In contrast, men are taught to suppress their feelings and that it is not masculine to be openly emotional. To make matters worse, women are raised to feel comfortable with their feelings, so it is natural for them to be emotional in pursuing contact with their partners. Men hear any expression of unhappiness by their partner as an indictment of their inadequacy as a man. Men are socialized to believe that their job as a man is to provide for and protect their partners and satisfy their needs. Women often don’t understand that their male partners are more responsive because they are scared. On the other hand, counter-intuitively, women learn that when they lead more with criticism and demands, their partners are often more responsive. No matter how carefully women frame their requests for more connection, their partners inevitably feel criticized and withdraw further. Women learn that trying to talk to their partners to get more connected often backfires. These fears drive a typical pattern of conflict in heterosexual relationships that researchers have called “wife demands/husband withdraws (WD/HW).” Women in straight relationships often initiate conflict because they often do not get the kind of emotional connection they yearn for, which is why women initiate most divorces. Weiss suggests that men’s fears of women include the fear of being dominated and controlled by women, the fear of being inadequate and failing to please women, and the fear of being abandoned. When we understand the fears that lie beneath these defensive postures in men, then everything changes. When we stereotypically reduce our understanding of men in intimate relationships as commitment-phobic, emotionally withholding, or shut down, we do a disservice to men and profoundly misunderstand what is happening in couples. Yet, these fears are one of the most powerful and pervasive shapers of men’s interior lives and their relationships with women. Men afraid of women? It’s pretty clear that women are afraid of men, and with good reason, but what do men have to be afraid of? Men have done such a good job of hiding their fears and vulnerabilities that even their mothers and lovers don’t know how scared they are. Avrum Weiss, in his new book Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men’s Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships, explains that men are as much a mystery to themselves as they are to women and that their opaqueness and emotional withdrawal in intimate relationships are a reflection of their fears of women. Have you ever wondered why there are so many books written for women purporting to help them understand men and why most of those books are written by women? Women often mistakenly believe that men are mysterious by choice as a part of a larger strategy to maintain their control in relationships.
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