Emotional range

Are you a man with a constricted emotional range? Chateau Heartiste writes a lengthy essay today to help you with that. Here are some excerpts:

Women have slicker emotional fluidity than men, but their highs aren’t as high nor their lows as low as the passions that men are capable of feeling. Few women will ever feel with the same intensity the exhilarating rush of power that a man feels when he is victorious in struggle. Few women will experience the lustful, insistent, romantic yearning that surges outward from every corpuscle of a young man’s being when the merest flicker of a pretty girl grazes his retina.

To rectify this sin-inducing passion deficit, the devil gave women, as substitution for intensity of emotion, frequency of emotion. Whereas a man can easily make it through a day without needing his emotional state roused to action, women slowly rot from the inside if their inner emotional joyride rusts unused for too long. Women are not built for stoicism; an imposed stoicism drives them mad, a self-imposed stoicism madder still.

When a woman isn’t receiving her recommended gaily allowance of emotional stimulation, she will try to “fill the tank” by seeking out a man who can make her feel alive or, if no man like that is available, by manufacturing drama in the hopes of dragging others across the event horizon into into her black hole of anxiety.

...Unfortunately, this is the subroutine of courtship which fails too many men. I’ve seen it happen to older men and to socially maladjusted nerds, the two largest groups with a propensity to stifle their expressiveness, or an incapacity to summon it in the proper dosage. The older Lothario, through a combination of his own negligence and a fatefully slow passion contraction, will lean on manly stoicism less as a seduction tactic than as a necessity to compensate for gimped emotional range.

The spergy nerd has a different problem. His emotional range is bifurcated. Most of the time he’s a monotonic drone, but sufficiently pressured by social contingencies will explode in a cluster bomb of random emotional shrapnel, thereby codifying the social ostracism that always stalks him.

Go here to read CH's pointers for improving your emotional range.