Men were taught to do. Not to Feel

A few days ago I was scrolling through my WhatsApp statuses and saw a group of women celebrating Friendship Day — lunches, photos, laughter. Even on the road I noticed groups of women out celebrating. And I was struck by a thought: where are the men?

I know men have friends. They watch cricket together, have chai, go for bike rides. But I can’t remember the last time I saw men celebrating friendship the way I was seeing on my screen. In fact, when I messaged “Happy Friendship Day” to one of my male friends, he asked me, “Is it to be celebrated?” I remember thinking — wow. Men and women really do carry different lenses on life.

But as a therapist, even my own lens on this has shifted. I used to think men just didn’t like talking about their feelings, or that they hid them. Now I don’t think that’s it at all. I think they were never taught how.

I noticed this with my own husband. I’d ask him, “How are you feeling?” and I’d get one of two words back — good, or bad. That’s it. And I’d think, but these aren’t even emotion words. These are just words. He’d look at me like I was discussing quantum physics, not feelings.

Over the years I’ve come to understand — men were taught to study, protect, solve, provide. But never taught to feel. Just taught to do it, whatever “it” was.

That doesn’t mean they don’t feel anything. It means many of them never learned the vocabulary for it. Imagine feeling something and not having a word for it at all.

When I look around at the men in my own family, I see how lonely a man can be even surrounded by his wife, his children, his job, people everywhere — and never once saying it out loud.

My father is one of them. I know how lonely he is. I’ve seen it. But he won’t say it. He keeps himself busy instead — household work now that he’s retired, prayers, sometimes just talking to himself. Never once out loud discussing what the loneliness, the anxiety, is actually doing to him.

My brother is no different. He wears his stress like a badge — not a problem he’s allowed to put down, but something he has to carry to be “the man of the house.”

Becoming a therapist changed my lens here too. I no longer expect men to be strong simply for the sake of being men. Strength isn’t the absence of emotion. Strength is having the emotion and learning what to do with it.

One thing I use often in session, especially with the younger men I work with, is a feelings wheel. It maps emotion in layers — a primary feeling, then secondary, then tertiary — so you can move from something broad toward something much more specific and true. https://feelingswheel.app/

I’ll ask, simply — what’s true for you today, looking at this wheel? You’d be surprised how hard that is to answer. But once you do, something shifts.

“I don’t know why I’m so angry today” and “I think I’m actually disappointed in myself” are not the same sentence. The first one keeps you circling, because you don’t even know where to go. The second one gives you a direction to move in.

Women carry a lot of invisible weight too. This isn’t a competition between genders — both carry their own struggles, and both deserve to be met with compassion.

But I think between all the cinema and everything else, we’ve turned men into knights in shining armour for long enough to solve everyone’s problems, and it’s only created more distance.

So instead of assuming a man doesn’t feel, or is just “a man of few words” — maybe it’s worth shifting the lens. Not to whether men feel. But to whether anyone ever taught them how to recognize what they’re feeling in the first place.

If you’ve read this far, do me a favour — actually open the feelings wheel today. Don’t just skim it, sit with it for five real minutes and find the word that’s true for you right now.

https://feelingswheel.app/

Then come tell me in the comments — which word did you resonate with, and how did it feel to actually name it?

— Geet