This sort of situation is how I knew my wife was/is a keeper. When I was pushed to the point where my negative emotions got too much, she was there for me. She didn't shy away, but stepped in to help and support me.
In many of my previous relationships, showing negative emotions was lethal to their feelings. I could be happy, or stoic, but never upset or depressed.
On a side note, I had a chat with a trans friend once, regarding emotions. When they transitioned, the intensity of their emotions didn't change much. However, their ability to contain them plummeted. Basically, men and women feel emotions similarly. Men are just a lot more able to bottle them up.
I'm trans and, until I started HRT, had very little access to my emotions. I would desperately want to cry, and just would be unable. Or I would know I was supposed to be having some kind of emotional reaction to something, and just...wouldn't.
Very very soon after getting my hormones straightened out, I discovered that I was having emotions in sympathy with characters on tv or in movies. If I was sad I could actually cry for a bit and process the emotion rather than having to channel it into anger or physicality. It was like living in color instead of black and white, this whole arena of human experience I'd read about but hadn't ever really felt.
I've heard the same from trans guys as well; they didn't ever feel like their emotions made sense until they got on T.
My now-ex reacted to this, first with concern, then with contempt.
I'm a cis guy and I also struggle with expressing my emotions, but I think that it's more of a cultural thing. Like I'm not really "allowed" to cry from watching a TV show and it's difficult to shake it off even when I'm alone.
For my it wasn't about expressing them, it was about feeling them at all. Only the very very strongest ones could even crack through.
Of course there was also the fact that my father threatened to beat me for crying "if I didn't have a reason", so there are obviously confounding factors, but interventions like therapy, meditation, changing my name, presenting female all the time, etc didn't have anywhere near as much effect on my access to emotions as a couple of weeks on HRT.
They were all helpful in different ways (sometimes enormously so), but it felt like there was an impedance mismatch between my conscious mind and the rest of my body, and the HRT fixed it.
This sort of situation is how I knew my wife was/is a keeper. When I was pushed to the point where my negative emotions got too much, she was there for me. She didn't shy away, but stepped in to help and support me.
In many of my previous relationships, showing negative emotions was lethal to their feelings. I could be happy, or stoic, but never upset or depressed.
On a side note, I had a chat with a trans friend once, regarding emotions. When they transitioned, the intensity of their emotions didn't change much. However, their ability to contain them plummeted. Basically, men and women feel emotions similarly. Men are just a lot more able to bottle them up.
I'm trans and, until I started HRT, had very little access to my emotions. I would desperately want to cry, and just would be unable. Or I would know I was supposed to be having some kind of emotional reaction to something, and just...wouldn't.
Very very soon after getting my hormones straightened out, I discovered that I was having emotions in sympathy with characters on tv or in movies. If I was sad I could actually cry for a bit and process the emotion rather than having to channel it into anger or physicality. It was like living in color instead of black and white, this whole arena of human experience I'd read about but hadn't ever really felt.
I've heard the same from trans guys as well; they didn't ever feel like their emotions made sense until they got on T.
My now-ex reacted to this, first with concern, then with contempt.
I'm a cis guy and I also struggle with expressing my emotions, but I think that it's more of a cultural thing. Like I'm not really "allowed" to cry from watching a TV show and it's difficult to shake it off even when I'm alone.
For my it wasn't about expressing them, it was about feeling them at all. Only the very very strongest ones could even crack through.
Of course there was also the fact that my father threatened to beat me for crying "if I didn't have a reason", so there are obviously confounding factors, but interventions like therapy, meditation, changing my name, presenting female all the time, etc didn't have anywhere near as much effect on my access to emotions as a couple of weeks on HRT.
They were all helpful in different ways (sometimes enormously so), but it felt like there was an impedance mismatch between my conscious mind and the rest of my body, and the HRT fixed it.