When will this end?

Myths get started sometimes, and they seem so true that they stay around.  Popular notions, usually unsubstantiated, are very hard to change because of the sheer number of people that perceive it as truth.  One such notion is that men don't talk to their spouses (surveys of women's remarks saying husbands were uncommunicative) because they can't express their feelings very well.

I believe some of the fodder for such a notion came from the psychology sector.  In the 1980s and 1990s, some psychologists, particularly "Christian" psychologists, made an attempt to "fix" marriages according to the model of communication through expression of personal feelings.  The research behind this model turns out to be flawed because the studies were almost all qualitative in nature and many were designed to yield the evidence to support the model.  Subsequent linguistic studies, more quantitative in nature, produced different results presenting a much more complex picture of cross-sex communication.

In the 2000s, the idea of mapping communication ties (in fact, mapping of many ideas such as Facebook connections to track advertising in order to personalize it and mapping the effects of nerve trigger points to detect warning signs for various diseases) showed that communication is affected by a host of influences not merely by personal feelings.  It also showed that a person's method of expression is not influenced soley by sex, but by influences of region, teen networks while growing up, behavioral modification trends during childhood, and many, many other forces.

So, in the movie Aloha, when one of the supporting male characters had trouble in his marriage due to non-communication with his spouse, I was non-plussed to say the least.  It definitely showed how stereotypes are built on unsubstantiated, antiquated ideas and popular notions leading to years and years of erroneous thinking before discarding them.  The general plot of the movie was entertaining, but ignoring the terrible weakness of one of the characters dampened the enjoyment of good entertainment.

The movie trailer at 1:14-1:28 shows one of the 4 episodes in which the minor character is uncommunicative.  I get it. The character is an exaggeration (for humor's sake) of the type of man that doesn't communicate with anyone much less his wife.  The bad thing is that the movie is a reflection of a society that tries to denigrate men's ability to express themselves adequately in intimate relationships by perpetuating the misguided notion that expression of personal feelings with one's partner is the only, or at least the principal, currency of good, sustainable marriages.  That's simply not true.  The world of cross-sex communication will be better off as soon as this ill-founded whim dies.