I've been seeing this idea, that "women shouldn't be expected to act as therapists to men", become increasingly prevalent. While I'm no expert, I understand that men and women tend to have different social support structures. Women can typically talk quite openly amongst their (female) friends, where they are free to be emotional and vulnerable, but men do not have a similar outlet amongst their male or female friends - they will tend to be seen as weak and unviable if they show too much vulnerability.

Support between men, in my personal experience, tends to be a bit more of an 'unspoken understanding' - it can often be enough to just have your friends around and for them to acknowledge the issue, or that there is an issue. However, I don't think this is a particularly effective way to work through emotional issues. It leads to self-isolation and a bottling up of the underlying causes of distress, so that, when you eventually have someone who's willing to let you open up emotionally, it all rushes out as an overwhelming emotional 'dump'. This can of course be a heavy burden for a partner, even for one who is used to working through things openly.

While I do believe that the issue is that men tend to have few alternative outlets, I'm not sure what the solution is. It's hard enough to get over the idea of being more open - it's much more difficult to convince others to accept it, to do the same, and to openly share emotional burdens, given that we're socialised to avoid placing such burdens on others. I couldn't even begin to imagine to suggest to my (sadly few) male friends that we all get together with some wine and chocolate so we can 'cry it out'. Though the problem is often asserted quite bluntly, solutions are very rarely offered beyond the vague and unempathetic, 'men need to just be better'.

A secondary problem is that I think people have, unsurprisingly, taken a reaonable concept to an unreasonable extreme - i.e. colloqiually, people have taken the idea that "men shouldn't dump all of their emotional baggage entirely on their romantic partners", which is fair enough, and conflated it with healthy emotional support between romantic partners. This leads to tension and ends up being counterproductive: I think this concept is actually being used to reinforce unhealthy masculine expectations - i.e. that men should 'keep things bottled up'. It is used both by men, who then distance themselves from their partners emotionally so as to not appear weak, and women, who are instilled with the expectations that their partners be stoic anchors.

I also wonder if there's some 'factionalism' at play: if women are willing to be open with their female friends, then should they be so reluctant to open up with their (platonic) male friends? Of course, it should be reciprocal, but the situation reeks of gender essentialism. Should support structures necessarily consist of people of the same gender, which is often implied in these discussions (i.e. that it's a problem men need to deal with alone)? Gendered divisions are increasingly untenable as our understanding of sex and gender matures, but men and women are still expected to be disjoint in many aspects of life. I doubt you would find many women willing to open up "girls' night" to (straight) men, nor many men willing to open "guys' night" to women; but does this have to be the case? Is it a bad thing or not? I don't know what to make of this, but I think there are prevailing attitudes about men and women being members of different 'factions', with mutually exclusive and competing/conflicting interests, and I don't think that is a good thing for anyone.