What Male Suffering Actually Looks Like: The Patterns We're Trained to Miss

Part 2 of the series on men's emotional health

In 2016, a man named Matthew Fray published an essay called "She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by the Sink." It was read more than three million times. Fray was not really writing about dishwashing. He was writing about what had broken in his marriage long before he understood it was breaking. His wife had been telling him for years that her experience mattered to her, that the small things were not small to her, that she needed to be heard. He had been dismissing her, each time, as irrational. He could not see, while it was happening, what was actually happening. By the time he understood, she was gone.

In a follow-up, Fray put it more directly: "My wife didn't really divorce me because I left a dish by the sink. She left because, for years, every time she was upset with me about something I didn't think she had a right to be upset about, I dismissed her as irrational and incorrect. I wasn't bad at taking care of the dishes, literally. I was just bad at taking care of the 'dishes,' figuratively."

Three million people read it because the pattern was familiar. The man who genuinely loves his partner. The slow drift. The bewilderment at the end.

This pattern shows up at scale in the divorce data. In heterosexual marriages, women initiate divorce at roughly 70% (Brinig and Allen, 2000; Rosenfeld, 2017). Among college-educated women the rate is higher still. The husbands usually say they did not see it coming, and most of the time they are telling the truth. They were not equipped to read what was happening between them, because they were not equipped to read what was happening in themselves.

This post is about that gap. Where it comes from, what it looks like, and why the men inside it are not failing. They are doing what they were trained to do.

Boys grow up in a different emotional culture

The clearest way to understand what produces a man like Fray, or a man you may live with, or a man you may be, is to listen to who he was at thirteen.

Niobe Way, a developmental psychologist at NYU, has spent over twenty years interviewing American adolescent boys about their friendships. The transcripts she has published in her book Deep Secrets are some of the most clarifying writing on masculine emotional life I have encountered. Her boys, in early and middle adolescence, sound nothing like the cultural script. They sound like this:

"Sometimes you just need to spill your heart out to somebody." (15-year-old)

"My best friend and I love each other. That's it. You have this thing that is deep, so deep within you, you can't explain it."

"Without friends you would go crazy or mad, you'd be lonely all the time, be depressed. You would go wacko."

"If I didn't have a friend, I would go wacko. I'd want to kill myself."

These are twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-, fifteen-year-old boys, across race and class. Way's finding, which contradicts almost every cultural stereotype about how boys relate, is that early-adolescent boys describe their closest male friendships in language usually reserved for romantic love. They name the depth, the necessity, the not-being-able-to-live-without.

Then, around age sixteen, the language changes. Way titled her chapter on this transition "When you grow up, your heart dies."

The same boys, two or three years later, start to use what Way calls a more stereotypic language. It doesn't matter. It's all good. I'm fine. They start to insert "no homo" qualifiers when they describe a friend with any affection. They start to perform detachment. By the end of high school, most of them have lost both the friendships and the language to describe what the friendships were. They have learned that the kind of intimacy they once had with a best friend is, in the cultural script, only for women, only for gay men, only for children. So they shut it down. And the wiring that supported it begins to atrophy.

The 2021 Survey Center on American Life finding that one in five single American men has no close friends at all is what this developmental story looks like at scale. So is the friendship recession data showing that the share of men reporting six or more close friends has fallen from 55% in 1990 to around 27% today.

The training begins long before adolescence, too. A 2017 study by Jennifer Mascaro and colleagues at Emory University recorded fathers' interactions with their toddlers across 48-hour periods. Fathers of daughters spent about 60% more time attentively responding to their child, sang and whistled with their daughters five times more often, and used significantly more emotion-related language: words like cry, tears, sad, lonely. Fathers of sons used more achievement language: proud, win, best. They engaged in three times as much rough-and-tumble play. They responded less when their sons cried. Brain imaging in the same study showed that fathers' neural responses to their daughters' happy faces were stronger in regions associated with reward, emotion regulation, and face processing.

This was not conscious. These fathers were not deciding to neglect their sons' emotional lives. They were enacting a cultural script so deep most of them could not see it. The script gets installed in infancy and reinforced for the next two decades. By the time a boy becomes the man sitting across from a worried wife, his emotional infrastructure has been shaped by an environment that systematically gave him less emotional education than it gave his sister.

