Men Are as Emotional as Women, They Just Lack Emotional Maturity (And We Call It Strength)
Riya Kumari | May 12, 2025, 22:47 IST
( Image credit : Pexels )
Let’s talk about the biggest myth doing the rounds since Adam bit the apple and blamed Eve: men aren’t emotional. Oh honey, please. Men are so emotional, they make Taylor Swift’s entire discography look like an instruction manual for IKEA furniture. The difference? Women know how to feel. Men… sort of just let emotions leak out in wildly misplaced ways, like yelling during FIFA or throwing a full existential tantrum because their sandwich came with pickles.
There’s a line we’ve all heard: “Women are emotional. Men are logical.” It’s said with conviction. As if it were a fact of biology, not the side effect of generations of conditioning. But here’s the truth. Men aren’t less emotional than women. They are just less fluent in the language of emotion. They feel everything — grief, shame, heartbreak, joy — just like women do. But where women are encouraged to name and navigate their inner world, men are taught early on to silence it. The result? You get boys who cry into their pillows at night and grow into men who flinch at the idea of softness. Not because they don’t feel, but because no one ever taught them how to carry it.
1. Where Emotion Begins to Break
From the time they’re young, boys are told:
“Don’t cry.”
“Toughen up.”
“Act like a man.”
These are not harmless phrases. They are small lessons in emotional disconnection. Each time a boy is told to hold it in instead of let it out, he learns that his feelings are either weak or wrong. So, over time, he learns to express sadness as silence. Fear as anger. Loneliness as distance. He doesn’t stop feeling. He just stops showing.
And then one day, when he’s 30, he doesn’t know how to say “I’m hurting,” so he walks away from the person he loves. Or explodes over something small. Or buries it so deep that he doesn’t even know what’s really going on inside anymore. This isn’t a gender flaw. It’s an emotional injury passed down like an heirloom.
2. Emotional Intelligence Is Not Feminine. It’s Human
The mistake society keeps making is treating emotional intelligence like a feminine trait. But it isn’t. It’s a survival skill. To know how to process disappointment. To express anger without harm. To grieve without shame. To sit with sadness instead of hiding from it.
These are the tools every human needs — not just women. Yet we give them almost exclusively to girls, and then wonder why so many men collapse under the weight of feelings they were never trained to carry. It’s like handing one person a life jacket and asking both to swim the same storm.
3. The Misplacement of Emotion
When a man cries during a movie, people call it sweet. When he talks about his heartbreak? Awkward silence. When he punches a wall? “He’s just got anger issues.” What we fail to see is that it’s all emotion — just misplaced. Many men do express emotion, just not in ways we’re trained to recognize as valid. They shout at football matches because they can’t cry in therapy. They ghost someone they love because they can’t say “I’m scared.”
They drink, detach, joke, rage — not because they feel nothing, but because feeling everything with no map is terrifying. This isn’t immaturity. It’s emotional illiteracy And that’s not the fault of one man — it’s the cost of a culture.
4. What This Means for Women — and For All of Us
Women often carry the emotional weight in relationships, not because men don’t care, but because they don’t know how to show they do. And that difference can wear love thin. But this isn’t about blaming men. It’s about understanding them. And it’s about seeing that when men are given permission — and tools — to express what’s real inside them, they don’t become weak. They become whole.
Because true strength is not stoicism. It’s knowing when to break down and still stay present. It’s learning to cry without apology. It’s sitting across from someone and saying, “That hurt me,” instead of disappearing.
5. What Needs to Change
We need to raise boys with the same emotional vocabulary we give girls. We need men’s spaces that allow not just competition, but connection. We need to stop equating vulnerability with weakness.
And most importantly — we need to stop waiting for men to figure it out on their own. Emotional intelligence is not instinct. It’s education. And the earlier we start teaching it, the less damage everyone will have to repair later.
Let This Linger
If you’re a man reading this and you’ve ever felt like no one gets what’s going on inside you — maybe not even you — this is your reminder: You’re not broken. You were just never taught the tools. And if you’re a woman reading this, and you’ve loved a man who couldn’t meet you emotionally, this is your reminder too: He likely wasn’t incapable. Just unequipped.
We owe it to the boys becoming men, the women who love them, and the men themselves — to stop confusing silence with strength. Emotion doesn’t make a man less of a man. It makes him human. And that is always enough.
1. Where Emotion Begins to Break
Boy crying
( Image credit : Pexels )
From the time they’re young, boys are told:
“Don’t cry.”
“Toughen up.”
“Act like a man.”
These are not harmless phrases. They are small lessons in emotional disconnection. Each time a boy is told to hold it in instead of let it out, he learns that his feelings are either weak or wrong. So, over time, he learns to express sadness as silence. Fear as anger. Loneliness as distance. He doesn’t stop feeling. He just stops showing.
And then one day, when he’s 30, he doesn’t know how to say “I’m hurting,” so he walks away from the person he loves. Or explodes over something small. Or buries it so deep that he doesn’t even know what’s really going on inside anymore. This isn’t a gender flaw. It’s an emotional injury passed down like an heirloom.
2. Emotional Intelligence Is Not Feminine. It’s Human
Consoling
( Image credit : Pexels )
The mistake society keeps making is treating emotional intelligence like a feminine trait. But it isn’t. It’s a survival skill. To know how to process disappointment. To express anger without harm. To grieve without shame. To sit with sadness instead of hiding from it.
These are the tools every human needs — not just women. Yet we give them almost exclusively to girls, and then wonder why so many men collapse under the weight of feelings they were never trained to carry. It’s like handing one person a life jacket and asking both to swim the same storm.
3. The Misplacement of Emotion
Boxing
( Image credit : Pexels )
When a man cries during a movie, people call it sweet. When he talks about his heartbreak? Awkward silence. When he punches a wall? “He’s just got anger issues.” What we fail to see is that it’s all emotion — just misplaced. Many men do express emotion, just not in ways we’re trained to recognize as valid. They shout at football matches because they can’t cry in therapy. They ghost someone they love because they can’t say “I’m scared.”
They drink, detach, joke, rage — not because they feel nothing, but because feeling everything with no map is terrifying. This isn’t immaturity. It’s emotional illiteracy And that’s not the fault of one man — it’s the cost of a culture.
4. What This Means for Women — and For All of Us
Texting
( Image credit : Pexels )
Women often carry the emotional weight in relationships, not because men don’t care, but because they don’t know how to show they do. And that difference can wear love thin. But this isn’t about blaming men. It’s about understanding them. And it’s about seeing that when men are given permission — and tools — to express what’s real inside them, they don’t become weak. They become whole.
Because true strength is not stoicism. It’s knowing when to break down and still stay present. It’s learning to cry without apology. It’s sitting across from someone and saying, “That hurt me,” instead of disappearing.
5. What Needs to Change
Support
( Image credit : Pexels )
We need to raise boys with the same emotional vocabulary we give girls. We need men’s spaces that allow not just competition, but connection. We need to stop equating vulnerability with weakness.
And most importantly — we need to stop waiting for men to figure it out on their own. Emotional intelligence is not instinct. It’s education. And the earlier we start teaching it, the less damage everyone will have to repair later.
Let This Linger
We owe it to the boys becoming men, the women who love them, and the men themselves — to stop confusing silence with strength. Emotion doesn’t make a man less of a man. It makes him human. And that is always enough.