Men Are More Emotional Than Women (They’re Just Worse at Handling It)

I grew up in a house ruled by a man who couldn’t find his car keys without turning it into a war zone. My stepdad. He threw plates, punched walls, and handed out black eyes like party favours. I learned early that a man’s anger could fill a house faster than smoke — and that it was always, somehow, our job to clear it out.

My half-brother watched all of that. He learned, too. Learned that breaking things was power. That shouting was control. That being “the man of the house” meant everyone else had to shrink when he walked into the room.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? The world is full of angry men — but they’ll tell you they’re not emotional. They’ll tell you women are the emotional ones. We cry, we talk, we feel too much. Meanwhile, they’re the ones punching walls, driving too fast, and storming out of rooms like toddlers in grown-up bodies.

I once had a man try to run me off the road because I dared to overtake him. He swerved between me and oncoming traffic, slamming his brakes, jerking the wheel, trying to make me crash. There was a little boy in his front seat — and I’ll never forget the look on that child’s face. Fear. Helplessness. The same fear I used to feel as a kid watching my stepdad rage.

And yet we still say men are the “rational” ones.

Men aren’t less emotional. They’re just emotionally illiterate.

Let’s be honest: anger is an emotion. So is jealousy. So is entitlement. The problem isn’t that men have fewer emotions — it’s that they were never taught what to do with them. They were taught to bury them until they rot.

Boys are told not to cry, not to talk about what hurts, not to feel anything that might make them look weak. But here’s the kicker — that bottled-up mess doesn’t disappear. It just festers. It mutates into rage, resentment, and violence.

When a woman cries, she’s called dramatic. When a man breaks a lamp, he’s called “passionate.” When a woman argues, she’s hysterical. When a man screams, he’s “just blowing off steam.”

We’ve built a world that excuses male emotional outbursts as masculinity, while demanding women stay calm, kind, and endlessly forgiving. We’re supposed to understand why men are angry. We’re supposed to soothe them. We’re supposed to call their tantrums “stress” and their abuse “just how he gets sometimes.”

I’m tired of it.

Men are drowning in their own emotions — they just can’t name them.

I’ve met plenty of men who think emotions are a female flaw. They’ll scoff at therapy, call journaling “gay,” and laugh about women “crying over nothing.”

But ask those same men how they feel about their fathers. Or what they’re afraid of. Or what makes them insecure. Suddenly, silence. A shrug. A joke. Anything but honesty.

The truth is, men do feel — they just lack the emotional intelligence to process it. Because emotional intelligence isn’t innate, it’s learned. And we’ve spent generations teaching boys that empathy, vulnerability, and reflection are feminine traits.

So what happens? They grow up emotionally stunted. They lash out when they’re sad. They sulk when they’re rejected. They ghost instead of communicating. They cheat rather than confront unhappiness. And when they’re called out, they crumble into victimhood, insisting women are “too emotional” to understand.

It’s almost funny — if it weren’t so dangerous.

Women aren’t the emotional ones. We’re just fluent.

Women have been forced to develop emotional fluency to survive. We’ve had to learn how to read moods the way sailors read tides — because knowing when a man is about to explode can literally save our lives.

We know when he’s sulking. When he’s about to raise his voice. When his ego’s bruised. We know the exact tone to use to calm him down, the right words to say to avoid another argument.

And yet, somehow, we get branded as emotional.

In truth, women aren’t emotional — we’re adaptive. We’ve had to carry everyone’s emotions, manage everyone’s feelings, navigate everyone’s egos. We’re the translators for men who can’t read their own internal language.

Men don’t have less emotion — they just outsource the emotional work to women.

Anger isn’t strength. It’s fear wearing steel-toe boots.

Anger feels powerful. It feels safe. It’s easy to be angry because it gives you direction. You can yell at someone, punch something, blame someone else. But sadness? Shame? Fear? That requires sitting with yourself — and men aren’t taught how to do that.

The angry men of my childhood weren’t powerful; they were terrified. Terrified of losing control, of looking weak, of not being enough. But instead of learning how to manage that, they weaponised it.

That’s what “male rage” really is — unprocessed fear disguised as dominance. It’s the tantrum of a boy who was never allowed to cry.

We romanticise stoicism as strength, but it’s not. It’s avoidance. True strength isn’t pretending you don’t feel; it’s learning how to feel without destroying everyone around you.

Emotional fragility is the real epidemic.

Men love to talk about “snowflakes” — usually women, or younger people, or anyone who dares to care about something. But in reality, men are the most fragile creatures walking the planet.

A woman rejects them? Cue rage.

A woman earns more than them? Cue resentment.

A woman sets boundaries? Cue a breakdown about how “women these days don’t respect men anymore.”

Men’s egos are made of glass, and they expect women to be their bubble wrap.

This isn’t me being cruel. It’s me being honest. Emotional fragility isn’t inevitable — it’s the consequence of decades of coddling men while calling it discipline. We taught them to suppress instead of express, and now we’re all paying the price.

Women die every week at the hands of men who can’t regulate their emotions. One woman every three days in the UK, to be exact. Not because women are emotional — but because men are.

Men need therapy, not more excuses.

I’ve seen countless posts about “men’s mental health” that completely miss the point. They say things like “men need to be allowed to cry too,” but then never follow it with, “and they need to stop taking their pain out on everyone else.”

Yes, men need emotional support. Yes, they deserve compassion. But not at the expense of women’s safety.

Men have to do the work. They have to stop expecting women to hold their hands through every feeling. They have to stop mistaking rage for masculinity. They have to stop treating their girlfriends like emotional punching bags because they never learned to name sadness.

Therapy should be as normal as going to the gym. Emotional intelligence should be taught as seriously as algebra. And until men learn to handle their emotions, they are not oppressed by feminism — they are oppressed by their own ignorance.

Stop calling women emotional. Start calling men uneducated.

When a man says women are too emotional, what he’s really saying is: I’ve never learned emotional literacy, and your fluency scares me.

It’s projection. Always has been.

Women cry, and it’s weakness. Men rage, and it’s leadership. Women express emotion, and it’s hormonal. Men repress emotion, and it’s heroic.

It’s absurd.

If we’re ever going to move forward, we need to stop tiptoeing around men’s fragility. Stop validating tantrums. Stop pretending anger is strength. Stop calling emotional immaturity “just how men are.”

Because it’s not. It’s a choice.

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Men are not less emotional. They’re just less evolved in how they handle it.

And I, for one, am done pretending that’s our problem to fix.