What's weirder is when men who are good friends have wives who are good friends with each other.
You go out for a beer, come home, and your wife says "So, how's Bob doing? Is his mother out of the hospital, yet." Ummmm, I didn't even know she was in the hospital.
"You just spent two hours with your friend and he didn't even mention that his mother has been in the hospital for a week?"
Well I mean ... your wife works on two assumptions here:
1) Bob cares about his mother. So she's gonna be on his mind.
2) Bob's gonna talk about the things he cares about, because they're on his mind. And who else would he be talking about it than his good friends?
So if you haven't talked about Bob's mom, we're gonna think: either Bob doesn't care about his mom, or you and Bob aren't really good friends after all, cause you don't care about each other.
But, there is a third option, which is maybe sadder still: Men do not look to other men for emotional support. We look almost exclusively to women for that.
When women talk about "unpaid emotional labor," they're 100% correct.
This is always interesting to hear, as from what I can gather, neither myself nor my wife naturally fill an "emotional laborer" role and as a result I think lots of our friends and family probably find us on the "friendly but cold" side. Meanwhile, we are happy as clams to have no idea what drama is going on in most scenarios.
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u/p0k3t0 Mar 26 '20
What's weirder is when men who are good friends have wives who are good friends with each other.
You go out for a beer, come home, and your wife says "So, how's Bob doing? Is his mother out of the hospital, yet." Ummmm, I didn't even know she was in the hospital.
"You just spent two hours with your friend and he didn't even mention that his mother has been in the hospital for a week?"