> never heard people mention stoicism in the same context

I’m not particularly familiar but I understand this “stoicism” is not really the Stoicism one might read about on wikipedia (maybe related but ultimately not congruent). In a practical sense, when people say “more expressive and open” they are necessarily talking about the opposite of this “stoicism”.

This “more expressive and open” is also often expressed as “more emotionally intelligent” and that’s insulting to the emotional intelligence of such “stoics”. It’s very literally “they don’t express themselves correctly” and I can’t imagine someone not being insulted by such a claim of their personality.

Emotional intelligence is about understanding what you are feeling and why, not about how you present your emotional state. It’s what allows someone to realize they’re getting angry because they had unspoken expectations that weren’t met, or because they were experiencing anxiety from unrelated triggers. This kind of understanding prevents someone from blowing up in the first place because they understand the root cause isn’t what our brain wants to jump on in the moment. A more “stoic” person may be that way because they are highly emotionally intelligent and avoid getting overwhelmed. Or, they may be bad at it, and are just bottling it up to explode randomly at inappropriate times. It’s related, but tangential.

I'm not a native speaker so it could be the wrong word. I wasn't aiming for Stoicism, the philosophy. Instead trying to describe the effect where some men seem emotionally indifferent, or present themselves as such.

Okay, that makes a lot more sense.