A Theory of Emotional Plasticity

I've always thought that men don't understand emotions. My mother used to say that when my grandfather passed away, even people who never get emotional cried. Recently, my father cried when my uncle passed. That was the first time my mother saw him cry. He didn't cry even when his mother died. I've never been able to cry at funerals. I feel a lot of pain, but I don't cry. It then takes me more than a few months, maybe a year, to feel the pain, cry at intervals, before I finally let go.

an arid ground waits for the water from the sky.

It is a huge challenge for me to cry in moments of deep pain or loss. However,  I am a big crier in everyday life. I cry at the smallest of triggers, when someone is mean to me or hurts me slightly. I cry when I am angry. I cry for no reason before my period.

For a woman, it is bewildering how the graph of emotions shifts wildly according to the phase of the menstrual cycle. There are days when I feel nothing, and some days when I feel like breaking down if someone even touches me slightly. It's a journey of riding the wave along with its ups and downs and understanding the impact of our bodily chemistry.

But there's more to it than just hormones, ain't it? Cultural shifts and societal norms govern how we feel or respond. If I felt outcast and sad in certain spaces for doing something, I felt like I belonged and was happy in another.

Space affects my ability to cry.

I recently watched a movie, to which I sobbed like a baby. "Man in Love". A Korean film with an intriguing plot: a debt collector asks a woman who owes him to date him. It seems predatory at first if you hear the storyline, but not when you watch the movie. An unlikely character arc in an unlikely situation, the film manages to turn the viewer inside out in questioning one's morality and intentions when it comes to love. It portrays love as a tender transaction between two beings. There is continuity of love beyond the beings into each other's families and work environments. For me, it is only then do I see the beauty of love. When it grows beyond two people and multiplies into everything around them. This love needn't be romantic or platonic, but any kind of affection or care towards another.

I wept like a baby at the end of the film in a way I hadn't in a while.

What defines the difference between different ways of loving? Can women really love more?

My friend once said that men just love differently. Their ways of showing affection differ. I see that with my dad. The way he cared for my grandmother before she passed brought tears to my eyes every day.

Why then do women feel that they don't get enough when it comes to romantic love?

The days when my body feels nothing made me empathise with men. What if our cycles are built differently? It is not a zero-sum game of us offering a lot and them receiving, but when you meet at par at certain moments of social or bodily sync to understand the range of emotions on both ends. What if the purpose is to mirror each other's light and train each other to be emotionally varied and plastic to fit into each other's graphs?

I believe that each of us is constantly growing and evolving, and we need time alone to understand ourselves. If it took me a few months and someone else a few years, and everyone their own pace of time, we just need to find the right frequency to tune in to find our matching range of emotional plasticity.