Think about the men in your life. Your father, your brother, your partner, your closest male friend. Now think about the last time any of them said — genuinely said, not as a joke, not brushed past — I’m not okay. I’m struggling. I need help.
Most of us are drawing a blank.
Not because those men aren’t struggling. They are. But somewhere very early in life, every boy in this country gets handed a set of instructions that nobody says out loud but everybody enforces. Don’t cry. Don’t complain. Handle it. Be strong. Man up. Mard ko dard nahi hota. And from that point on, a man doesn’t stop feeling things, he just stops saying them. He learns to swallow it, bury it, carry it quietly and call that strength.
It is not strength.
“We didn’t raise men who don’t feel. We raised men who were punished every time they did.”
Mental health-linked suicides among men in India rose by 44 percent between 2018 and 2022. In 2022 alone, 10,365 men died by suicide, accounting for nearly 72 percent of all mental health-related suicide deaths that year. These are not just numbers. These are fathers who went to work and never came home. Husbands who smiled at dinner and fell apart at 3am. Sons who seemed fine until they weren’t. And in almost every single one of those stories, there was no one who knew, because he never said, and no one ever asked the right way.
We talk endlessly about the mental load women carry. And that conversation is important and real and still incomplete. But there is another load nobody talks about, the one sitting on the chest of every man who wakes up every morning knowing that no matter how hard yesterday was, today he has to show up again. Provide again. Hold it together again. Because that is what men do. That is what men are for.
“A woman is allowed to say I am exhausted. A man is only allowed to say I will figure it out.”
Think about what an Indian man is actually asked to carry. The financial pressure — not as a contribution, but as a non-negotiable identity. If he earns less than expected, he is not just struggling, he has failed as a man. The emotional pressure to be the steady one, the fixer, the person who doesn’t add to anyone else’s burden. The social pressure to never appear weak in front of friends, colleagues, family. And then the private pressure he puts on himself, the voice in his own head that says I am the man of this house, nothing can break me, I don’t get to fall apart.
A 2026 study on masculinity norms in North Indian men found a critical paradox: the very identity that grants a man social status simultaneously damages him by enforcing emotional suppression. The performance of mardangi, what it means to be a real man, doesn’t just pressure men from the outside. It erodes them from within.
So what does a man do with all of that feeling he was never allowed to have? He deflects. He gets angry when he is actually scared. He withdraws when he is actually hurting. He becomes distant, unavailable, unreachable and everyone around him calls it coldness, arrogance, not caring. Nobody calls it what it actually is. A person who was never taught that his pain was allowed, trying to survive pain he cannot name.
“He didn’t stop caring. He just ran out of ways to say it that anyone had taught him were acceptable.”
Mental health helpline calls from men in India surged 126 percent between 2020 and 2024. Something cracked open in those years: the pandemic, the job losses, the isolation, the pressure of holding a family together while your own ground was shifting. And for the first time, some men picked up the phone. Not many. But some. And that number alone tells you that the need was always there. The silence was never about not hurting. It was always about not being given permission to say so. And for the man reading this, this is for you directly. The pressure you feel to hold everything together, to never be the problem, to always be the solution that is real. You did not imagine it. The world did put that on you. But here is the thing nobody told you: carrying it without ever letting it out is not protecting anyone. It is quietly destroying you. And the people who love you would far rather have a man who sometimes falls apart than one who disappears piece by piece trying not to.
“Strength was never the absence of pain. It was always the courage to admit it was there.”
We have spent generations building a version of manhood that doesn’t express it. It is time to give them the space to open up.
You are allowed to not be okay. You are allowed to say that out loud. To the person next to you, to a friend, to a professional, to yourself in a quiet room at the end of a hard day. That is not weakness. That is the one thing. Real strength actually requires honesty about what is happening inside you, even when everything outside you is asking you to pretend it isn’t.
Because somewhere right now, there is a man who is not okay. He is sitting with it alone. He is handling it, managing it, suppressing it, because that is all he was ever taught to do.
And he is waiting, without knowing he is waiting, for someone to finally ask the right question.
When was the last time you asked the man in your life, really asked, and really waited for the answer how he was doing? Not his job. Not his plans. Not what needs to be fixed next. Just him. Just how he actually is, underneath all the things he manages so that everyone else doesn’t have to.
Ask him. And then stay for the answer.
“We never gave men the words for their pain. And then we were surprised by their silence.”
If you are going through any kind of trouble in life, if you feel like you need someone to talk to but are too shy to speak up, use this anonymous feature to send me a message.
