The Champagne of People

Another friend of mine, this time female, was expressing her own frustration at not being able to relate to or understand her boyfriend’s very emotional reaction to the recent loss of his favorite team.  Now here is a man who is actually quite in tune with his emotions and is, as far as I know, pretty good at expressing them. Yet here is he acting like your run-of-the-mill suppressed American male.

 

Well, one of the reasons that this particular American male is more in tune with his emotions than his peers is that he was introduced to therapy at a relatively young age after the loss of his father.  His father with whom he regularly attended baseball games, which made up a substantial part of their relationship.

 

It seems almost comically obvious, now, why his team’s loss might conjure a deeper more extreme sadness than my friend could initially understand.

 

Men in America have set it up so that not only are they funneling all emotive release into the outcome of a sports game, they are concentrating into this environment the entirety of the complex father-son relationship.  And where there is concentration there is often pressure.

 

And pressure builds.

Men and women have the same feelings, the joys, disappointments, fears, and outrages of life.  But somehow (most) men have limited themselves in a way women have not, specifically in a community-based sense.  Women talk about their feelings with other women constantly. Adult women call home twice as often as men.  When we get together with female friends we discuss our own fears and insecurities in a way that men do not.  Sometimes all it takes is a compliment from the woman in line behind me and *poof* she has heard my entire life story.

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I am going to go out on a limb a say most men cannot relate to that scenario.  *I*, however, cannot relate to reacting to a man catching a ball like this: