How do you feel? Part one of this piece talked about emotions, and the value of exploring them in detail. You’re probably best off reading that before coming back to this, because it was originally written as one piece, but here’s a brief summary: articulating your emotions is a skill – one to which we don’t always give enough time or attention. It’s often seen as something you either can do or you can’t. What’s more, some of us are given permission to do it where others are aggressively prevented from trying. This is heavily gendered, of course: men are told not only that they’re innately ‘bad’ at articulating emotions, but also that they shouldn’t be as emotional as women are. Cannot and must not. They’re allowed to show big scary feelings like anger, but punished for showing any that hint at vulnerability, and often discouraged from spending time with their feelings at all. I find this wildly unfair and, if I think on it too long, outright heartbreaking. Spending time with your feelings can help you know yourself better, and articulating your emotional needs is a very valuable skill when it comes to building relationships. Learning how to do it is a gift to yourself, as well as to those who love you.
Forgive me for the gendered nature of this post: I’m a straight woman who dates men, and I live in a society that has fed a whole bunch of messages to me and the men that I date. The following is based on things I have noticed about dudes I’ve loved, and some I’m friends with too: it is not true of all men, nor is it necessarily only men who do this, but I notice it in relation to gender because of the way it impacts my romantic relationships. As per the first blog post, if it resonates with you (no matter what your gender) I hope you might find it helpful. If you don’t, don’t sweat it, it’s not for everyone.
How do you feel? (please expand)
As I mentioned in the first post, when I ask people I love how they feel, I’m hoping that they’ll be able to give me an insight into the detail. After all, that’s a large part of what friendship and intimacy means to me: stepping inside someone’s head and understanding the complexities of their emotional landscape. Getting them to paint me a picture, or a map, of their emotional state, so I can understand how best to be a friend to them in that moment. I am very expansive when it comes to painting these pictures about my own feelings (sometimes to the point of being boring, I’m sure) when somebody asks how I am and makes genuine space for an honest answer. To me this is a large part of what it means to love and be loved: sharing not just the ups and downs of what’s happened in your life but the granular detail of how those things make you feel.
With some obvious notable exceptions (you know who you are, brilliant emotion-articulating dudes!) when I ask men I love how they feel, often the conversation goes something like this:
A: How are you feeling?
B: OK/alright/fine.
A: How are you feeling?
B: Just sat down for a pint.
A: How are you feeling?
B: Ah, you know.
Ah my love, sadly I do not. If you’re someone I know intimately, chances are I could have a guess at the overall tone of your emotions at a particular moment in time: you look sad, happy, angry, whatever. I could perform some basic guesswork based on your body language or facial expression. But I might be wrong, and I certainly won’t get the detail. When I’m asking how you feel, I’m inviting you to paint me a picture. The responses above take that invitation to connect and either colour it beige (OK/Alright/fine), reply with nonsense (‘having a pint’ is not a feeling) or make assumptions that I can read minds.
Note: I understand that not everyone will want to tell me how they feel and that’s obviously fine. Everyone’s entitled to privacy. But for the sake of brevity please assume that these are all men who want to be my friends/lovers/boyfriends and therefore achieve a certain level of closeness.
As we know from society (boo society!), men generally aren’t encouraged to be ‘emotional’, and women are patronised and dismissed because of how ‘emotional’ we are. Emotions are a fraught and tricky topic, so I’m not going to stand on my soapbox and tell you that you should or shouldn’t do anything in particular with yours. What I will tell you, though, is that a lot of my most worrying relationship conflicts could have been made better by two things, both of which involve this emotional picture-painting.
If you tell me how you feel, I can love you better
The first is that if men I’ve dated understood their emotions better, and were able to articulate them, conflict could be resolved without making those feelings worse. I am so so desperate, always, to understand the men I love – I’ll listen for as long as you need if you’re trying to paint me a picture. Articulate the detail of how you feel and why and chances are, even if I don’t agree with your conclusion, I’ll be far better at finding compromise because now I can see your map.
Unfortunately, too often I’ve ended up in arguments with men where instead of telling me how they feel they’ll instead tell me what should be done.
“I’m sad about X because it makes me feel left out” becomes “You need to stop doing X”
But telling me what should be done skips over a vital step: the negotiation, compromise and above all understanding that sits at the foundation of a healthy relationship. We can negotiate better if, instead of jumping to the end, you start by explaining your feelings. This problem is a problem because it makes you feel… what? Sad? Let’s dig into that. Do you feel jealous, unloved, worried, sidelined, humiliated, dismissed… what? Don’t tell me facts and assume I’ll share the same feelings. Tell me how you feel and let’s take it from there. I don’t have access to your emotional landscape, so if you want to connect with me you need to share your maps.
