When Men Lack Love

I went to sleep last night, dreading waking up in the morning. No, I'm not in a depressive episode, (or even close to it) but I am beginning the process of navigating being a single man once again. I’m not going to dismiss the plethora of advantages that being a man grants me, but there is a weakness in being a single man. Our peers want us to believe that being single as a man is liberating, but freedom comes at the cost of isolation. This separation from the one person you're inclined to be honest with is severed, which leaves difficult feelings like festering sores inside of you. We are taught as men to be bottles, to be a man and hold in the feelings that weigh us down. But this weight kills us disproportionately from women. Men die from loneliness. But loneliness is just the combined feeling, the real thing that kills men at a higher rate is fear of emotional intimacy with people other than our partner. Men cannot connect to our friends the way we can when our vulnerability is involved. We have seen our fathers fall into this trap, relying on our mothers as their only touch point, a stressor that can often lead to relationship hardships. How many relationships could have been saved if we just reached out to our friends and handed out our grief instead of exploding at our loved one? How many people would still be alive if we were able to process our feelings? We cannot continue like this, this feeling that we cannot connect to this world because of the limits of what masculinity tells us to be. I woke up this morning dreading Valentine's Day, but it honestly reminded me that I have already broken the cycle. I have great relationships with men and women in my life and I can speak my deepest fears to them and not feel like a burden. I must continue the process over and over again because I have to unlearn the repetition of generational traumatic masculinity. Only then can I be free from the chains of toxic masculinity.