Do Not Open Up to Women About Your Struggle

i have a number of objections:

Don't go to women for support, turn to your male friends instead.

you also look weak to males when you open up to them; every child on the playground knows that weakness invites aggression. thus begins the behind-the-back shit talking by your compatriots. the difference is that they can't break your heart, only sting it with rejection. shitty people are going to be shitty. don't try to pin the sins of a shitty person on the coincidental fact that the shitty person was a woman you cared for. do try to remember that there have likely been times when you yourself have rejected your male friends when they showed weakness.

the fact is, nobody "respects your struggle" when you frame it in such a victimlike way. everyone struggles; struggles are cheap, but heavy enough that nobody wants to take on the struggles of another. begging for respect of your struggle is begging for pity. remember: pity is close to hatred, so don't look for respect but rather cut an example that sensible people will render respect to.

You will hear people say "Be Vulnerable" this does not mean open up and show a women your soft side.

this is exactly what that means. the logic: you are so strong that even baring your most vulnerable parts will not endanger you. sure, some women love the stoical types-- i, as one of those stoical types, know this-- but emotionally intelligent women will understand reticence as fear of being emotionally harmed by someone else, and they will infer that such a harming has occurred in the past, raising questions about your worthiness.

now onto a few more radical bits: men are not islands emotionally or in any other capacity. the lie that a man is an independent ubermenschen is a dangerous one that most men (TRP is a hilariously overwrought example here) unconsciously endorse to some degree. the result of internalizing this perverse dictum is poor mental health, and lo, men are far more likely to kill themselves than women. you bottle the emotions up, then you carry the weight. your male friends are going to help you carry the weight, if they're good people, and good friends-- but they'll never be able to really intuit what's going on in your head any better than you can. besides, it'd be weird if they did. that's where women come in: it's natural to confide in women because they're emotionally adept.

the solution isn't to emotionally withdraw from women because you're scared of them hurting you, because that ends up hurting you more in the long run. believe it or not, women can tell when you're holding back emotionally, and it usually makes them feel alienated-- men are very poor at concealing emotions from women, especially the women they are in relationships with. go ahead, say it ain't so, but women have been analyzing the minutiae of men's emotions for millenia, and they're several laps ahead of the man in the relationship most of the time. to recapitulate this point in another way: women are going to know your emotions better than you do much of the time. trying to hide emotions from your woman only works if your woman is mostly checked out of the relationship, at which point you have nothing to hide from anyway.

in conclusion: confide in your woman, because she sees it on your face anyway and hiding makes you look weak. don't pansy around with the "too cool to be emotional" driftwood, it's unbecoming for anyone out of high school.