Are women worse at being vulnerable than we think?

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Are women worse at being vulnerable than we think?

I put the question to one of my midlife lady group chats, and the responses came pouring in—everyone acknowledged that they struggle with being truly vulnerable (like don’t-have-a-silver-lining-story, lost-inarticulate-heartbroken vulnerable). And mind you, these are women whose lives are filled with silent meditation retreats and deep friendships, shelves are stocked with Anne Lamott and Nedra Glover Tawwab books, and podcast feeds are humming with Glennon, Abby, and “Sister.”

There was some consensus that vulnerability felt easier when they had some sense of control over the situation; where they still felt out of control, they were far less likely to connect with someone else about their in-process emotional state. And also, that women are often rewarded for being vulnerable in certain ways—winning praise, social cred, status even—while being actually at risk or losing control is frowned upon.

I am less comfortable with vulnerability when I’m exposing something soft, scared, and nameless.

I have ZERO problem doing things that others praise as vulnerable, naming spilling my guts, but when I think of times I felt some kind of risk, like vulnerability on my terms, I am totally at sea.

I can tell countless stories about personal disasters, but I am always the one taking care of others in these stories.

I can’t share the things that feel too private or tender or raw or humiliating.

While I think women are socialized to talk about their feelings more than men, without a doubt, I think that the way we are socialized to do that probably shouldn’t accurately be described as “vulnerable” (which requires genuine exposure…the sense that you are revealing something that puts you at some kind of emotional risk).

The majority of women I know—from a wide range of demographic and geographic backgrounds—are more likely to tell you a story about their past vulnerability, which they squeezed the most triumphant life lessons out of, than to tell you that they are lonely, jealous, lost, or disappointed right now. They may complain about their partners (strike that, they will almost certainly complain about their partners 🤣), but expressing despair over their own dysfunctional behavior or open questions or fear about their own inherent unworthiness—not so much.

They are often remarkably invulnerable when it comes to talking about their kids—their terror for them, their struggles with them, their need for support. Sure, a mom might possess a crocheted pillow winking at her potential drive to drink because of all the stress, but does she actually articulate what the deeply human, totally messy fuel for that drive is really about? No way, Rosé!

I am the pot calling the kettle black here, without a doubt. I have sometimes wondered if my “brand”—yes, a term I hate—is so emphatically vulnerable, because I, myself, struggle with real vulnerability in my real life! I don’t mean that I’m trying to trick others, but more that I’m kind of trying to trick myself…like if I write about it enough, I will become it or something. (It’s like Field of Dreams for Brene Brown readers.) And let’s be honest, writing about an emotion can feel way safer than actually feeling it. As Melissa Febos writes in The Dry Season:

I have come to understand that there are many parts to my personality, but one of the strongest is someone I inherited from a long line of badass woman that I think of as the cowgirl. She’s great in a crisis—insistent that I put on my shit-kicking boots and just deal with the damn thing, especially when others are too weak to do it. She’s also a real bitch (see: the use of the term “weak” in the last sentence?). She’s strategically numb, obscenely capable, a tough broad. She’s just trying to get through the day, not sit around in therapy and talk about where in my body I find the messy feelings (she rolls her eyes at somatics, obviously).

And she’s here for a reason—ancestral reasons for sure. The women in my lineage have been raised in families with powerful secrets (likely incest), disappeared upon getting pregnant, institutionalized for mental illness, and much more. Women—all of us—have reason to feel rationally vulnerable and resistant to it! (Now, in particular, with this administration and climate change.)

My cowgirl is here for contemporary circumstances. She has helped me take care of a lot of people, including myself, at all kinds of sad and terrible moments. She has helped me—a little girl from Colorado Springs—move to New York City at 18-years-old and pursue the writing career of my dreams. She’s a bitch, but she’s my bitch, and I love her! I’m grateful to her for all she’s done. I’m also trying to teach her when to stand down, to be less annoyed with and embarrassed by my own messiness and vulnerability, to let me feel some things that I really need to feel even when they’re inconvenient or “weak” or “white people problems.” (She loves a good class-based shaming!)

The other day, my incredible therapist asked me, “So what’s the alternative to the cowgirl?” And without skipping a beat I blurted out, “The martyr.”

Ugh. What a Sophie’s choice—the cowgirl or the martyr. The invulnerable or the victim. The in control or the stripped of control. If I can help it, I’ll choose the cowgirl every time, but the choice itself is a bullshit dichotomy—erasing the wider range of humanity that is my birthright.

What true vulnerability offers to me, and to all of us women performing a fantastic version of our own softness for our friends, is something sacred. It offers us the chance to be fully human—not a lemonade maker or a silver liner—but a real, honest-to-goodness, fully fleshy and messy and confused human. It allows us to admit where we’re out of control, and the truth is, we are inherently so out of control on so many fronts, always and especially in this precarious moment. And that’s scary, but there’s also freedom in it—realizing you can’t control it all anyway.

I’m imagining so many of us women, living our lives like the Velveteen rabbit, convincing everyone else and even ourselves, that we are forthright about what’s really going on in our tender inner sanctum, that we were out of control, but now we’ve tidied it all up and have something profound to say about it. But really we hunger to be real real. To be flawed and humble and bad at things and to have limitations and let people down and live to say it out loud to someone we trust. Without the cathartic ending. With the self-doubt and the snot and the liminal, unfolding inelegance of it all.

Sometimes it just sucks to be human on earth with other humans. It hurts. We hurt. And maybe the only thing worse than a guy who has never learned to cry with his friends is a gal who has learned to cry in just the right way with hers—not too little, not too much.

What would it look like if we stopped urging the men in our lives to be more vulnerable, stopped performing vulnerability in our own lives, and started really throwing up our hands and talking about how lost we sometimes feel?

Found this fascinating - we talk about vulnerability so much more than we used to, I’m guessing largely due to Brene Brown’s TED talk, which launched in 2010.

What do you think? I’m so curious to hear…