The point Way makes most insistently in her work, and the point worth holding here, is that this is not about boys lacking emotional capacity. It is about boys being trained to perform its absence. The capacity is there. They are not born stoic. They are made stoic.

Normative male alexithymia

The psychologist Ronald Levant gave a name to the adult endpoint of this developmental process: normative male alexithymia. Alexithymia literally means "no words for feelings." In general clinical populations it is considered a disorder. In men it is so common it is normative.

It has three components. First, difficulty identifying feelings in yourself. The internal sensations are there, the tight chest, the churning stomach, the racing thoughts, but the man has never learned to translate those sensations into emotional language. Second, difficulty describing feelings to others. He knows he feels bad but cannot differentiate between anxious, sad, ashamed, disappointed, or afraid. It is all just "bad" or "stressed" or "frustrated." Third, externally oriented thinking. He focuses on events and facts rather than internal experience. Ask him how he felt during a hard conversation with his wife and he will give you a play-by-play of what was said.

When a man in my office says "I don't know" in response to a question about his feelings, he is almost always telling the truth. He does not know. The neural pathways between sensation and language were never fully built. Asking him now to identify his emotions is like asking someone who never learned to read to analyze poetry.

This is the validation worth offering first. If you are a man who has been told you are emotionally unavailable, shut down, or stonewalling, you are not failing at something you should naturally know how to do. You were never taught. The skill was actively trained out of you. This is not your fault.

How men cope with what they cannot name

Feelings a person cannot identify do not disappear. They go somewhere. Men, on the whole, have developed a fairly consistent set of strategies for managing emotional pain they cannot name or process directly. These are not character flaws. They are the best available solutions for someone who was never given the other ones.

Work. Long work weeks are often not about ambition. They are about escape. Work is where men do not have to feel the emptiness, the conflict, or the not-knowing. Work provides clear metrics of success when everything else feels like failure. It provides structure for a nervous system that does not know what to do with unstructured time. Workaholism is rarely diagnosed as the coping strategy it usually is.

Substance use. Men have nearly twice the rate of alcohol use disorder as women, and substantially higher rates of overdose deaths. Most of this is not recreational use that got out of hand. It is self-medication. Nightly drinking is not about enjoying a beer. It is about making it possible to fall asleep without the rumination starting. It is about turning the volume down on thoughts and feelings that are otherwise overwhelming.

Exercise. Healthy movement is one of the few culturally sanctioned ways men can regulate their nervous systems. Many men describe their workouts as the only place they feel anything at all, or the only place they can finally stop thinking. This can be genuinely healing. It can also become its own form of avoidance when the workout is the only emotional regulation tool a man has, when the day falls apart if he misses it, or when the intensity escalates over time in pursuit of the same relief.

Pornography and affairs. This is uncomfortable territory but it belongs in the conversation. Compulsive pornography use and infidelity frequently function as emotional regulation strategies for men who cannot access their inner lives through other means. The intensity, novelty, secrecy, and validation provide a temporary hit of aliveness that breaks through the numbness. This framing does not excuse the harm these patterns cause to partners. It does help explain why men who genuinely love their partners still do these things, sometimes for years, often with confusion about their own motives. Affairs and porn binges are often less about the other person or the image and more about creating a private space where a man can briefly escape the trapped, deadened feeling of his actual life.

Anger and irritability. For many men, depression does not feel like sadness. It feels like anger. Everything irritates them. Their fuse is short. They snap at their kids over small things. They have road rage. This is not separate from depression. It is how depression manifests when you have been taught that anger is the only acceptable negative emotion for men. All the vulnerable feelings underneath, sadness, fear, hurt, shame, get funneled through the one channel that feels permissible. When men can finally access the grief and fear beneath the rage, the explosive anger often begins to subside.

Numbing and disengagement. The inability to feel pleasure or excitement is classic anhedonia. Men describe it as feeling nothing, going through the motions, watching their lives from behind glass. This presentation can persist for years because the man is still functioning, still going to work, still handling responsibilities. He tells himself this is just what being an adult is like, and slowly drifts further from anything resembling genuine aliveness.

