For years, masculinity was sold as a performance. Be stoic. Be dominant. Be detached. Be desirable. Somewhere along the way, the internet took this prescription, birthed the manosphere and turned this into a lifestyle. Enter looksmaxxing, gym-bro culture, alpha male podcasts, and an endless parade of men teaching you how to optimise everything into oblivion. Every perceived flaw had a solution, and hence masculinity turned into a project.
But in all that performance and optimisation, we forgot about something really important: emotional depth.
We set ourselves back years when we bounced back to equating masculinity with power, nonchalance, and that unique brand of inaccessibility and emotional unavailability. The idea of a man is impossible to read, impossible to reach, and hence desirable.
But that’s not how humans work, do they? The aura-farming nonsense doesn’t translate to real life. If you spend enough time doomscrolling social media, you’ll find that men who are actually liked are not brooding and nonchalant, but exactly the opposite. They’re intelligent, they’re articulate, and they’re emotionally aware. They cry, they talk about love not as an irony or transaction but as something meaningful. And they’re soft without apologising for it.
The men we adore
For the longest time, especially in our society, vulnerability was treated as a character flaw. “Ladke rote nahin,” Boys don’t cry and they sure as hell don’t talk about their feelings. But the audience is now exhausted of this performance. Everybody is busy branding, curating, and marketing themselves. So, genuine vulnerability and intellect have become revolutionary. The moment it appears, people respond immediately.
Take Andrew Garfield, the Amazing Spider-Man. People don’t just adore him because he is handsome or a good actor. Hollywood is filled with those. He is adored because he talks about grief. The way he openly cries when talking about his mother. The way he allows himself to be seen. There is something deeply disarming about a man who is emotionally present and unafraid of it.
Closer to home, look at Rohan Joshi. Beyond the comedy, there is an intelligence and emotional honesty that comes through in his interviews, podcasts, and conversations. His appeal isn’t built on mystery. It’s built on thoughtfulness, on wit, on his genuine passion for all things pop culture. You get a sense you are watching a real person and not someone performing to be one.
Comedy, in fact, has long understood the power of vulnerability. Zakir Khan built an entire generation of fans by talking openly about family, heartbreak, loneliness, and growing up. The audience didn’t see weakness. They saw humanity, something they could relate to.
Even someone as exuberant and larger-than-life as Ranveer Singh has often been most loved in moments of emotional openness. In the wedding film with Deepika Padukone, one of the most memorable things she says about him is, “I love the fact that he cries.” It’s such a simple statement, but it reveals something profound. His vulnerability wasn’t a flaw she overlooked. It was part of what made him lovable.
Because emotional intelligence signals something many women are increasingly looking for: emotional accessibility.
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Refreshing vulnerability
A man who can articulate his feelings is a man you don’t have to decode. There are no walls to scale. No arbitrary emotional puzzles to solve. No waiting for scraps of communication. He can meet you where you are.
Maybe that’s why these men feel refreshing. Most women are practically trained from birth to deal with emotionally unavailable men. Pop culture has spent decades preparing us for the brooding hero who says very little and reveals even less.
Nobody prepares you for the slightly nerdy man who can discuss literature and therapy in the same conversation. The one who can tell you exactly why he’s upset. The one who has thought deeply about himself and the world around him. The one who doesn’t confuse silence with strength.
Those men short-circuit the script. We celebrate them in films. We obsess over them online. We share clips of them speaking thoughtfully. Not because they are perfect, but because they are real. And no, this isn’t performative vulnerability, which social media has plenty of. It’s not about crying on command or packaging sensitivity as a personality trait. People can usually tell the difference.
The appeal lies in sincerity. A genuinely vulnerable and intelligent man is attractive because he offers something increasingly rare: the courage to be known.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)