including your allegedly heinous example of bonding with a widow because you also lost your SO! Can you imagine?! Humans bonding over a common experience?
I used that example, because I am a widow myself. My fiance passed a few years ago. I don’t mean to imply people do this out of malice, just that they try to “make you feel better” by relating to your grief, but unfortunately grief doesn’t work like that. When I am grieving, more than anything I’m just looling for someone to listen and understand, not try and tell me “it’s normal” or “this happens to everyone, don’t feel so bad”, because as genuine and heartfelt that substance is it is not helpful. I’m not immune to it either, I met a man on the bus who’d lost his daughter, and my first reaction was to mention my fiance rather than listen and let him let it out. I realized what I was doing and reflected about it later, I saw how he reacted and how sharing that type of pain doesn’t mitigate it, what you really want is to talk to someone without comparing tragedy. There is a time and place for that, but not in those moments of grief and pain.
Yes, I mentioned that explicitly in my comment, did you read all of it? I never said that it was okay for that type of thing to happen to men, and that we should talk about it. And just like with letting women have the floor, we should allow men to have it when the convo is centered on that issue. I don’t see what the issue with giving each issue their own time and space is, we need to have focus if we’re talking about two very different, yet similar scenarios, in order to have some kind of real way to find a solution proper to both.
I used that example, because I am a widow myself. My fiance passed a few years ago. I don’t mean to imply people do this out of malice, just that they try to “make you feel better” by relating to your grief, but unfortunately grief doesn’t work like that. When I am grieving, more than anything I’m just looling for someone to listen and understand, not try and tell me “it’s normal” or “this happens to everyone, don’t feel so bad”, because as genuine and heartfelt that substance is it is not helpful. I’m not immune to it either, I met a man on the bus who’d lost his daughter, and my first reaction was to mention my fiance rather than listen and let him let it out. I realized what I was doing and reflected about it later, I saw how he reacted and how sharing that type of pain doesn’t mitigate it, what you really want is to talk to someone without comparing tragedy. There is a time and place for that, but not in those moments of grief and pain.
Yes, I mentioned that explicitly in my comment, did you read all of it? I never said that it was okay for that type of thing to happen to men, and that we should talk about it. And just like with letting women have the floor, we should allow men to have it when the convo is centered on that issue. I don’t see what the issue with giving each issue their own time and space is, we need to have focus if we’re talking about two very different, yet similar scenarios, in order to have some kind of real way to find a solution proper to both.