The Long Smile: On Emotional Vitality, Male Socialization, and What Gets Lost

At a Little League game this weekend, I watched a boy catch a fly ball, and then, remarkably, smile for the next fifteen minutes.

Not performatively. Not self-consciously. Not for anyone else’s benefit.

Just a simple, steady expression of pleasure. He smiled as he jogged off the field. He smiled in the dugout. He smiled through his next at-bat. It wasn’t boastful or exaggerated; it wasn’t layered with defense. It was emotionally pure. And it lingered.

And as I watched him, I had that familiar therapist’s ache. The one that comes when you witness something beautiful that you also know is at risk.

Because I know what happens to that smile.

I know how it gets shortened. I know what gets coded as “immaturity,” and what gets called “strength.”

I know the slow erosion of emotional expressiveness that occurs as boys are socialized into normative masculinity. The message is clear and persistent: vulnerability is dangerous, joy is unserious, and emotional aliveness must be hidden to be safe.

In AEDP, we speak about emotional expression as a form of vitality. True affective experience, when it is not distorted by defense, is inherently healing, connecting, and organizing. It moves us toward core self, toward relational engagement, and toward integration. But our culture teaches boys, early and often, that these core affects, especially joy, sadness, fear, tenderness—are not safe to express. They are truncated. Repressed. Shamed. And so the vitality that was once visible in the long smile becomes stylized, hardened, or shut down.

By adolescence, many boys have learned to replace emotional expression with performance, suppression, or dissociation. By adulthood, many men have internalized a model of self-regulation that privileges stoicism over self-awareness, flatness over feeling.

As clinicians, we often encounter men in the aftermath of this process, men who were not allowed to develop an emotionally coherent internal world because the culture actively discouraged it. And then, in a cruel twist, we punish them for the very adaptations we forced them to make. We shame them for the numbness we conditioned. We criticize the walls we trained them to build. It is a staggering contradiction, one that causes real harm, not just to them, but to the people around them.

And the cost is not theirs alone.

When emotional vitality is cut off, men suffer. But so do their relationships. So do their families. So do we all.

Because unprocessed emotional pain doesn’t disappear, it finds other routes. Often through anger, dissociation, overwork, addiction, control. And those adaptive responses, while understandable, can have real collateral damage. Not because men are broken, but because they’ve been separated from the very capacities that would allow them to metabolize pain with care.

When we witness a boy whose emotional pleasure is intact, who smiles because he is alive in what he’s doing, we are not just seeing a sweet moment. We are seeing something sacred. A nervous system in congruence. A self in integration. A future that has not yet been distorted by defense.

That smile is more than a facial expression. It is a symbol of what is possible when we are allowed to feel. When joy is not cut short. When emotional truth is not pathologized. When wholeness is protected.

Let us remember what gets lost.

And let us do everything we can, in therapy, in parenting, in culture, to protect that smile.

To make room for it to last.