Men and Vulnerability

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And if you bothered to read the rest of it, you'll notice I mentioned two of my exes used to cry to manipulate me. Those were the times I hated it. I think anyone who cries to manipulate is an a***hole. Otherwise I think it can be quite cute. All the other times I've seen men cry genuinely, I've thought it was sweet.

This is the kind of thing my post was getting at.

I never bother to read the rest of anything you say, smudge.

I usually bottle up all my feelings and hide them out of fear of showing any weakness last time I showed weakness it was taken advantage of and I was abused and immasculated because if it. Showing feelings means I am a weak man and women do not want a weak man so I must put a barrier around my heart.

who gives a damn what men and women want? be who you are and say what you feel, because the people who matter don't mind, and the people who mind don't matter.

I want to show my emotions at time and open up but have to bottle most of them up and maintain my resilience and composure,otherwise weakness is exposed and weakness leads to vulnerability and most women want a strong man and any vulnerabily leads to exposing a weak man, most women want a strong man!Emotional weakness leads to weakness and instability also the potential of being a needy whiner,if your a man do what it takes to hold back those tears no matter how much your touched or moved or its game over! A man must be strong and tough at all times to defend a woman against other males and any emotional weakness shown leads to attack from not only other males but females leading other males to take the female from the male seeing him unfit to be with that female!

Last edited by AspieOtaku on 10 Mar 2015, 2:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

social Darwinism sucks big wind.

In mated pairs the female T-rex did the hunting while the slightly smaller male T-Rex guarded the nest and protected the babies against other T-Rexes and predators he was the home maker while the female was the real master!

Fellow men don't show any weakness or vulnerability even if she claims she wants to be there for you to cry don't do it, stay strong if you show any emotional weakness or cry she wont respect you and move some where else its all a trap! We men must stay strong and rigid and show no weakness in order to gain respect from any woman because women prefer a strong man and not a weak man a man with strong will! Stay strong, stay tough stay stead fast! Without those qualities a woman will look elsewhere that is all there is to it! I am now a strong man,independent and a lone wolf and will continue to be strong wild and free nobody can tame my heart!

You can still be the typical man, but aware of your vulnerabilities, it's not just about the extremes eg crying. Bottling up strong emotions is not healthy, they tend to be released later at inappropriate moments, personally I would be less worried by a man that could tackle their challenges through discussion. I dont know if it's a denial piece, but I think ignoring interpersonal problems etc. leads to more complicated issues in the fullness of time.

Bottling up emotions is not healthy but necessary because the majority of women don't want an emotional wreck because an emotional wreck means a weak man and instability! Our unhealthy emotional damage is beneficial for the woman!

I cried the other day, (privately) when someone i worked with left their job. I haven't cried in a long time. Usually i brush feelings like this aside, but i didn't this time, and in doing this i realised just how much emotion i have been blocking over the years, both sad and happy feelings. I think i have 'blocked' emotion as a self protective reaction to sadness and not knowing how to deal with starting from late teens. Blocking sadness though has the effect of blocking lots of other emotions and feelings, as i don't think its possible to only push away certain feelings and not others.
I think the idea of gender as a spectrum is a much better way of looking at things. Males are biologically male and females female. Masculinity and femininity though, are on a sliding scale, not two opposing scales with one at one end and the other at the other end, but two different scales, and any person can register on the two scales depending on who they are and how they are feeling.

Are you living your life and trivialising your emotional well-being for what you think a potential partner might desire in a man and what type of partner are you hoping to attract with that ethos? To me that is living an unauthentic life, ignoring your actual needs as a human, and prioritising the imagined desires of an as yet non existent person, over your own health.
Vulnerability does not equate to an emotional wreck, you have formed an extreme interpretation.

@Concrete, Now to me that seems like a privately healthy reaction. Blocking emotions is something I think I have done in the past, because I did not know how to deal with them. I agree about gender being a spectrum, and that everyone contains feminine and masculine energy/traits. I like to balance mine through meditation, which serves as an outlet for a part of me that I try to embrace, rather than suppress.

The stigma males face is they are seen as weak that is all there is to it,that is how society sees it men are not meant to show emotions or have any emotional weaknesses at all or openings at all if they do they face ridicule and seen as weak nobodies!

I agree with this, it expresses the biological, sexual and emotional reality very well - a reality that humanity has only recently begun to come to terms with. One of the main reasons why men are now beginning to understand and (sometimes grudgingly) accept the often alarming complexity of their identity is because of the changes brought about by the Feminist movement over the last half-century, which has enabled women to wrest control of their identities from the hands of a male-dominated world. More than ever before, women are free to define who they are, to reject the stereotypes that have been imposed upon them; as a result, men are slowly beginning to go through the same process.

Thank you for starting this thread, Smudge, it's prompted some fascinating comment. I remember listening to Emma Watson's UN speech at the time, she's very much a woman of the age. As part of my Theology degree at Oxford I did a dissertation on 'The maternal vocation of the man', so it's a subject that interests me.

The thing is I fear showing any emotional vulnerability because its asking for me to be attacked I will not let that happen again and I will not allow someone get to my heart again unless I trust her and good luck with that trust is for the weak I trusted once and it destroyed me and I was betrayed!I am on full guard I will never let my guard down again!