No need to say it
27 March 2025 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeYet another programme about 'toxic masculinity' recounting the sad, sad story of a young man whose father didn't say "I love you" often enough-- I don't remember my father *ever* going round saying "I love you" to his children (or to my mother, in our hearing; I've no idea what went on in private, but doing it in front of the children would have felt pretty much indecent). Come to that, I don't remember my mother ever saying "I love you" to us either; she always signed off her letters "Love from Mummy", but that was different. I'm trying to imagine her saying any such thing, and it would sound incredibly stilted.
And yet it never even *occurred* to any of us to doubt that we were very much loved. It simply went without saying; it was patently obvious. Anyone who needed constant verbal assurances about it would have been regarded as incredibly insecure and probably emotionally damaged in some way...
Nor do I remember my father (or my mother) 'expressing emotional literacy' by openly weeping or raging; only small children who didn't know any better would do that. Part of growing up was learning to control your own negative emotions and not let them spill out all over other people. I remember only one or two occasions in my entire life when my parents ever quarrelled, at least in front of us, and it was absolutely terrifying, because otherwise they never, ever, openly lost their tempers in public, let alone with each other.
The alternative to expressing yourself in emotional outbursts is not explosions of physical violence inflicted upon your wife and children; it is courtesy, rational thinking, and unselfishness. My father never shouted or cursed or demanded his 'rights'; he was a highly intelligent and civilised gentleman who believed that you should treat others with respect and self-restraint, and endure physical pain and unhappiness with dignity and reticence. And there was nothing 'toxic' about him; he was more fun to be with than anyone else's parents, because he didn't talk down to children but treated them as imaginative intellectual equals who just happened to have as yet less knowledge about the world (which he was delighted to increase in response to the most fanciful explorations of ideas).
The children in the story-books we read generally didn't have parents who constantly cooed over them either, and in fact, I have a feeling that the mothers who did were depicted as implicitly clinging and smothering; the ideal parent was seen as one who trusted their offspring to go off and do potentially dangerous things without getting hurt (IF NOT DUFFERS, WON'T DROWN) and didn't make a fuss about annoying trivialities like torn clothes or coming home later than expected. So we really didn't expect little trilling cries of "Love you!!" as we left the house, which would have sounded very odd... and still sounds weird to me as a casual sign-off, as it were.
I suppose this is why as a writer my characters tend not to use the word 'love' either (and also, of course, because I see it vastly overused in bad fiction); if somebody says "I love you", it is a very major statement, not a casual aside. (In fact I've just run a text search across my entire corpus of twenty-five years of fan-fiction, and the phrase occurs in precisely five stories, two cases of which are characters remembering canon dialogue at the time and one of which is a posthumous letter :-O)
But this mantra that someone who doesn't constantly talk about whatever emotions they happen to be feeling at any moment is not only defective but *dangerous* -- and urgently needs to be 'cured' for the sake of society -- is one that seems to be gaining increasing traction, and one that I find infuriating... although not, of course, in a way that would cause me to lose my temper in an undignified manner, because that would cause a loss of rationality that would never do :-p
The alternative to verbal expressions of anger is not violence. It is *thinking* and expressing yourself without the emotional undertones that only raise answering hostility; it is attempting to see the other chap's point of view. It is trying to rise above your gut feelings rather than give in to them.
(And yes, I write 'men who cry' where it's socially and historically appropriate; Leroux-Raoul notoriously weeps a lot. That doesn't mean that *I* choose to cry if I can help it -- if I can't help it, then that means the emotion is real and overwhelming, and deserves the shock value of complete breakdown.)
And yet it never even *occurred* to any of us to doubt that we were very much loved. It simply went without saying; it was patently obvious. Anyone who needed constant verbal assurances about it would have been regarded as incredibly insecure and probably emotionally damaged in some way...
Nor do I remember my father (or my mother) 'expressing emotional literacy' by openly weeping or raging; only small children who didn't know any better would do that. Part of growing up was learning to control your own negative emotions and not let them spill out all over other people. I remember only one or two occasions in my entire life when my parents ever quarrelled, at least in front of us, and it was absolutely terrifying, because otherwise they never, ever, openly lost their tempers in public, let alone with each other.
The alternative to expressing yourself in emotional outbursts is not explosions of physical violence inflicted upon your wife and children; it is courtesy, rational thinking, and unselfishness. My father never shouted or cursed or demanded his 'rights'; he was a highly intelligent and civilised gentleman who believed that you should treat others with respect and self-restraint, and endure physical pain and unhappiness with dignity and reticence. And there was nothing 'toxic' about him; he was more fun to be with than anyone else's parents, because he didn't talk down to children but treated them as imaginative intellectual equals who just happened to have as yet less knowledge about the world (which he was delighted to increase in response to the most fanciful explorations of ideas).
The children in the story-books we read generally didn't have parents who constantly cooed over them either, and in fact, I have a feeling that the mothers who did were depicted as implicitly clinging and smothering; the ideal parent was seen as one who trusted their offspring to go off and do potentially dangerous things without getting hurt (IF NOT DUFFERS, WON'T DROWN) and didn't make a fuss about annoying trivialities like torn clothes or coming home later than expected. So we really didn't expect little trilling cries of "Love you!!" as we left the house, which would have sounded very odd... and still sounds weird to me as a casual sign-off, as it were.
I suppose this is why as a writer my characters tend not to use the word 'love' either (and also, of course, because I see it vastly overused in bad fiction); if somebody says "I love you", it is a very major statement, not a casual aside. (In fact I've just run a text search across my entire corpus of twenty-five years of fan-fiction, and the phrase occurs in precisely five stories, two cases of which are characters remembering canon dialogue at the time and one of which is a posthumous letter :-O)
But this mantra that someone who doesn't constantly talk about whatever emotions they happen to be feeling at any moment is not only defective but *dangerous* -- and urgently needs to be 'cured' for the sake of society -- is one that seems to be gaining increasing traction, and one that I find infuriating... although not, of course, in a way that would cause me to lose my temper in an undignified manner, because that would cause a loss of rationality that would never do :-p
The alternative to verbal expressions of anger is not violence. It is *thinking* and expressing yourself without the emotional undertones that only raise answering hostility; it is attempting to see the other chap's point of view. It is trying to rise above your gut feelings rather than give in to them.
(And yes, I write 'men who cry' where it's socially and historically appropriate; Leroux-Raoul notoriously weeps a lot. That doesn't mean that *I* choose to cry if I can help it -- if I can't help it, then that means the emotion is real and overwhelming, and deserves the shock value of complete breakdown.)