Hearing the Need to Be Heard

I’ve had a very bad couple of weeks. No reason in particular—the universe just seems determined to test whatever wisdom I think I have to the absolute max.

Chances are, a lot of you have had a shitty couple of weeks in recent memory. Life is hard. Business is hard. But when we present either as a constant firehose of wins, we rob ourselves of the very fruits of the struggle. We forget that with every period of darkness, with every mood swing or passing inability to see the forest for the trees, there is a series of beautiful lessons present and waiting to be noticed.

The most recent of these lessons for me was a big one, and wholly unexpected. It’s a lesson which I’ve been trying to crack for quite some time: why is it that when going through something difficult, women tend to prioritize “being heard” while men tend to prioritize “problem-solving?”

This is one of those classic tropes I thought was surely bullshit until my expectations clashed with reality. As a gay man, I’ve always been suspicious of platitudes that claim to capture dynamics between men and women. I’ve seen first hand the way many of these unravel the moment they’re pressed. I’ve had the privilege of seeing the public and private faces of countless men and women, because I’ve experimented with and embodied so much of so-called masculine and feminine socialization personally. But this issue kept showing its face, and I was surprised to find myself squarely on the side of the men.

A woman would confide in me that she was going through something difficult, and I would immediately snap into problem-solving mode. I’d probe for additional data, and offer a range of possible solutions as if debugging some broken code. Sometimes this would be well-received—most often it would not, and I would be told something wholly baffling: I just want to be heard right now.

“Wanting to be heard” is not something most men have any basis for understanding. Our socialization, apparently even for the gays like myself, does not include anything representing “wanting to be heard” for its own sake. I could not fathom a situation in which I would go to someone for help without expecting the same thing I’d think to do for others: break the problem into its component parts and offer solutions. And apparently, I’m not alone in this, as this has become one of those things virtually every single man and woman I know has revealed as a serious, recurring disconnect in their relationships with the opposite sex.

That disconnect remained in me until an hour ago, when I was feeling down about something I had been trying to resolve for years. Just two days ago my best friend and I had a breakthrough, and yet I found myself mired in a sense of futility yet again. He again snapped into problem-solving mode, but this time I told him to stop. I realized that in that moment, I did not have the bandwidth for problem-solving, and no amount of analysis or novel frames or data was going to give me the bandwidth. I simply needed to put the problem on the table in front of me, to sit with it and look at it, and to feel supported while I gathered the strength and desire to problem-solve in due time.

This was further punctuated by what happened after I told him I didn’t want to problem-solve. He left the room—and who could blame him: he was respecting my boundaries. But I felt even more deflated, and realized I needed something that the majority of the women in my life would have instinctually provided: they would have broadcasted a kind of non-verbal support (often starting with a hug) that would have recharged my batteries in no time and given me the bandwidth to move forward.

In other words, for the first time, I found myself consciously desiring to be heard rather than to receive assistance in problem-solving. For the first time, it became clear why “being heard” was not merely kicking the can down the road, but rather creating an emotional foundation that made future problem-solving more effective.

This is a big deal. My failure to solve my original problem, repeatedly, beat me down to the point where I was genuinely out of energy to proceed. And yet, from a place of being humbled by the sheer weight of this problem, an opportunity opened for me to see the value in what was previously a completely foreign approach. My failure created the circumstances that forced me to face my own humanity, and it was in that surrender that I was able to, for the first time, finally access a tool readily available to every woman in my life.

The suffering sucks. The grind sucks. And yet, it is precisely because of the humility one gains through suffering that one is capable of attaining new heights.

Let’s stop shying away from the ugly parts of the journey. That’s where the greatest beauty lives.