What this touched is my ongoing sadness, puzzlement and frustration about the general state of emotional illiteracy in men. Also, what this brought home is the cost women pay for this illiteracy. It seemed very unfair for women to be the emotional containers and emotional vehicles for men in relationships. So, the need to write something that may help occurred.

I found a very good understanding of the cause of this emotional illiteracy in men in John Hough and Marshall Hardy's book, Against the Wall: Men's Reality in a Codependent Culture. They maintain that the patriarchal culture in which we live has as a consequence the separation of men from their emotions. That the cultural rules and expectations for men are "Don't talk", "Don't feel", and "Don't express." These rules are similar to the rules for codependency and leave men with very little emotional self awareness.

Another primary cause of this emotional disconnection among men, according to Hough and Marshall, is that they grow up without a model of what it is like to be a male who can both think and feel. Without this model many men end up searching but never finding a sense of wholeness in their lives. Most then end up looking outside themselves for the missing piece that can make them whole. The search for this missing piece can take the form of a very driven ambition to succeed in order to avoid the felt emptiness and to fill it up with people, places and things. Also, the search for this missing piece can become a lifelong unfulfillable quest because the missing element has become romanticized usually to the point of distortion.

Men have three options for what to do about this missing piece. They can try to find this missing piece to their wholeness in their achievements, creations, and accumulated possessions. The other option is for men to become numb which is one of the primary cultural rules of being a man. Men who follow the prevalent guidelines of masculinity which they grew up with will often be in conflict with the feeling dimension of life. Also, the cost of this emotional disconnection is one that is not readily seen. Men suffer inordinate health costs associated with the stresses involved in being unemotional human doings. The statistics on population mortality show that one-half of all men will die a minimum of eight years before the average woman (Hough and Marshall, 1984).

The last option for men is to look for the missing in the heart-center of the women in their lives. This is an unfair burden for women to have and is wrought with negative consequences. One of the consequences is that, as in the case of the psychotherapist at the conference, there is a fundamental way in which women's basic relational needs cannot be met by the emotionally illiterate man. The basic need for the health and maintenance of any intimate relationship are the expressive interaction of emotions. Without a healthy balanced emotional exchange there is an isolation and loneliness because of the lack of any depth. Further, there is no way that the heart-center of women can be truly met and nourished by men who are clueless or in denial regarding their own or others emotions. So many women are often left feeling fundamentally unseen, not truly understood, and essentially discounted.

Probably one of the most difficult and frustrating burdens is that the partner of the emotionally illiterate man has to carry the load of maintaining the emotional connections for the relationship. What this means is that if feelings are going to be expressed other than the ones permitted to men like anger or competitiveness, then women have to initiate and facilitate the discussion. Not a very appealing picture.

There are many needed remedies to this most serious and unfortunate problem. The first step is for this culture generally and men specifically to appreciate the importance and need for emotional intelligence. The second step is for men to be willing to become involved in acquiring this kind of literacy-for their sake and for the sake of those they love and who love them.