Personally, I went through a phase maybe 25-30 years ago where I was fighting back tears and felt sad all the time. I may have been depressed, I am not sure. I was working teaching school at the time, so I was functioning, but I felt this overwhelming sadness much of the time, and if you looked at me, you might see my eyes were wet, though I was never actually crying. The people who treated me worst of all during this phase were all women. Hispanic and Black women were the worst of all, because both of these types of women demand extreme masculinity from men. In contrast, most men were pretty good to me. Perhaps some were bad; I do not recall. A lot of men were actually quite sympathetic and it was not uncommon for a man, often middle aged, to “mirror” my sadness and become sad himself. It’s pretty much ok to look sad in ManWorld. You can’t look depressed and of course you can’t cry, but a lot of men look pretty sad, especially as they get older. It dawned on my recently that men (usually at least middle aged) are ok with male sadness because older men have figured out that life is pretty damn sad a lot of the time. In one sentence, men know that life is sad.
I must say though that it’s pretty pitiful of women that men were actually more sympathetic of a sad man than women were, and women treated me much worse than men did. Whatever happened to nurturing and empathy and all that female crap?
