Women do not select for emotional men. They select for status, wealth, attractiveness. Only when those qualities are met FIRST, perhaps you may also share some feelings here and there, but do keep that shit in check.
The above sounds brutal and primitive, but every social study and dating research confirms it. And it makes perfect sense as it 100% aligns with biological incentives, as much as we want to deny those.
Men shouldn't be in touch with their emotions to attract women - they should be in touch with their emotions for their own well being.
The idea you're expressing is called hypergamy, and it's more of a caricature of human courtship than anything. There are women who are attracted to status and women who are looking for someone with emotional sophistication and there are millions of other things they might look for. They aren't robots; they don't behave in unison.
The other idea you're touching on is evolutionary psychology, the idea that human behavior stems from certain knowable evolutionary pressures. This makes sense at first glance but it ends up being a way for people to dehumanize others and use scientific language to justify the belief that a certain group of people are robots operating under a known ruleset. It's a rationalization of prejudice.
Evolutionary pressures are so vague and difficult to know, and sexual selection in particular, that you can justify anything with this framework. Try this on for size; "women disproportionately bear the cost of childbirth, so they're incentivized to select for partners with a high degree of emotional maturity, because these partners are more likely to attend to their needs during pregnancy, withstand the often traumatic stress of parenting an infant, and to be caring parents who will pass on these high-value traits to their male offspring." Is that any less sound an argument than that they select for high social status, or physical strength, or what have you?
I'd really encourage you to look into criticisms of these ideas. Unfortunately I don't have a lot to offer as far as places you may start, I've routed through my browser history and turned up a couple things that might interest you:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-...
(Non-paywall: http://web.archive.org/web/20230115075145/http://www.nytimes...)
"Men shouldn't be in touch with their emotions to attract women - they should be in touch with their emotions for their own well being."
And the point of this discussion, what started it, is that they can't. Those feelings are ignored, dismissed and ridiculed.
I think it would be worth considering that the ideas you were describing are axiomatic in incel ideology. If you dug through some Andrew Tate videos, you wouldn't have any trouble finding him make the same case as you've made. The crossroads here is, once one observes these critiques of masculinity - do you accept them fatalistically, attributing them to some indelible aspect of biology (this is the Peterson route), or do you seek to change it? Do you place the blame on women (the incel route), or do you observe that there is a power structure (the patriarchy) that is simultaneously oppressing and privileging both men and women in different ways, so that they both enforce the rules of the patriarchy on one another?
There is a problem here, absolutely, we're on the same page there. But it doesn't stem from biology, it is a set of social constructs and expectations; artifices created by humans and which can be abolished by humans, no more immutable than the concept of the divine right of kings.
The relationship that one has with oneself shouldn’t be dependent on others ‘ignoring/dismissing/ridiculing’ them. Then it is a relationship they have with the outside world.
I didn't realize this until recently. Rude awakening. Even the most close relationships turn out to be quite transactional.
It's not as transactional as to be loveless. It's conditional love.
So here when men are judged by utility, it is essentially competition between the males of the species themselves.
It isn’t dissimilar to ape societies or lions. The alpha wars are happening due to testosterone. There is most certainly an evolutionary and biological reasoning for this.
This has nothing to do with women. Please leave us out of this.
Although every man's circles are different, your experience is highly common. I'm going to intentionally dramatize a little to get the point across efficiently.
Men effectively live in an emotional desert. Showing emotion, vulnerability or dependency is discouraged, dismissed or even ridiculed. Men lack a support system. They're often the last buck and there's nothing or nobody to back them up.
This is why to many men, their relation with their mother is holy. It's often the only source of genuine unconditional love and a safe place to be vulnerable. Of course, you can't even have that, this too is to be ridiculed, hence the many "your mum" jokes.
When men get sick, they're ridiculed for being such a baby. Here too a rare sign of vulnerability expressed is to be laughed at.
Men are judged by utility. Society doesn't care about men's needs or problems. They are willingly sacrificed in war, work, homeless on the streets, and in suicide without this even being a topic of mainstream interest.
The handful of reasonable feminists spotting how this complete indifference is a problem are shouted down by their radical counterparts, that have seized the movement. Not only is there no mainstream culture to care about men, it's openly hostile to men in general.
If I were to post my little lecture on a social network, I'd be piled on with: "oh you poor man, you have it sooooo bad lmao!!!"
Anyway, I know none of this helps, but I just wanted to share that your experience in many ways is the experience of many if not most men. And I think you analyzed the situation very well with the "deer in the headlights" remark.