Wit & Attitude Quote by Barbara de Angelis

De Angelis aims her critique at the system, not the individual man, and that’s the rhetorical sugar that helps the medicine go down. By insisting men “aren’t the way they are because they want to drive women crazy,” she preemptively disarms the most common defensive move: the idea that relationship criticism is an accusation of malice. The pivot is strategic. It reframes emotional distance as inheritance, not conspiracy.

The real charge lands in the word “trained.” It suggests masculinity as a curriculum: rewards for stoicism, penalties for tenderness, applause for control. “Thousands of years” isn’t meant as a tidy historical claim so much as a cultural time-lapse, collapsing tradition, religion, economics, and family modeling into a single force that feels immovable. That scale matters because it explains why intimacy isn’t just a personal choice; it’s an act of unlearning.

Subtextually, the quote offers both an explanation and an ultimatum. If men have been trained out of intimacy, then partners can stop treating emotional unavailability as a private flaw and start seeing it as a pattern with predictable scripts: deflection, problem-solving as a substitute for listening, vulnerability performed only when it’s safe. The line also gently shifts responsibility: women aren’t asked to “fix” men, but men are asked to confront the training.

This sits squarely in late-20th-century self-help and relationship discourse, when therapy language went mainstream and gender roles were being renegotiated in public. It works because it gives frustrated partners a map and gives men a way to change without first swallowing shame.