There is something I keep witnessing in the men around me, and I have been trying to find words for it for a long time.
When emotional intensity arrives — real feeling, the kind that has weight and heat and nowhere easy to go — most men I know don’t move through it. They move away from it. Into their heads, into distraction, into physical release, into silence, into disappearance.

Not because they are weak or broken.
But because nobody ever showed them how to do anything else.
Nobody taught them that feeling is something you survive by going through, not around.

I think about a woman in labor.
There is a moment where the body takes over completely, and there is simply no exit. You cannot think your way through a contraction. You cannot redirect it, suppress it, or intellectualize it into something more manageable. You have to let it move through your entire body from the inside, with no guarantee of when it will end. The only way out is through.

That is what unintegrated emotional intensity asks of us.
All of us.

But women, on the whole, have more practice with this in different ways. We have been initiated into it, biologically, culturally, in ways that are hard to articulate but very real.

Men, generally, have been initiated into the opposite.
Master it. Resolve it. Discharge it. Don’t let it show.

So when the feeling arrives — and it always arrives, especially in genuine intimacy — it becomes pressure without a name.
The body locks it away, mostly in the lower half, and the mind starts looking for an exit. Any exit.
And what looks from the outside like desire, or restlessness, or withdrawal, or aggression, is often something much simpler and much more heartbreaking: a person who never learned to be in labor.

I am not exempt from this.
I have spent years learning to breathe into intensity rather than flee from it. And I had to learn it without experiencing child labor.
I still lose ground sometimes. At night, especially, when the mind catches the energy and starts spinning stories to give it somewhere to go.

The returning to the body is the practice. Breath by breath.

What I have stopped doing is adding pressure to the men in my life who are still learning this. Because pressure is what most of them already have too much of.

What they rarely have is someone who can sit with them inside the intensity without flinching, without demanding it resolve itself on a particular timeline, without making them feel inadequate for not yet knowing how to feel.

You cannot open a person from the outside.
But you can be present enough, steady enough, that the inside becomes a little less frightening to inhabit.
That, I think, is what love actually asks of us.
Not to fix the unlived feeling. Just to stay close enough that feeling it becomes, slowly, possible.