That's Men For You/ Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health: How many marriages have broken up because men and women grieve differently?
The following is a generalisation but it's true often enough to be worth stating: women grieve on the outside and men grieve on the inside.
While the woman cries, the man remains silent or does his crying out of her sight. Is this why marriages are at a heightened risk of breaking up after the death of a child?
The death of a child is every parent's nightmare. Other people assume that this unspeakable event will draw the couple so closely together that nothing could part them.
The evidence, however, is that such a death can bring serious stresses to the relationship between the parents. Those of us who have never experienced it can hardly imagine the pain of a marriage break-up in such circumstances. Yet it happens.
Because the man grieves silently and appears to be going about his day and his work as usual, he may seem to the woman to have got over the loss very quickly and to be unsympathetic to her suffering.
Similarly, the man may be unsure as to what to do or say when the woman is grieving so openly. He may feel that saying nothing is the best way to help her.
She may feel abandoned. He may feel unable to share his grief for fear that doing so will make matters worse for her.
The potential for a prolonged communications breakdown and for misunderstandings is obvious. Fortunately, the death of a child is still a relatively rare event.
Far more common are miscarriages and it seems to me that these too have the potential to drive a couple apart because of different styles of grieving.
Here too the woman is likely to grieve more openly than the man. To her, he may appear to have gone off to work after a day or two as if nothing has happened. Not only does he grieve on the inside but he may not know what to say to her about this event.
Matters can be made worse by a lack of support from family and friends. The experience of women who have spoken to me about this issue is that family and friends expect them to get over a miscarriage fairly quickly and to get on with their lives. This deprives the couple of an outlet for their feelings of grief.
A somewhat similar problem can arise following the death of a child or of any family member. Family and friends, unsure of what to say and not wanting to say the wrong thing, may avoid the grieving couple. It isn't that they actually make a decision to avoid them. It's just that whenever the idea of speaking to the couple or visiting them occurs, they put it off until tomorrow and tomorrow never comes. Even people who had been quite friendly with the couple may stop seeing them.
This throws the couple back on their own resources and, if these resources are strained, the results can be quite serious.
Part of the answer is for couples to realise that their grieving styles are different and to accept this fact. Women need to be aware that the absence of open grieving does not mean that men get over these things any more quickly than women. Men need to take the trouble to let women know now and then that they are grieving.
Each needs to support the other in their differing styles of grieving. Both need to realise that stresses in the marriage can be worsened by grief and to make allowances for this.
Family and friends can help by realising that the couple will need expressions of interest and sympathy for a very long time after the death. We sometimes seem to think that the pain is at its height around the time of the funeral and gradually lessens after that. Very often, however, the pain worsens after the mourners have gone away and the couple will need at least as much sympathy and support as before.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.