah, the ultimate ick source. A man expressing their emotions is kind of the inverse of the speech in Barbie about how it's impossible to be a woman.
It's easy. A man must be in touch with and transparent about his emotions, but must also be in conscious control over them, without repressing them, while choosing strategically when to be and not be transparent about them, and ultimately be fine, such that we will also be fine if all that information we shared can then be shared with others or used as a weapon.
Express your emotions. No, not those, and definitely not like that. But do it.
That's the goal. If you say that's not fair? Well, life isn't fair, I report the facts rather than make the rules, and the whole thing sounds like a you problem.
Kryssy La Reida: Serious question for men…what is it that makes you feel like you are in a relationship with a woman that you can't express your feelings to? Or why would you even want to be in one where you don't have a safe space to do so? If your partner isn't that safe landing space for those emotions what is the point? Or are you just conditioned to not express them?
Eric Electrons: Many women will often say they want vulnerability in a man, no matter how calmly and respectfully delivered, but treat us differently once they get it, use it against us when upset, joke about it, or share it without our consent to friends and family.
Philosophi_Cat: It's true that many women say they want a man who's "in touch with his emotions," yet get the "ick" when he expresses them. This can be bewildering for men, but the issue lies in how emotion is expressed, not in the fact of feeling it... Emotional depth does not mean emotional dumping. A man can speak openly about his struggles while remaining self-possessed and anchored in his own centre.
Robin Hanson: So men, feel emotions only if you fully command them. If you are instead vulnerable to them, you are "ick". Got that?
Robin's imprecise here. It's not that you can't feel the emotions, it's that you can't talk about or too obviously reveal them, and especially can't burden her with them. Unless, that is, you are sufficiently justified in not commanding them in a given situation, in which case you can do it.
As with many other similar things this creates a skill issue. Yes, we'd all (regardless of gender) like to be fully in touch with and in command of our emotions and in a place where we can own and share all of it securely and all that, while also having a good sense of when it's wise to not share. That's asking a lot, so most people need practical advice on how to handle it all.
When you sense potential trouble and the wrong move can cause permanent damage up to and including the ick, risk aversion and holding things back is the natural play. But if you always do that you definitely fail, and you also don't fail fast. A lot of risk aversion is aversion to failing fast when you should welcome failing fast, which is the opposite of the correct strategy.
So you'll need to start getting command and ownership of at least some of those emotions, and you should err on the side of sharing more faster if you're in position to handle it, but also it's fine to hold other stuff back or be vague about it, especially negative stuff.
You'll be told that the above is overthinking things. It isn't.
It is extremely attractive to feel and openly show your emotions and get away with it, if you do it successfully, largely because it is so difficult to do it successfully.
Taylor: wish men understood how attractive it is when they can feel & openly show their emotions instead of acting like a sociopathic brick wall.
Pay Roll Manager Here: Any man reading her tweet, please do not believe her.
Geoffrey Miller: Sexual selection through mate choice can shape traits faster than any other evolutionary process can. If women were really attracted to men who cried a lot, men would have evolved, very quickly, to cry a lot.
Robin Hanson: And if women who actually knew what they wanted and said so honestly were attractive to men, that would have evolved very quickly too, right?
On the evolutionary level, yes selection is rapid but even if the effect were extreme that's over centuries and millennia, not decades. So the 'if this was attractive evolution would have handled it' argument only holds for traits that would have been attractive in older worlds very different from our own. Also, a lot of your reproductive success in those worlds is about intersexual dynamics and resource acquisition, so a trait can be attractive but still get aggressively selected against.
'Can feel and openly show emotions' is not one thing. There are some ways that being able to feel and openly show emotions is attractive and winning. In other ways and situations it is very much not. Like when you train an LLM, there are a bunch of correlated things that will tend to move in correlated ways, and modifying one thing also modifies other things.
