Feelings Without Emotion: Rethinking Male Friendship and the Value of Personal Reticence

In various Euro‐American contexts, commentators have highlighted how emotional reticence inhibits men's ability to understand themselves and connect with others. More generally, public discourses of affective expressivity often present curtailed emotion as a form of “repression.” Through an ethnographic account of male railway enthusiasts, this paper explores the nature of friendships that are explicitly marked by the absence of personal disclosure. Building on anthropological literatures on friendship and affect, I highlight forms of connection that emerge in the absence of talk of this kind, and the feelings that are shared, even when unmarked by words. Accounts of unarticulated intimacy, in Western contexts and beyond, have largely treated this as an incidental or unmarked quality of relations that work in alternative registers, for instance, through shared tasks and banter. By contrast, through showing how emotional reticence emerges as an actively engendered ideology in explicit opposition to the norms of affective expressivity, I foreground the specific forms of intimacy and care that emerge through this awareness. My argument is not simply that feelings arise in the absence of explicated emotion, but that these sentiments are actively shaped by this awareness of absence.