I remember my 10th year of life in Bombay in glimpses: the sheet music for Bach’s “Invention No. 1 in C Major” sitting atop my new piano, on which my teacher had scribbled, “Sit like a king”; fighting through traffic on car rides with my best friend to unwanted Karate lessons at 7 p.m., and a yearlong television campaign by Star World titled “Ladke nahi rote hain” (Boys don’t cry). The premise was simple — a series of examples of boys being admonished for crying, whether at birth, at their first day of Kindergarten, after the loss of a football match; followed by the suggestion that men who never learn to cry only ever learn to make others cry.  

Watching that video, seated on the carpeted floor of my grandparents’ apartment, I recall the first moment that I began to question the theater of masculinity. I am fortunate to say that throughout my adolescence, such interrogation of masculinity has been largely intellectual. I have felt comfortable with manhood simply because its boundaries were very wide. I have a father who will still unpromptedly hug his children and plant a kiss on their forehead, who will still not end a phone call without the briefest of “I love you’s”; a mother whose insistence that her children learn to swim, cycle and play a racquet sport was shared by both her daughter and son; an older sister whose tears are synchronized with my own. Emotional vulnerability is the hallmark of my most meaningful friendships even from middle school, and it has been that way since the arbitrary Tuesday that I began to resemble the person I am today. 

But masculinity is rarely so forgiving. It can compel to violence as easily as it can disarm self-confidence. It is pomp and pageantry and theater of dissimulation. It has its own symbolism— one in which valor is associated is unemotional fortitude and weakness with subversion. To be clear, I am less concerned with the explicit customs of manliness —lists of 100 skills every man should know — than I am with its subtext. I would like to be proficient both at tying a necktie and at surviving a bear attack, and I certainly hope I know how to tell a joke (Number 14). Perhaps that is why I am unduly scornful of those especially spoiled, hyper privileged men I was surrounded by at home, who lack masculinity’s purported competence, clinging only to its theater. 

I would be remiss, though, not to acknowledge the examples of masculinity that I can aspire to  — the fictional Phil Dunphy from “Modern Family,” whose sense of humor and adoration for his family frames my own ambitions for a family; the Charles Boyle from “Brooklyn Nine Nine,” whose commitment to male friendship is surpassed only by his devotion to the musical “Annie”; even Balzac’s “Père Goriot”, whose price gouging of vermicelli aside, is flawed only in the infinitude of his blind love for his daughters. In short, these are men who are unafraid to love. 

In real life, though, such honest intimacy is vanishingly rare. At Yale, I am lucky to be part of so many communities that value emotional vulnerability: a comedy group that often hears my innermost thoughts before I subvocalize them; an all-male fraternity that prides itself on a model of positive masculinity; friends who value my lachrymose sentimentalism, who accept daily, unsolicited hugs and other expressions of affection with ready smiles. 

As soon as we leave the Yale bubble, though, the wind imperceptibly shifts. The protective veil of Yale’s liberalism is gone and the eyes of the world finally settle upon us. Soon, the weight of masculinity begins to bear us down. A tight embrace with the college best friend interning in another city feels far more fraught in the center of Dallas-Fort Worth airport then it did outside the Humanities Quadrangle. We worry that intimacy will be confused with desire and we love in a world in which desire can be fatal. 

I would be lying if I did not admit that the history of masculinity has shaped how I conceive of my future — as the provider for a family, as a model of unwavering strength for loved ones to lean on. But it has no place in dictating the ways we express our affection. Whether this is an Instagram caption for your best friend’s birthday, declaring to the world how much you love him; a swing dance with your roommate in the Branford dining hall; or sitting with a new friend on the bench outside the TEAL building, holding them as their body shudders with sobs. 

For Yale students, such musings on masculinity will neither be novel nor challenging. But as commonplace as criticisms of masculinity are, as often as men’s mental health is deemed to be in crisis — masculinity continues to be politicized and stoicism, silent suffering remains the hallmarks of life for so many men within and outside Yale’s cloisters.   

If nothing else, then, understand the symbolic power of public intimacy. For it is these images of love — of confiding in your brother about how a professional crisis has crippled your self-esteem, of hugging your friend in the middle of Old Campus when they do fantastically on a midterm they spent the last two weeks studying for— that relaxes the expectation of unfeeling stoicism that so many people are suffocated by, and finally allows them to breathe again.