This is a skill issue. Being the brick wall is not a universally optimal play. But it is a safer play in any given situation. First best is to be in touch with your emotions but be high skilled in managing them and knowing when and how to communicate them to others. Second best is to be cautious. Long term, yes, you want to pick up this skill.
This is speculative. The theory is, it is fine to mix and match and combine and defy stereotypes, but only via embodying more things rather than less things.
Sasha Chapin: So I have a theory that for most people, men and women, peak attractiveness in a hetero context involves high-budget androgyny
Low-budget androgyny: not inhabiting either gendered energy High-budget androgyny: inhabiting your own fully, and a bit of the other
Sarah Constantin: this is in the Bem Sex Role Inventory, which i think is from the 60s. distinguishes "androgynous" (both masculine & feminine) from "undifferentiated" (neither masculine nor feminine.)
I've said it before but it's important so it bears repeating, one of the fundamentals: you want to give people the unexpected compliments that mean something:
Ibrahim: telling a hot girl shes pretty is like someone telling YOU, presumably a smart twitter tech guy, ur smart. if someone told you ur smart ud prob just say thanks. give people complements they dont usually get to stand out. call ur local tech guy hot and call ur local hot girl smart
Ben Hsieh: for awhile i was on this completely psychotic kick where i'd relate this advice (tell pretty girls that they're smart and smart girls that they're pretty) and then ASK the girl which compliment they'd prefer
Lydia Laurenson: my genuine answer: I feel slightly happier when men tell me I'm pretty than that I'm smart. I guess this indicates that I think I'm smarter than I am pretty, and that is true.
Zvi Mowshowitz: new level of ask culture unlocked, I love it.
Lydia Laurenson: it's a real brain twister whether it's a neg or not.
I think it's entirely context dependent whether it's centrally a neg. Your delivery of the line would matter a lot.
Ruby: The whole "men should pay on first dates" thing gives me the ick... I'm less attracted to men who blindly follow social scripts. I have no interest in unequal partnership...
Aella: Yeah when I let a guy pay on a date I feel myself putting one foot into escort world where I become suddenly aware that our relationship is transactional.
The transactionalism worry is real as a downside. Despite this, I believe men should very clearly pay on most first dates, for at least five good (related) reasons.
To the extent that the above justifications are broken, such as when the woman is initiating and suggesting the activity, that is an exception.
Consider an obvious example: If you are invited over to someone's house for dinner, very obviously they should usually not send you a bill. Similarly, I am a big fan of the rule that whoever travels the farthest does not pay for dinner.
Very obviously, if you have someone like Ruby or Aella where the vibes run the other way, and not paying hurts their experience? Then you should split or they should pay. It is on her to let him know this. He should reach for and request the check in a way that indicates intention to pay, but in a soft way that is interruptible.
Jeremiah Johnson: Cartoons Hate Her tested the 'Men are turned off when women have high paying jobs' hypothesis. It turns out that's just completely untrue - greater percentages of men swipe right when the same women is listed as having a higher-paying job.
Not only did she get more matches presenting as a higher earner, the matches were on average higher earners themselves.
Lila Krishna pushes back that CHH was asking the wrong question. Yes, you can get as many or more initial swipes, but that is not the goal. The problems come later if you don't want to give up your ambitions, she says, with personality clashes and emasculation and resentment and the male expectation that you'll still do all the chores and childcare which rules out deep work.
The ability to be ambitious is valued, she asserts, but actually still being ambitious isn't. See Taylor Tomlinson's bit about how she wants to marry a stay-at-home dad, but not a man who wants to be one, so she needs to find a successful man and destroy him, and she's kind of into him resenting her for it.
Which is all entirely compatible with CHH's findings, but also means that you're strictly better off making more money rather than less.
Shut Thefu: Don't have my car today so requested a colleague if he can drop me on the way. His exact reply, "sorry dear, my wife may not appreciate it." Men, it is really that simple.
