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Sharing Blues

The mishaps of a woman's dating life and romantic relationships can serve many purposes. Among friends it could provide release, amusement not to mention camaraderie. Just talking through the thing can help with discovering detail that was previously missed, lead to understanding preventing (one hopes) future disasters. If sharing with relative strangers, it could be as useful as therapy. All this is probably not the same for men coping with their romantic failures and disappointments as this essay suggests. Men in my experience are happy to talk about how they met their wives, specially when they have remain married to the woman for many decades. The way they tell that story is quite different from how women may tell it. There is a lot of self-deprecation when the man tells it - he married up, she took him on a charity case, definitely not his looks or his brilliance that closed the deal and so on. Sometimes there will be a funny yet illuminating anecdote from the times they were still dating. 

I can't remember hearing a man share a personal heartbreak story - the breakup will be mentioned as a fact if the situation warrants it but nothing further will be discussed. When one of my closest childhood friends was struggling in his marriage, I knew there were troubles and he wanted out but there was very little if anything he shared that could help paint a clear picture of their marriage. In my over-sharing phase after divorce, he heard a lot of painful detail, frequently rehashed because only repetition ad-nauseum helped with easing the pain. Even that never prompted him to open up. There are other things about him I know that even his wife might not have. Challenges at work, lingering health issues that caused worry, disputes with close family members over things that most people would consider fairly private. I was privy to all that but relationship troubles was off-limit. The last time I had a male friend talk about difficulty in relationships must have been in my mid-20s. That's probably when the door that opens to vulnerability is shut tight. 

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