Ask a man how he's doing. Nine times out of ten you get one word back: fine, stressed, tired, good. Push a little further, ask what's actually going on, and the words don't get much more specific.
It isn't evasion, exactly. For a lot of men, that vague word is the most precise answer available, because underneath it there isn't a clearer one waiting to be spoken. There's a real feeling. There just isn't a name for it.
Psychology has a term for this gap, and it's worth knowing.
No Words For It
In 1973, the psychiatrist Peter Sifneos coined a word for a specific kind of difficulty: identifying and describing your own emotional states from the inside. He built it from Greek roots that translate, literally, to "no words for feelings." Alexithymia.
Decades later, the psychologist Ronald Levant, a former president of the American Psychological Association, narrowed the idea toward a specific, common pattern he'd observed in men.
He called it normative male alexithymia. [1] The word "normative" is doing careful work in that phrase. This isn't the same thing as clinical alexithymia, which is linked to certain neurological and psychiatric conditions.
What Levant was describing was something else entirely: a mild, common pattern, learned from how a lot of boys are raised, not a hardwired deficit.
That distinction matters. It means the wall isn't permanent, because it was built, not born.
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