I've never really understood why people imagine there's only a one-way flow from "culture" to "individual" whereas it is obvious that because people make culture, there must therefore be a two-way flow. In other words, humans shape culture just as much as (and in fact much more than) culture shapes people. Once we grasp this basic concept, we can then see whether we can begin to make sense of certain recurrent tropes - especially in areas where evolutionary psychology may eventually shed some light (at least, if it ever emerges from its stunted academic dead-end).

In my experience, both personal and thanks to the experiences of others, I've come to a few conclusions regarding behaviors that manifest across different cultures and across different times. One conclusion I've drawn is that men stay silent because there's a cost to exposing oneself. While a woman may imagine she wants to learn about the man's emotional state in order to provide some benevolent assistance, the reality seems to be quite different. During nearly all of our evolutionary history, women were dependent on men to a far greater degree than we can imagine today. Thus, the condition of their male partner was critical to their own survival. Judging when to stay, and when to leave, was essential to the woman's prospects of passing on her DNA. Thus seeking information about a man's internal state is simply part of the process of evaluation. Should a man be unwise enough to open up, and things are bad, this information may result in his female partner leaving the relationship sooner than would have otherwise been the case, thus intensifying his present vulnerability. Silence, therefore, is very often a survival instinct. Our modern and rather foolish political correctness prefers to look away from fundamental hardwired behaviors, but only when we are willing to look at all relevant data and form testable hypotheses does knowledge truly expand.