He says he’s fine. You can see he isn’t. The research says he is probably not lying, not shut down, and not unaware of what he feels. The gap sits somewhere far more specific, and it is the one part of this that can actually be changed.

He is not ignoring you when he jumps to a solution. He is doing what almost everyone does, and the research says so plainly. When researchers coded what people actually say to someone in distress, problem-focused support was the most common response from both sexes, and emotion-focused was the least common from both. The real…