I've been tossing up the idea of the dating app around for a bit, and asking if people would be willing to help me test it out by going on fake dates. For some of my male friends, as soon as the question left my mouth, I realised that I had no idea whether they were single or not. Not that they needed to be single to test my app, but it just occurred to me that I had never asked, and they had never told. Some of these people I had known for nearly ten years (I know that because WoW recently turned 10).
Which is completely jarring compared to my experience with the PGC (which I'm going to rename the WFWC - Women From Work Club). I've only been part of this group for a very short time, and I already know their relationship status - married, in a relationship, single, single, married). I know details about their partners, or prospective partners. I know about their aspirations, their favourite foods, the people they are annoyed by at work.
One of my friends (Joel), who I've known since uni, confessed to me that he considers me one of his best friends. We get along really well, and have no problems talking to each other about anything - or so I thought. His wife is a member of the WFWC, and the last time the bunch of us caught up, it was revealed that they were in the process of trying for children.
Joel has never brought that up at all. In fact, we were talking about houses today, and I mentioned how I hate accumulating stuff, as it makes it harder to move. He replied that he agreed, and he's really been trying to cut down the amount of things they have. I asked if they were planning to move to a new house in order to have more rooms, completely expecting him to mention that they were planning to have kids. Nope, he didn't say a thing.
I guess it's just another difference between men and women. Thinking about it, it's quite rare for me to talk to my male friends about relationships. Often our talk is very task-oriented: patch notes for Dota, or how to cook sushi. Talking with my female friends seems to revolve more are relationships, and not just romantic relationships, any kind of relationships. I wonder if that's just they way that people tend to be socially programmed. I wonder if more of them would like to talk about it, but feel like they can't.
In another random encounter, another one of my friends revealed to me something incredibly personal. I felt like someone had just punched me in the stomach. We rarely ever talked about anything other than the common activity that we do together, and here he was, sounding like he was about to cry as he described what happened. Of course, I talked through it with him, and I think I helped, but I actually felt honoured that he decided to share it with me (is that wrong, feeling good about something bad that happened to him?). So of course I had to go and share it with the rest of the Internet, because isn't that what you do these days?
It's moments like this where I start to think maybe this is what I was made to do. I attended a men's health seminar as part of something at work, and the guy who ran it said that men will often ignore mental health issues, because they don't believe they're real issues. So they'll suffer in silence until it ends up being a serious issue, and will require drastic treatment. Or they end up hurting the people around them and become confused as to why everyone is leaving them, at which point there will be nobody around to tell them that they need to get help, and they continue like that until they die. It's really sad, because there are so many resources out there to help them, but they can't bring themselves to ask for help. Movember is meant to be about men's mental health, among other things, but I think all that people remember about it is that for a month, a bunch of men start growing dodgy looking moustaches.
As insensitive as this sounds, I am curious about what made him decide to confide in me. Was he going to confide in someone anyway, and I just happened to get caught in the blast? If I could work that out, maybe I could work out how to get people to ask for help when they need it, rather than when it's too late to do anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment