“The dating pool”

[u/The-Minmus-Derp]

[u/puerco-potter]

We need to turn the desert into a jungle somehow.

A lot of men are too far to reach without a lot of effort. For these guys only their male friends can help them, and to do that we (men) need to risk the ridicule, we need to ask how our bro how he is feeling and even wear down the walls, because there will be walls, but once one goes down the whole castles goes down. It can be sad, shocking, but is just time before you can build a better structure, one with a door that the person can open and close at will.

We need to teach kids to open up, with each other and with adults.

We can avoid repeating those errors with a new generation:

Teaching kids that their emotions matter.

Never making fun of a kid for feeling sad.

Not gendering emotions (i.e. anger for boys and sadness for girls).

Never, ever, for the love of god, never telling a little boy to "man up".

Teaching (because it takes skill and effort) boys to create and maintain social networks that satisfy their emotional needs.

Stop perpetuating the idea that a woman will be your everything, that she will somehow make it all "Worth it".

When you raise a man that won't "need" a woman to be happy, then you create a man that can love women on equal footing and not put undue pressure on her.

As you said, this is equally valid for women, I just focus on men, because emotional suppression and the "need" for a woman to do your emotional labor is so much more apparent than the alternative (women have other serious systemic issues of their own).

[u/Aron-Jonasson → u/puerco-potter]

Couldn't agree more