In part one I used the example of jealousy – when I feel jealous, exploring the detail of that emotion and why it’s come about can help me better recognise what I need from the other person. Reassurance, perhaps, or a bit more attention, rather than just dictating that a partner stop doing the thing that causes me to feel this way.
Too many times I’ve had men tell me that I must do X, or stop doing Y, when actually what they mean is ‘when you do Y I feel insecure/worried/jealous/vulnerable/sad/angry’. These are significantly different things, and the latter is a far more productive and healthy approach than the former. If you try to control my behaviour, you’re waving a red flag: putting me in charge of tempering your (unspecified, mysterious) emotions by restricting my freedom. There’s no room for negotiation or discussion or better understanding, just ‘you stop doing Y.’ I can stop doing Y, but it won’t bring me any closer to understanding how you feel (so I might do similar things in future!), and I will also likely feel extremely resentful – you’ve made it clear that your feelings trump my freedom even though you can’t articulate what they are.
If you tell me instead about your emotions, paint me a detailed picture of how you feel and why, then we can work with that. I can listen and try to understand you, paint a picture of my emotions in turn, and we can come up with a solution together. You might feel less sad about a particular behaviour when you know that I’ve been taught to do it by a therapist who helped me understand my needs and boundaries, or you might be reassured when we’ve talked through your feelings aloud and I’ve dispensed reassurance. You might realise that these particular emotions stem from events in the past that you want to talk about and process. You might see, when you articulate your jealousy, that although it’s a valid feeling, it’s not reasonable to use that feeling to try and control my behaviour. It’s possible, too, that knowing the detail of how you feel may cause me to behave differently automatically, if I realise that I’m doing something that’s hurtful in ways I hadn’t anticipated. That has to be my decision, though, and I cannot make it fairly without all the relevant information. If I’m going to take care not to trample on your feelings, I need to see your map.
This is just one example of many. I have had many many arguments with men that involve them trying to tell me I should ‘just’ do A or stop doing B. I once had a man give me a list of behaviours that I absolutely must stop doing or else (“Stop using the language of feminism about our relationship!” “You have to let me interrupt you!”). Each command hit me like a punch in the gut and I struggled to dig my way out of the pit of despair in order to talk about it. When I tried to talk about it, he shushed me. These were his boundaries, he’d decided, and it was unreasonable of me to try and negotiate them. But those aren’t boundaries – they’re rules, and they’re very controlling. To avoid ever having to feel bad about his own behaviour, he wanted to stop me from expressing the ways that certain things hurt me (“It upsets me that we’ve reverted to gender roles where I do all the laundry” or “I need to get to the end of this story without you trying to guess the end when I’m speaking.”). He didn’t mean to be controlling, of course, but people rarely ever think that of themselves. You can mean well, and think you’re doing right, while actually behaving in ways that are harmful – especially if you haven’t examined the way that you feel, and instead just assumed that the other person must know and is ‘making you feel’ that on purpose. This list came out of nowhere – I’d had no idea how he felt and no opportunity to discuss either his feelings or mine. It was just a list of diktats that I had to obey, or else. A lot of hurt could have been avoided if, instead of telling me exactly what he wanted me to do, he told me how he felt and we took it from there.
When partners tell me only what I should do, often there’s an element of outrage that accompanies it – they assume that I already understand the picture in their head. This is what I struggle with most, I think: I’ve had many arguments with men where they act as if I’m behaving extremely unreasonably because I’ve made a choice that makes them feel… a certain unspecified way. How could I possibly make that choice?! It makes them feel… [black box of emotion that I cannot see inside]! Why would I deliberately cause them to feel… [jumble of emotions that comes out mostly as ‘rage’ but has no other colour]!
Perhaps this is tied in to the idea that men should be ‘rational’: maybe some of these guys thought that acknowledging the detail of their emotional map meant losing the privilege of appearing to be the rational, unemotional one – the one who dispenses commands and decides what we do. A different partner used to tell me that he’d consulted with his friends on a particular disagreement, and they all agreed that my feelings were wrong and weird. As if the truth about the contents of my heart could be established by consensus. I had feelings, he had facts and data. Except obviously he’d fished for those facts as a way to back up his feelings: my friends, if I’d asked them for input, would inevitably have sided with me because I’d have told them my side of the story – that’s just how this stuff works. He couldn’t simply tell me his feelings, though, because he wasn’t emotional, I was.
Believing you’re rational and your actions sit entirely outside of emotion is always going to be a mirage: conflict wouldn’t arise in relationships if we all genuinely felt nothing.
Different people can have vastly different emotional responses
Emotions are not always rational, and they certainly aren’t universal. We can assume that if someone stamps on your foot deliberately you’ll feel roughly the same as I do (angry, hurt, shocked), but most everyday interactions will be subtly different because all of us have very different contexts. Our needs, desires, triggers, and boundaries might overlap but they’re never identical.
