Last time on Questions and Manswers, Alex Tindal (tall, a man) explored men’s complex relationship to high heels. This week, a new question:

WHAT IS A GENERALIZATION ABOUT MEN THAT YOU STRONGLY DISAGREE WITH?

That men are not sensitive. As someone who has watched two adult men almost fist fight because neither of them would heed the other’s directive to “stop looking at me, bro,” I can tell you with ironclad certainty that men are idiotically sensitive.

Let’s break that down. Two men, who have never met and thus whose lives hold absolutely no bearing on one another’s, are willing to risk personal disfigurement, potential assault charges, incarceration, having their travel or employment limited (not to mention a lifetime of corrective dentistry), because they refuse to be the person who takes responsibility for meeting eyes with another man.

Of course, when you think to yourself, “I wish men could be more sensitive,” you are not thinking, “I would like the men in my life to be on a street-brawl hair trigger, subject to provocation at the hands of social minutiae,” but these ideas are inseparable. The problem is not that men are not sensitive, rather that men are very sensitive and many don’t possess the tools to reflect on and process their feelings.

I grew up on the rural outskirts of suburban Ontario in a place called Lowville. We got our water from a well, had our own septic tank, and lived on an acre of land backing onto a horse farm. This meant two things: 1) I almost certainly spent my youth ingesting a great deal of biodegraded, particulate horse shit, and 2) we had something called a ‘sludge pump’ which (sexy alert) was a device designed to pump sewage from our house into the septic tank buried in our back yard.“Pumping the sludge,” as my father affectionately referred to it, was something that my brother and I were required to run down to the basement and do a couple times a day by plugging in a pump motor and waiting until a pipe in the basement shook violently with the flow of… waste. If we hadn’t been “pumping the sludge” it could’ve backed up from the sealed tank where it was gathering and then who knows where it would’ve shown itself as it squidged out an escape.

The very blunt analogy that I am drawing here is that without methods of relieving a build up of frustrations, fears and other complex feelings, men’s emotions can squidge out in such charming behaviours as drinking whiskey quietly, fighting other men, assaulting women and starting world wars. Nurturing faculties and forums for constructive expression of our emotions is part of the maintenance we should all be doing to better our relationships with ourselves and the world at large.

Even if you were lucky enough to be a boy growing up in a house where you had present, caring parents and/or parental figures, and those figures (especially male role models) talked openly about their feelings and intuited to you the tools of self expression, there were other boys on the playground who were learning different lessons at home. One learned quickly that any overture suggesting to those boys that the answer to a disagreement might be an earnest bout of introspection usually resulted in a brisk shove off the edge of a tall play structure, or the worst conceivable insult known to men: you were behaving like a girl (or for some reason, alternately, queer).

Even if you were attempting to develop those tools, you might have had to set them aside to prevent your face from getting punched. Cut to 20 years down the road when you’d like to create space to have a discussion with your partner about how the tone of a comment they made was hurtful to you even though you’re aware that was not their intention and you’d just like to feel empathized with, and you find your skillset in this area lacking. Unfortunately, during some of the most developmentally influential periods of a young man’s life, running really fast or throwing something really far seems more important and is more readily and palpably celebrated. This leads into a couple other questions which have been submitted by women for this column:

HOW DO I ASK A MAN, WITHOUT HIM FREAKING OUT, WHERE HE SEES OUR RELATIONSHIP GOING?

Try not to. By which I mean, phrasing the question in broad terms like that allows your partner to manifest the spectre of any number of anxieties about the future which could address fears he has difficulty articulating. Not all experiences in a young man’s life reward admitting weakness as much as later relationships will. Instead of presenting a concern about the future, see if you can get your partner excited about a future together. Being told that you’ll make an amazing father might still not be a totally anxiety-free assertion for a lot of men, but hopefully he’ll feel a bit chuffed considering the idea in the abstract. I know I respond better to discussions about aspects of the life I’m actively building with my partner as opposed to being invited to present a 10 Year Plan.

DO MEN ACTUALLY LIKE IT WHEN WE MAKE SUGGESTIONS REGARDING THEIR WARDROBE, WHAT WE LIKE AND DON’T LIKE?

Yes and no. Depending on the man, a comment on wardrobe can trample on the edges of virility. If you were hanging out with a shabby peacock it would be gauche to rag on his crummy feathers because like, his whole genetic line is riding on it, you know? Having said that, beneath any initial insecurity at having their style questioned is probably some appreciation of helpful input. By the same token, leaning more towards sharing what you like, or what you think you’d like will probably be better received than asking me if I’m, “really going to leave the house wearing that hat,” because YES I AM MONICA.

Men are deceptively sensitive, and the reason you can’t get a handle on it is that they can’t either. But part of being with someone else is being able to learn new ways of relating to yourself for the benefit of others. Try to bear in mind that while it can be frustrating to perceive limitations in someone you love, sharing skill sets and learning from one another makes you both richer people.

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