Physical symptoms. Many men's first signal that something is wrong comes through the body, not the emotions. Doctors refer men to therapy because of blood pressure, weight gain, chronic pain, or insomnia, not because the men complain of depression. The body is trying to communicate what the mind cannot articulate. Because men have been trained to attend to physical problems rather than emotional ones, they seek medical solutions for what are essentially psychological injuries. Stress sounds physical, manageable, like something successful men deal with. Depression sounds like weakness.

Reckless or self-destructive behavior. When you feel nothing, you sometimes do dangerous things just to feel something. Driving too fast. Gambling. Risky financial decisions. Refusing medical care. Some researchers call this partial suicide, slow-motion self-destruction through choices that increase mortality risk. Men who research suicide methods online often are not in acute suicidal crisis. They are testing the edges, imagining an exit, creating a fantasy of escape from a life that feels unbearable to stay inside.

What this looks like in relationships

The relational cost of these patterns is enormous, and increasingly well-documented.

John Gottman's research on the Four Horsemen of relationship dissolution identifies stonewalling, the complete shutdown of communication during conflict, as one of the strongest predictors of divorce. Roughly 85% of stonewallers in heterosexual relationships are men. From the inside, stonewalling is not contempt. It is physiological flooding. The man's heart rate exceeds 100 beats per minute. His prefrontal cortex goes partially offline. He cannot think, cannot reason, cannot stay present. The only available strategy is to go offline. From the outside, this looks like indifference. From her side, it feels like being shut out of a room he just locked.

Then there is the demand-withdraw pattern that couples researchers have studied for decades. In heterosexual conflict, women are far more likely to be the demanders, asking for engagement, discussion, change, while men are far more likely to be the withdrawers, going silent, leaving the room, escaping into their phones. This pattern is itself one of the most reliable predictors of relationship dissatisfaction over time. The withdrawer is not failing because he does not love her. He is reaching for the only nervous system regulation strategy he was ever given.

Fray's account is what this pattern sounds like from inside the man living it. He had been a faithful, hardworking, committed husband. He had also been incapable of taking his wife's inner life seriously when it differed from his own. He spent a decade telling the person he loved that her experience did not count. Every time she walked into the kitchen and found a drinking glass by the sink, he later wrote, "she moved incrementally closer to moving out and ending our marriage. I just didn't know it yet."

The dish, in other words, was never the dish. The fight is never the fight. A wife is rarely leaving because of the literal thing she is asking for. She is leaving because of the cumulative weight of a thousand small moments of not being heard, not being responded to, not being met. And the husband, often, has been organizing his entire defense around the small things rather than the pattern. I do so much around here. Why are you making a federal case about a glass? He is missing the point because the point is not legible to him. It is built out of feelings, accumulated over years, that he was never trained to track in himself or anyone else.

This is the most common pattern in couples therapy. By the time the man fully recognizes that the relationship is in serious trouble, his wife has already been grieving and disengaging for years. He arrives at the threshold of change just as she is walking out the door.

The shame layer

Underneath all of these patterns is shame. Crushing, pervasive shame that makes everything worse.

Men are supposed to be strong, capable, and in control. Distress makes a man feel weak, incompetent, and powerless. Admitting to emotional struggle can feel like admitting failure at being a man. It is not just I have a problem. It is I am not man enough to handle my life.

So men minimize. "It's not that bad." "I can handle it." "Other people have real problems." They are trying to maintain some shred of masculine credibility in the face of evidence that they are struggling. They cannot tell their wives how scared they are because admitting fear feels like admitting weakness. They cannot acknowledge pain because pain feels like victimhood. They cannot tell anyone they are considering ending their lives because that would make them a burden, and men are not supposed to be burdens.

The shame creates isolation, and the isolation makes everything worse. This is why the suicide statistics are what they are. When a man finally acknowledges that he needs help, he is often so far gone that he bypasses I should talk to someone and goes straight to I should end this.

It is not your fault. And the work is still yours.

This is the both/and at the center of all of this.