One person’s harmless solo bike ride is another’s reason to feel jealous and left out. My need for freedom when it comes to leaving projects half-finished might cause you genuine distress that prevents you from relaxing in a messy home. A better example: I am often surprised by how nonchalant my friends are if they get what I’d refer to as ‘told off’ – asked to move from a particular seat or to stop vaping in this place where they thought that vaping was allowed. These minor corrected mistakes don’t mean much to most people, but to me they would kick off a spiral of self-hate and panic. If asked not to vape in this particular section of the pub garden, my best friend would likely shrug his shoulders and move on, but I’d be falling over myself with apologies and misery and worse. This sort of ‘telling off’ would destroy me for a day: maybe even nudge me into a quick weeping session in the toilets.
In a relationship, my triggers will be different to yours, likewise my boundaries. My emotional needs and desires, too. There’ll be similarities, for sure, but many many differences. I think often people believe that in a relationship you’re working as one, so all your needs/desires/boundaries/emotional responses should run along similar lines. But humans don’t work like that at all! I think healthy relationships are less about thinking/feeling the same things than they are about being willing to discuss the differences in detail. Sharing and listening and building out that empathy.
So I hope you can see why the question ‘how do you feel?’ is worth spending time on if you love somebody. Don’t just tell me you’re ‘fine’, take a second to consider and approach me with genuine emotional honesty. Paint me a picture! Show me your map! If I love you, I want to understand you, and I’m happy to listen while you give me the granular detail.
I’ve focused on negative emotions here, but I desperately want to know the good emotions too. I once had a wonderful time with a boyfriend who explained in exquisite detail why he loved football so much, and his team specifically. I’ve had similar squirmy pleasure with partners who’ve told me about the intricacies of their latest fun project, or even the plot of Final Fantasy. Hearing not just what you love but why you love it is an important and beautiful step towards connecting. So… practice articulating it! If you’re happy right now, how intense is that? What caused it? What’s that emotion paired with? Is there anything that consistently brings this joy about? What makes you feel safe and comfortable?
How can I make you feel loved?
Some men say that women are a mystery, but I will tell you anything if only you’ll ask. I ask these questions of men I love on a constant, irritating basis, and I am so so thirsty for an expansive answer.
Articulating feelings helps change them
People who aren’t used to expressing their emotions might be missing a very important piece of the puzzle that comes with self-knowledge, too: the act of expressing how you feel can radically change the picture. If you’re terrified of something, articulating those fears can help make them less frightening. Excited or in love? Letting yourself talk about that can often be a means of feeding your desire (or helping you exercise caution).
If I’m frustrated with a partner because of something insensitive they’ve done or said, ninety per cent of the time I do not need them to grovel or make promises, and I certainly don’t need them to buy me apology flowers: I just need them to listen as I tell them my feelings aloud. Not ‘stay quiet while I ramble on’ but actively listen and take on board what I’m saying. By the time I have finished speaking, if you’ve shown me that you’ve heard and understood, my emotional picture – that used to be a vivid, angry red – is now softer. The colours have faded because we’ve removed some of the heat that was in them.
If you aren’t used to articulating your emotions, you could be forgiven for thinking that the way I feel about X today will be the same as the way I felt about it six months ago. But so much time has passed since then! We’ve discussed X and addressed it, I’ve written about it (not necessarily on the blog, often in notes like diaries or messages to friends as I pick over the way it made me feel) and in the process radically changed the picture. An ex of mine used to remind me of things I’d told him months before about how I felt, as a kind of ‘gotcha’ counterpoint to my feelings in that moment. “Ah, you say this thing is fine but six months ago you told me it was upsetting!” I mean… yeah. That sometimes happens. Because we talked about it back then, remember? Maybe what used to be coloured by frustration and uncertainty is now mellowed with peace and perspective.
Talking about feelings doesn’t just help other people understand you, it can also help you reach a better understanding of yourself. Not just how you felt in that past moment, or how you feel now in this one, but how you grow and process emotions as you move from A to B. You do not exist as a static being, you are always evolving. Your emotional maps are not solid, like the ones you find in a printed atlas, they’re far more like Google Map’s ever-changing, ever-growing, increasingly-detailed worldview.
Ask me to paint you a picture
The second thing that I think would make an enormous difference in relationship conflicts (mine, remember, I am not making judgments about yours) would just be giving me the chance to paint the entire picture. To talk through my emotions in detail, the way I lay them out here on these pages. Doing for me what I hope to do for you.
