Dear men,

Your hearts matter too.

Your feelings are so f*cking important. So please stop “man-ing up.”

Raise your hand if you’d rather get punched in the face than deal with another heartbreak for the rest of your life. Yeah, me too. Why do you think that is?

Emotional pain is worse than physical pain. You know that black eye is going to heal in a couple of weeks, but a broken heart? That’s tricky, it takes a lot of time and patience, and we have no way of knowing how much time it will take.

To truly be strong, you have to learn to be emotionally strong. To be emotionally strong, you have to allow yourself to be vulnerable. That’s where you’ll find your support. If you have friends who call you a pussy because you express your emotions, you need to get better friends. Seriously, Be better friends to each other. We are losing so many men to addiction and suicide because they feel like they don’t have anyone who will listen. Be the guy who tells his friends they’re important.

Emotions are energy, and they need to be released. Emotion = energy in motion. I don’t think you’d have to ask an electrician what happens when there’s too much energy in one place, but let me paint the picture for you, the transformer goes BOOM. It needs a constant flow, in and out. We’re basically stuffing all this energy (emotion) inside us with no release and we wonder why we’re so full of anxiety. Cry it out, man.

We need more emotionally available men.

There are still women out there who want one man for the rest of their lives. We want to be your best friend. We want playfulness, to laugh with you, and shoot you with Nerf guns, but we also crave your depth. We want to know your pain and your fears, not so we can defeat you, but so we know how to love you better.  We want to know that you need us just as much as we need you. We’re loyal and faithful. We want to support your goals and help you achieve them, but we need that same energy from you. We’re meant to grow together, not damage each other.

The world is constantly telling us, women, to love ourselves and know our worth, but we are not the only ones at risk of low self-worth. So many of you grew up in environments that were extremely damaging to you. You need to know that you also deserve to feel safe. You deserve to be nurtured and cared for by your partners. You deserve forehead kisses and someone who is so gentle with your heart that you forget it was ever broken. You have to start believing that you are worthy of this or you will sabotage it every time.

Please teach your daughters what an emotionally available man looks like. She will learn by your example. If she doesn’t know what to look for, she will end up crying alone someday, wondering where she went wrong. She’ll question her own worth and she won’t understand that it never had anything to do with her unless you tell her.

Please teach your sons how to be emotionally available men. Teach them that having feelings is part of being human. Let them know that crying is natural and healthy. Don’t make them quiet their fears because the world wrongly taught you that strength means silence.

Remember that avoidance is not strong, running is not brave, and numbing is not healing.

Be brave and love yourselves.