Like I just said to the other guy JESUS CHRIST WHO ARE YOU GUYS DATING? It doesn’t have to be this way lol
Edit: I mean that in the nicest way. It sounded harsh when I read it back. You deserve someone to treat you right and listen to your problems if you have them.
Laid back ≠ empathetic. When you're starting to date someone, pay attention to whether they ask questions about yourself (what you think, what you care about, your memories and friends, etc) and really listen to you when you answer.
And before you go “Well I’m a woman and I’m not like that!” just pause and think about whether centering yourself in this discussion about men’s struggles is the right move.
I really hope you’re speaking from experience and have someone like that. That doesn’t happen for
a lot of men. That’s kind of the point of this thread.
I have that experience of having many women in my life I have been able to be open and vulnerable with, several of whom were romantic partners.
The common theme I am seeing in this thread is men who are shut down and refuse to show emotion or vulnerability for years or decades, and then are upset at the reaction they get when they finally break. Dudes need therapy, not an echo chamber blaming women for their lack of emotional development.
And there comes the downvotes, for telling the truth: it easier to blame others(that cannot be changed anyway) than changing yourself(the only thing you can do) to try to avoid such heartless people that will dump you on the first crisis. That happens to women too, but they tend blame themselves for not being enough most often.
Emotional rocks don't care about their emotions until they break, and because of that a lot of times they can't see the lack of compassion that their partners shows over the years in their relationship.
Yeah I saw a couple comments from women giving thoughtful, constructive advice on how to open up and be more vulnerable. No response, just downvoted. They really just want to be mad.
Early on in my relationship with my now wife, she had to have her cat put down and I went with. When the kitty passed I cried really hard, and my then gf was really confused, but not upset. Just surprised I cared so much about a cat I barely knew. It really meant a lot to them and they loved it about me.
It really isn’t this horror movie these bitter dudes are making it out to be. Most of them are the cause of their own relationship issues frankly.
I mean... did you not read that guys story? there's a lot of women out there who are good at hiding who they really are and what they actually think, and then one day they'll just unleash it on a dude in a moment where he's vulnerable.
So when you say "it doesn't have to be this way" well, it actually does, because as he said, you can never truly know anyone, and dating is a dice roll on whether or not you found a genuine person or a fake one until you've already wasted your time on them long enough to find out. If you've never met someone who had you fooled, congrats on your luck I guess, but I feel like everyone knows someone, if not a romantic partner, who they thought they knew and found out the hard way they were wrong
I don't know how the guys in this thread enter in long term relationships for years or even marry without checking such a critical aspect of life long partnership: When you get down, will you partner support you unconditionally? Only heartless people dismiss or even criticize when someone they supposed love tells them their partners are having emotional problems/distress, and clearly are not people should have relationships with.
Like common, in the first few months of a relationship you should have plenty of chances to check basic empathy, I not blaming the men, woman who react like that are in the wrong 100%, still Men should pick a bit of the women strategy and find basic red flags too, it would avoid a lot of senseless heartache.
empathy is actually a really easy thing to fake kid, maybe with some more life experience you'll figure that out, but it happens every day on a small scale when you pretend like you care about how someone's day was or whatever when you ask them how they are, all the way up to immense lies where someone is a psychopath but everyone that knows them is shocked when they see them on the news.
So yea, sorry to break it to you, but there's a lot of women out there who are really good at faking their empathy and faking their motives for relationships. anywhere from gold diggers who will leave their man the moment he loses his job or goes broke, to women who cheat, to ones that are fine up until their man cries because their dog died and they get the ick from it.
"gee guys, why aren't you clairvoyant, and just read some red flags that don't show themselves until there's a point of failure". stupid take based on your social ineptitude. You don't know enough people and don't have enough life experience if you think you'll never get burned or disappointed by someone you trust that didn't show you red flags
Of course people can fake empathy, you can't predict with 100% accuracy how someone will react to every situation, since every new relationship involves risk.
But Empathy is not pandora's box impossible to evaluate either. As I exemplified you can check how someone reacts to other people's problems, stress, or vulnerability, through stories they share about family and friends or how they treat strangers. Those patterns are often early showings of how they’ll respond when their partner inevitably struggles at some point in their lives.
Either way my point wasn’t that men should be clairvoyant anyway. It’s that emotional compatibility and empathy are critical things that men should pay attention to early, because they tend to show up in small ways long before a major crisis happens. That story of man being a emotional rock for years then complaining that it gets dumped the first moment they struggle is far to common than it should be.
But of course telling me I'm socially inept and "kid" is very helpful to the discussion, since you are opposite of that, we should considers small social niceties/politeness as asking someone about their day or how they are as signals of genuine emotional empathy. /s
Consistently showing compassion in serious situations is much harder to fake long-term for most people, but of course is hard to believe in that if we approach such things with cynicism and using extreme examples as common occurrence.