Aella: Are the monogs ok
I don't think this is automatically one of those 'that which can be destroyed by the truth should be' or 'if I can take your man he was never your man' situations. Circumstances drive behavior, and yes it is entirely plausible that you could have a good thing worth preserving that would be put at risk if you put yourself in the wrong situation, even one that is in theory entirely innocent. Opportunity and temptation are not good things in these spots and a tiny chance of huge downside can be worth avoiding.
Most couples most of the time do not need to worry on this level, and certainly having to worry that way is a bad sign, but play to win.
Nikita Bier: If you get upgraded on a flight but your girlfriend/wife doesn't, do you downgrade and both suffer or do you take the upgrade?
Matthew Yglesias (being right): If it's your girlfriend you should either take the upgrade and break up with her soon, or else quietly decline it and propose soon. If it's your wife, you as a gentleman offer her the upgrade and she'll probably decline and let you take it.
What you are going to do is realize that if she takes the upgrade, that information is far more valuable than the upgrade. Hence the now ex part of the girlfriend.
Mostly you want to offer her the upgrade, the value of doing that greatly exceeds the actual experiential benefits even if she says yes, she often says no and you get valuable information.
Shannon Hill: This poor dude planned his proposal and she said NO in front of all of their family and friends because the ring was only $900 and came from Walmart. Personally, I think he dodged a bullet.
I'd say that if this is real both of them dodged a bullet. It's a terrible match. She was willing to crush him in front of everyone over this and then doubled down, saying that she didn't feel chosen even though he's been planning this for a year. In particular, she also said 'something from Walmart' rather than saying it was the wrong type of diamond, which I'd respect a bunch more.
But also, dude, look, this is your moment, you planned this for a year, you don't leave the freaking price tag and Walmart label in the box, what the hell are you doing.
One of the big classic \<problem>s.
Peter Hague: Wife: \<problem> Me: \<solution>? Wife: I don't want \<solution>! How do you get past this dynamic? Yes, I get the idea that she wants emotional support. But I want to solve problems - why isn't that equally valid?
Russel Hogg: Everyone here is giving you a solution but you seem to just want us to share your pain!
Most of you already know this, but perhaps a better framing is helpful here?
So I would reply: Wife's problem is not \<problem> it is \<emotional stress of problem>, and so you are trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong methods based on a wrong model of the world derived from poor thinking and unfortunately all of your mistakes have failed to cancel out.
You need to offer a \<solution> to \<emotional stress of problem> at which point the problem changes to \<problem>, which may or may not then be \<someone else's problem>. As in, no problem.
Chronically Drawing (Reddit): I have no idea how I feel about what he told me... He got drunk... and he ended up saying something along the lines of "could you believe we wouldn't be this happy if I hadn't watched you for so long?"... He told me what he was ordering and it was the exact same thing I always get and I thought it was an amazing coincidence... Apparently it was similar to a scene in a book that I had read and told my coworker I had thought was cute.
The main problem with mostly harmless versions of such things is that they strongly correlate with and predict future very much not harmless versions of those and other things. Which is exactly what happened in this case. He got abusive and threatening and clearly was a physical danger to her, she had to flee her apartment.
A potential rule to live by here would be to say, don't do anything you wouldn't think the other person would be fine with in a hypothetical. Another obvious one is, if you think this would make people think you were crazy stalker person if they found out, then don't do it, even if you think it wouldn't mean that.
You don't want the rule to be 'would be fine with it if they knew everything,' because knowing can ruin the effect. For example, one sometimes needs to Perform Vacation (or another occasion or action) and present as if one is happy in context, and they want you to do this if needed but it wouldn't work if they outright knew you were faking it.
There certainly is also a class of 'do your research' strategies where you would okay with someone doing this as long as they kept it to themselves how they found out.
As many noted, the (often far more intensive) gender flipped version of this is common, and guys are remarkably often entirely fine with it (including many cases where it goes way too far and they shouldn't be, but also many cases in which it is totally fine). This is not 'fair' but the logic follows.