Reflecting the experience of many of us, the individual telling his story talked about wanting the love of this hard man but then learning not to want it, learning to silence his heart, to make it not matter.

Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure.

to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire.

If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness.

We came together hoping to create love and found ourselves creating conflict.

am not alone. So many of us have felt that we could win male love by showing we were willing to bear the pain, that we were willing to live our lives affirming that the maleness deemed truly manly because it withholds, withdraws, refuses is the maleness we desire.

My longing for my father’s death began in childhood. It was the way I responded to his rage, his violence. I used to dream him gone, dead and gone.

It’s a grief that is hard for me to speak of. That the only time I would feel free to touch him without feeling threatened by his power over me was when he lay dead—it’s unbearable to me. And I think there can hardly be a woman who hasn’t felt a comparable grief.

The lack of such writing intensifies my sense that women cannot fully talk about men because we have been so well socialized in patriarchal culture to be silent on the subject of men.