As a guy, I never really felt comfortable saying those things to anyone irl.
When people tell men “you can tell me anything” what they mean is “I don’t want to feel like you’re keeping things from me.”
It 100% does NOT mean “you will face no negative consequences for telling me.”
Men keep some things to themselves because sharing feelings has resulted in getting burned too many times.
These things aren’t necessarily bad. They might just shatter exciting illusions the other person prefered over the ordinary truth.
Coming from the Midwest I don’t think I ever felt uncomfortable expressing any emotions. I could kind of rattle off whatever I wanted to say without too much thinking.
But having lived in Los Angeles for roughly 10 years now I’m afraid to be open at all. When I first came here I was accused of hacking people’s credit cards twice because here knowing about computers means you’re a hacker. I learned to keep my mouth shut and become a robot; toxic/fake positivity is everywhere here and if you don’t play along then you’re quickly cast aside.
I spent some time in the midwest and you nailed it exactly. People in the midwest aren’t nice, they’re fake nice.
Sounds like they meant LA was worse
I can believe it a bit. I feel like LA gets influenced quite a lot culturally from Hollywood, and it’s morphed into a lot of fakeness, a competitive atmosphere, and lots of people trying to front being wealthy or coming from money.
I don’t think that’s everyone, but some of my friends that moved to LA struggled with the clicky-ness of the place and another I visited had friends that all were money focused and wanting to flex their wealth or their family’s wealth.
