On male emotion and heartbreak

And just because I now can at work (they have opened our access to 'social media'), I just wandered into Twitter, which doesn't happen all that often, and read this Slate article that Karen had tweeted, on male emotion and heartbreak. It's worth a read.

For all the men in these stories, the stakes of love remained high—which made their disappointments like stakes in the heart—but in their grief they never came across as weird, or naive, or effeminate. Rather, there was a dignity, strength, and honor that surrounded their despair because, to the other characters and now to me, they had gone somewhere only the stout of heart can go.

As it turned out, this was the only medicine that worked in my period of distress: In a world and time that esteemed—nay, championed—romantic risk-taking, male heartbreak was seen not as a defect but as the barometer of valor.