It’s good to talk – boys too – but beware of offloading too much
Men bottle things up; women share. This is hardly a surprise, given that from babyhood, boys are subtly discouraged from crying whereas girls are more likely to be immediately soothed when they sob. The consequences of this can sometimes be severe over the long term: masculine reticence is linked to a far higher suicide rate among men than women, to say nothing of the anxiety and other forms of discontent that come from being unable to share feelings for fear of seeming unmanly.
So the call by Sarah Fletcher, the outgoing head of the City of London School for Boys, to encourage boys to talk about their problems rather than telling them to “man up” makes a lot of sense. She is right that boys are not biologically more robust than girls, and that they actually face many of the same issues girls do, from anxiety over body image and academic performance to how they measure up sexually.
Nonetheless, a word of caution. Feeling able to share is good, but the impulse to do so – when habitually indulged – has some drawbacks.
Take this from a woman who began her career as a committed sharer, indeed over-sharer, at a young age. On the one hand, I have few secrets festering away, which is liberating. Telling all means that friends – who have listened and counselled on even the most embarrassing of private matters – know and accept the whole caboodle. On the other hand, however, I struggle to make sense of things, even deeply ply personal things, on n my own. In
other words, I am dependent on others to do the psychological work that I should probably be able to do for myself by now. The result is that I sometimes feel rather internally weak and insecure and I have often watched with awe while more self-contained people – men as well as women – solve problems calmly and deliberately for themselves, only discussing them after they’ve been dealt with. Research too suggests that there are some advantages to keeping things in, and that the rumination that girls and women characteristically undertake together can actually increase anxiety. For instance,in a University of MissouriMissouri Columbia study fo found that talking about boy trouble with friends mak makes girls depressed and anxiousan because such conversations te tend to focus on negativ negatives. Boys should be encouraged to shares more, but no not to go overboard overboard, lest they find themsel themselves in a swamp of habitua habituated worry worry, which could affect their ability to sort things thro through for the themselves.