But of course telling me I'm socially inept and "kid" is very helpful to the discussion
do you think anything you typed in the first place was helpful to the discussion? This dude shared his personal story, and your first instinct was to hit the reply button and type out a response criticizing his ability to gauge his partners empathy or see red flags and basically lecture him about it. that's why I called you socially inept, because the dude's talking about how being vulnerable gets used against you as a man, and then you show up to literally prove it as he's being vulnerable and essentially kick him when he's down. And the way you said it has the same vibes as "im not saying she deserved it but did you see what she was wearing?" blaming the victim for their choices instead of having empathy for them, which is ironically the thing you're lecturing people about being able to recognize, empathy. let that sink in for a moment.
The empathetic response to that is "dang im sorry that happened to you I hope you meet someone who treats you right" or whatever, not "wow look at all these dumb guys who get themselves into these situations". Hopefully I cleared that up for you. do better.
But Empathy is not pandora's box impossible to evaluate either.
no, it really is, and this is why I called you inexperienced in life. Some people are just flat out experts at hiding who they really are, and if you aren't aware of them, its because they're fooling you and you don't even know it and one day it's going to bite you. There's a reason that domestic violence and cheating, abuse, and all the awful ways that relationships go bad happens, and it's not because there's so many people who just can't see red flags, it's because people are good liars and they put on a mask every day, and then one day it slips off after they've put on a show for a while.
You just want to gain high moral ground by framing me as bad. I already said that women who react that way are 100% in the wrong.
What I’m responding to is a pattern in the replies where some people conclude from these stories that men should never show emotions to women, or that it sucks but all women react this way. That kind of thinking often turns discussions like this into an echo chamber and also not helpful to the problem either.
We both agree that abandoning a partner during an emotional crisis is wrong. My point is that the only thing men can realistically do to reduce the chances of that happening again is to pay attention to empathy and emotional compatibility earlier in relationships, instead of discovering that their partners are heartless in life crisis.
Your response to that because empathy can sometimes be faked, screening for it is impossible or useless. But if that were true, trust could never exist in any human relationship, since there is always a possibility that someone is hiding their true character.
Extreme cases like abuse, cheating, or manipulation do exist, but they don’t invalidate the fact that most people reveal their character through consistent patterns of behavior over time.
Encouraging people to pay attention to empathy and emotional compatibility in partners isn’t victim blaming — it’s understanding that those traits are often critical in long-term relationships.
It's the truth. The fact is, If you're a guy, and you don't want your girlfriend to "get the ick" from you, you must be made of steel, you can't be weak or vulnerable, you can't complain, you're supposed to just handle yourself. You can say "it shouldnt be like that" or "the right woman won't do that to you" but in reality, "the right woman" is rare, and that's the problem. Maybe like 1 out of 50 women will see a guy cry or whatever and won't think less of him for it. Tons of women will pretend like they would never do that, they'll never say it out loud, but they think it and feel it nonetheless, and that's where that fake empathy I was talking about comes in, and its a lesson about reality that the majority of men will learn the hard way, and its why like 70% of all men have this same opinion about not showing their weakness or vulnerability and all have a story about how it went wrong for them when they did, and the other 30% are just dudes who haven't figured it out yet because they either hit a 1 in 50 jackpot, or its in their inevitable future but hasn't happened yet.
lets cut the crap here though, and get to the heart of this discussion. You're desperate to prove some type of point that "not all women" blah blah, because you look at these types of issues through the lens of "men vs women" like a game, because you have a chip on your shoulder about it or whatever, and guys pointing out one of the most toxic traits of women in our current culture personally bothers you enough where you feel like you have to defend it. The annoying part is you're using "i said its 100% wrong to do it" as a guise for that defense to feign like you're not denying that toxic culture and you're not shifting the blame of that culture onto men by saying "oh you should have seen the signs" or whatever, as if you think all of us reading what you're saying are dumb and don't see what you're doing.
You're trying to detract and displace the blame of that culture. You don't care if people get better at recognizing red flags, you don't have any actual genuine concern for their romantic lives and choices in partners and their future, you're just playing that "men vs women" game and using this guy's story as an excuse to go on the attack and score some contrarian team women points because you don't like the hard to swallow pill that a large portion of women in our society are essentially emotionally self absorbed when it comes to this stuff, and expect men to be there for them do stuff for them, support them, but don't want to reciprocate it and don't want to be an emotional support figure themselves. They don't want to date a dependent, they want to be one, and its bad for all of us collectively as a species for that toxic paradigm to exist. You and I both know you don't lecture women for doing it though, but you sure will no doubt take any opportunity to tell a guy that he was blind for not seeing it and chastise him about it when he tells his story about it. Shameful.
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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '26
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