"You Idiot": How Men Show They Care Without Saying It Directly

Written by Evan Vukets, RCC, Registered Clinical Counsellor in Abbotsford, BC. I support men in Abbotsford, the Fraser Valley, and online across BC. Learn more about me.

There is one thing that I have noticed in my life and in my work. As men, when we talk about our friendships, especially ones that matter to us the language we default to describe them can sound almost hostile.

He gives me a hard time. We rip on each other. If he's being an idiot, I'll tell him. And yet the way we say it, there clearly is warmth and shared appreciation.

While it may sound harsh, it is not dysfunction or avoidance. It is just how we are socialized. Men often express care, respect, and closeness through language that sounds negative on the surface.

When Negative Words Carry something else

A lot of men express care through what sounds like its opposite. Teasing, sarcasm, the well-placed mock insult, these aren't failures of emotional expression. For many men, they are the emotional expression.

"You're brutal" lands as a compliment.

"You idiot" carries genuine affection.

"Don't screw this up" can hold more belief in someone than a dozen earnest pep talks.

The words say one thing. The relationship translates them into something else entirely. This idea is described well by Dr. Alok Kanojia (aka the Healthy Gamer), who notes that men often use “a negative expression of positive affection.”

Why Many Men Communicate This Way

This pattern of how men show they care doesn't appear out of nowhere. It gets built over time, through sports teams and schoolyards, through watching how the men around them connected with each other, through figuring out early on that warmth offered directly could be a vulnerability and warmth wrapped in humour was safer. 

There's a logic to it. If you say something affectionate and it lands awkwardly, you're exposed. But if you say something playful and it lands awkwardly, you were just joking. Indirect expression creates a kind of buffer. It lets connection happen without requiring anyone to be too naked about wanting it.

For the most part, this works remarkably well. The communication lands because it's carried by so much more than words. Tone, timing, a smirk, a pause, the whole physical context of being in the same room with someone you've known for years. The negative wording is almost beside the point. Everyone in the exchange understands what's actually being said.

There Is Nothing Wrong With How Men Show Care in this way inherently

This is worth saying clearly. This way of communicating is not a problem. It builds camaraderie, ease, a kind of shorthand that takes years to develop with someone. A lot of men are already expressing care, it just doesn't always land the way they expect it to.

When This Style Starts To Create Distance

The place where this starts to quietly break down is text.

Most of us in our thirties are maintaining friendships almost entirely through asynchronous messaging. We are busy with work, our kids, or responsibilities that didn't exist a decade ago. A voice note here, a few Instagram replies there, texts sent and answered across the gaps of a full day. It's not ideal, but it is what life looks like in this chapter of our lives. It's how connection gets maintained when the calendar has been completely consumed.

The problem is that this style of communication was never designed for text. It depends entirely on the cues that text strips away. So a message like nice of you to finally reply, which in person would land as warmth with a grin behind it, can arrive cold. What was meant as the familiar language of closeness can read as frustration, or passive aggression, or distance. The translation fails because the translator isn't there.

When Male Communication Is Seen as a Problem

That's one layer. But there's another one I think about more.

A significant majority of therapists, somewhere around three quarters are women (Wall Street Journal). I raise this not as a criticism but as context, because it shapes the lens through which a lot of emotional and relational behaviour gets interpreted professionally. A communication style that feels completely natural to many men, one that has carried genuine connection for them for decades can be inappropriately read in therapeutic or relational frameworks inaccurately. As avoidance. As deflection. As a sign of limited emotional range. The implicit message, however unintentionally it's delivered, becomes: the way you connect is a problem to be fixed.

I've watched what that does to men. It doesn't open them up. It shuts them down. Instead of feeling like there's more room to explore, they feel like they've been told they've been doing it wrong the whole time, that the friendships they built, the care they expressed, the closeness they felt, somehow didn't count because it wasn't 'right.'

The Pressure Underneath

R.W. Connell wrote in Masculinities about how dominant ideas of manhood have long required men to suppress vulnerability, tenderness, and dependency just to be considered legitimate. That pressure is already significant.

Most men I work with are carrying a version of it, whether they'd name it that or not. When the way they express care gets added to the list of things that need to be corrected, it compounds something that was already heavy. It communicates that there is no acceptable version of them.

Adding Range, Not Replacing Your Style

What I'm interested in and what the work I do is actually about isn't taking this away from men. The humour, the edge, the indirection, that's not pathology. The goal isn't suppression. Most men have had more than enough of that already.

The goal is range.

What it looks like in practice is small. It's holding onto the style while making a little more room inside it. "You're an idiot… but I'm really glad you came." The first half stays and the important second half gets added. Nothing about the person changes. They just have slightly more to work with when the moment calls for it, when someone needs to know directly, not just between the lines, that they matter.

What This Can Look Like

“You’re an idiot… but I’m really glad you came.”

“Don’t screw this up… I know you’ve got this.”

“Nice of you to show up… I missed you, man.”

I work with a lot of men in Abbotsford who are navigating exactly this. These are often not men who are disconnected or emotionally unavailable, but men who have been expressing care their whole lives in ways that don't always get recognized as care. The work isn't about learning a new language. It's about having a little more range in the one they already speak.

Closing

A lot of men are already expressing care. They have been for a long time. It just doesn't always sound like what people expect care to sound like.

Once you learn to hear what's underneath the language, you start noticing it everywhere, in the ribbing, the sarcasm, the reflexive "you idiot" that somehow, in context, means the exact opposite of what it says.

If any of this resonates, whether you're trying to understand yourself a little better or someone you care about, counselling can be a space to explore that. Not to fix the way you connect, but to give it a little more room. If you're in Abbotsford or the Fraser Valley and curious about what that could look like, you're welcome to reach out for a free consultation or by booking an initial session.