A long time ago – apologies, I completely forget where I saw this – I read something by a person who explained that their conflicts with their partner became immeasurably easier when they stopped seeing them as battles to be won but instead as mysteries to be investigated. Rather than leaping in with a counterpoint, or trying to issue advice or instruction, they treated their partner’s feelings as something like a crime scene at the start of a whodunnit. Their job was not to clean up the crime scene or apportion blame, their job was to gather evidence. Investigate everything. Why does their partner feel this way? What started it? What causes it? Are there other things they need to know? They focused on teasing out the detail of the other person’s emotions, and those curious questions gave their partner space to articulate the nuance of how they felt.
I think about this a lot, especially when I find myself wanting to pour a little sadness into the warm listening ear of a partner. Men I have loved (NOT ALL OF THEM) have often actively cut me off from speaking when I’m articulating a negative emotion like sadness or frustration or anxiety. They’re keen to dispense advice that might solve the problem, or reassure me that everything’s going to be OK. But those actions – though well meant – do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. They make me more frustrated and sad, as I try (and fail, and fail, and fail) to do the one thing that will truly give me peace: articulate how I feel, and know that the person I love has heard me.
I think 90% of my sadness and frustration in relationships – during arguments or just periods of general anxiety and pain – could be solved, or at least lessened, if partners understood that simple thing. I do not need you to tell me what to do, I need you to understand how I feel. Make space for me to talk through my emotions, and recognise that they will change as the conversation goes on. Often the act of saying something aloud makes the problem seem much smaller. Knowing you are listening can make the pain hurt less. And if you show me yours in return, perhaps we can understand each other more intimately, and leave any conversation closer than we were at the start.
A while back, at the start of a relationship, a partner and I had a sudden and really shocking conflict. He did something that frightened me, and I couldn’t quite believe that someone I was falling for would do something so appalling. We kissed and made up, but it itched at me. It itched at him, too, because my reaction in that moment was to tell him we couldn’t be together if he behaved that way. He was frightened that we’d break up, and I was frightened that I might have just forgiven the unforgivable. He sent me a text about it a couple of days later: detailed, expansive, introspective explanations of exactly how he’d felt in that moment and what had been going through his head. It was bliss. I replied in a similar way: painted him a picture of exactly what was in my head and my heart at the time it happened. He seemed equally pleased. I can honestly say it was one of the most satisfyingly-resolved conflicts I’d ever had, and doing that made my heart sing. It was probably a large part of why I fell in love with him, to be honest.
Eventually, though, he stopped doing it. This introspection and detail. He switched to issuing instructions and commands, assuming I’d feel the same way he did, or be able to intuit how he felt. When I nudged at the topic he shrugged and told me he’s just not that emotionally expressive. I asked him why he’d done it at the start and he explained:
“We all put our best foot forward in the first six months, don’t we?”
…
Do we?
Understanding your emotions is a lifelong, ongoing project
I wanted to end on a personal example, because I think so much of the way I feel about this stuff is shaped by relationships I’ve had. Maybe this entire blog post is just my way of doing the thing that I have done so much during conflicts in those relationships: beg someone to listen to me, give me space to speak. I’m sure it’s irritating for my friends and lovers to be confronted with a woman who needs to do this so often. The piles and piles of words I’ll pour out if you ask me a question that displays even the tiniest spark of curiosity about what’s going on in my head. Perhaps this ridiculously long two-part essay is just another way of me crying out for someone to listen. To be allowed to do this thing that matters so much: paint you a picture, tell you how I feel.
I don’t need you to do anything, I just need you to hear me.
The older I get the less certain I am that I can draw broad conclusions about anything other than how I as an individual personally experience the world. So as I said in part one, and earlier here, I’m not giving you instructions on how to deal with your own emotions. Apart from anything else, my core message is that I can never truly see what’s going on in your head, so issuing universal advice would be a fool’s errand.
I do believe that emotional intelligence is a skill, though. It’s a hard one. One we often dismiss or ignore, instead giving basic (and incorrect) explanations, like women are just better at it and men are too rational to feel these sorts of things. Humans are complex individuals, and our emotional reactions to any situation will necessarily be coloured by our past: trauma, joy and everything in between. Our ability to articulate the unique ways we experience the world is not inherently gendered, though some genders are given permission to do it, and lessons in how to do it, where others aren’t. I believe that people who aren’t given the space, time, or permission to explore their emotions in detail are being short-changed by a world that owes them so much more, because doing this is extremely valuable when building connection with others.
Achieving intimacy with other people is astonishingly difficult, but it’s worth the effort. You don’t personally have to agree with me, but one of the things I’ve learned over the years as I explore my own emotional landscape is that anyone I date long-term does need to be able to do this, or at the very least be willing to learn. Understanding how to speak and listen, how to paint detailed pictures of our inner emotional lives and ask questions to tease out the detail of somebody else’s… it’s a lifelong, ongoing project. We reap the rewards by building stronger, closer connections with the people we care about.
Sharing your emotions, and listening to someone else share theirs is a powerful tool. And I believe it’s something bigger too: I think this is love in practice.