It is not your fault that you did not learn the skills. Boys are not given the emotional education girls receive. The capacity was actively suppressed in you. The boys in Niobe Way's research at thirteen could love their best friends. They could say I want to spill my heart out to somebody. That capacity was in you too, once. It got trained out. By the time you reach adulthood, you are working with neural wiring that was shaped by years of being told not to notice, not to feel, not to need. This is true even if you had loving parents. The culture is in the water.

And: the wiring is not permanent. Neuroplasticity is real at every age. Emotional literacy is a learnable skill, like reading or playing piano. Adults can rebuild capacity that was foreclosed in childhood. The conditions for this learning are well understood: structured practice, safe relationships, body-based awareness work, and being witnessed by other men who are doing the same work.

This is the both/and that healing requires. I was set up to be this way. And I am the only one who can do this work now. Holding only the first half leaves a man stuck blaming the culture while continuing the patterns. Holding only the second half collapses into shame and self-attack, which makes the patterns worse. The integration of both is what allows actual change. Fray made this turn explicitly after his divorce, when he stopped defending himself and started doing the work. His later book, This Is How Your Marriage Ends, is essentially a long meditation on the lesson it took him losing his marriage to learn.

What helps

Therapists cannot just give a man a diagnosis and expect that to help. Telling him he has depression does not suddenly give him access to his feelings. Telling him his anger is really sadness does not make the sadness accessible. The work is slower and more indirect.

It usually starts with the body. Where do you notice that? is a less threatening question than how do you feel? Physical sensation is closer to the surface than emotional awareness. Men can usually tell you about the tight chest, the churning stomach, the tension in their shoulders. From there we can build toward that tightness might be anxiety and eventually what are you anxious about?

It almost always involves structure. Connor Beaton's MensWork curriculum is built around exactly this principle. The book asks men to do concrete inventories around shadow material: the avoidance shadow, the anger shadow, the sexual shadow, the wound of the father. The structure functions as scaffolding. Rather than asking men to free-associate about their inner lives, which most men cannot do, the work gives them prompts, questions, and practices. The same logic underlies men's circles and structured groups in the lineages of David Deida, Robert Bly, and others. Different traditions, same core insight: men generally do not develop emotional capacity through unstructured talk. They develop it through structured practice, in the company of other men.

It almost always involves other men. The shame that keeps a man isolated dissolves fastest when he is in a room with other men doing the same work. Hearing another man name what you have been carrying alone is one of the most reliably transformative experiences in this work. It is also why the friendship recession is not just a side effect of male emotional restriction. It is also one of its primary causes and one of the primary obstacles to its repair.

And it requires patience. Undoing decades of conditioning takes time. The first real breakthrough, when a man accesses genuine feeling and lets himself express it, is profound. But it does not happen in session three. It happens after months of building trust, teaching skills, and creating enough safety that vulnerability becomes possible.

What this series will explore next

The next post in this series goes deeper into the developmental story. How exactly does the thirteen-year-old who can say I would die for him become the thirty-five-year-old who cannot tell his wife what he feels? What are the specific moments, forces, and cultural pressures that produce normative male alexithymia? And what would it look like to raise boys differently? This is where we will sit longer with the research of Niobe Way, Michael Reichert, Andrew Reiner, and others who have spent careers trying to understand what we are doing to boys and how we might stop.

Because if we can understand how this gets created, we can begin to imagine how to undo it. Not just in the men sitting in our therapy offices, but in the boys growing up around us right now.

Next in the series: "How Boys Learn to Disconnect: The Developmental Roots of Male Emotional Restriction"

Sources: Matthew Fray, "She Divorced Me Because I Left Dishes by the Sink" (2016) and This Is How Your Marriage Ends (2022); Niobe Way, Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection (Harvard, 2011); Brinig & Allen, "These Boots Are Made for Walking" (2000); Rosenfeld (2017); Mascaro et al., Behavioral Neuroscience (2017); Survey Center on American Life (2021); Ronald Levant on normative male alexithymia; John Gottman on the Four Horsemen; Connor Beaton, MensWork.

If you or someone you love is struggling, you are not alone. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text. For ongoing support, working with a therapist who understands masculine psychology can make a real difference.