Do Men Have Feelings?

The answer may surprise you

Welcome back to Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! Today’s question, from E., is almost as short as the pseudonym I assigned her:

“How can I get my husband to talk to me more about his feelings?”

Let me put my cards on the table, E.: judging by your email address, not only have I met your husband, but I was his roommate on two occasions in the 1990’s. We’ve been close friends for over thirty-five years, so I actually have some subject expertise here.

And I’d like you to consider the possibility that the reason your husband doesn’t want to talk about his feelings is because he doesn’t have them.

I’m pretty confident in this assessment, because I don’t have them, either.

I can’t ask him to confirm it, because God knows we’re not going to discuss our inner lives with each other. The closest we’ve ever come to that was between innings at a Yankees game ten years ago, and it got awkward so fast that we instantly pivoted back to one of our two standard conversation topics, “How are your kids?” and “Did you see that thing on TV?”

But trust me when I say he’s mostly dead inside, just like I am.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “That’s ridiculous! Everybody has feelings!”

And sure, I guess. To a point. If you drop a heavy object on your husband’s foot, will he holler? Probably.

But when it comes to the kind of emotions you’re thinking of—joy, sorrow, the other stuff—you’re tapping a dry well.

This isn’t his fault. It’s just the way we were raised. Remember your father-in-law? Did he seem like he was operating with the full palette of human emotional reactions?

No, right? Neither was my dad.

As the sons of pre-Baby Boom American males, your husband and I were taught from birth that the only appropriate feelings are those expressed by the main character in a Clint Eastwood movie. To spare you the trouble of re-watching A Fistful of Dollars, Dirty Harry, or Every Which Way But Loose, here’s a comprehensive list:

Anger.

That’s it. That’s all we’ve got to work with. Primal fury, plus the monochromatic baseline sort of eh that’s our day-to-day default setting.

My dad took me to see this movie in a theater when I was five years old, which explains a lot about both of us

This may strike you as tragic. It’s not! It’s actually fine. Please don’t think of it as a problem, because with proper management, it doesn’t have to be.

And for God’s sake, don’t get bamboozled by the smear campaign that the millennial generation’s been waging against my entire gender cohort by hammering the adjective “toxic” onto the front end of the otherwise perfectly serviceable noun “masculinity.”

Up until somewhere around 2010, it wasn’t toxic. It was just masculinity. And it worked fine! Except for the Iraq war. But I’d argue that was more of a Texas thing.

There are a ton of advantages to your husband’s not having feelings, both for him and you. During major life events—at times of huge emotional upheaval for everybody in your family except him—he’ll be steadfast in his commitment to supporting you and the kids in every conceivable way, minus one.

He’ll make arrangements, he’ll pick people up from the airport, he’ll positively leap at the opportunity to go to the kitchen and do the dishes. If the situation calls for it, he’ll even give a speech. It’ll be thoughtful, concise, and delivered in a very calm voice.

He will be an absolute rock, both in his reliability and his affect.

All that said, I’m a little concerned that you asked this question because in your almost thirty years of marriage, you’ve occasionally seen little green shoots of what seems like evidence that there’s an emotional life struggling to emerge from the dry, withered mass of dead brown lawn that constitutes his psychic landscape.

Don’t encourage that. It’s not healthy grass trying to grow there. It’s just weeds. And if you try to force the issue by watering the shit out of his mental lawn, you know what you’re going to get? Mud. Which will wind up getting tracked all over your house. And by “house,” I mean “marriage.”

Trust me that you don’t want this. You’ve actually got a really good thing here, if you can just accept its natural limitations.

You might be a little dispirited at the thought of spending the remainder of your life with a person who, down deep, still doesn’t really understand why you cry sometimes and might even get a little freaked out by it. If so, rest assured that A.I. chatbots can already mimic human emotions even more persuasively than your husband or I can, and they’re improving exponentially.

So if you can just hold out for a few more months, you’ll be able to supplement your otherwise exceptional spouse with a backup A.I. husband who can perform whatever emotional labor needs doing. If that feels like cheating, make it a threesome by getting one that’s also trained to help your husband with his golf game.

Thanks for your interest in my bad advice, E.! Let’s get a dinner on the books soon for the four of us. Or the six of us, if you and my wife want to invite the A.I.’s.

And for anyone else who’s still reading: please ask me a question! I’ll do my best to answer it as unhelpfully as I can.