Negotiating Heartbreak: Everyday Emotional Practices and the Fragility of Masculinity Among Young Indonesian Men

Heartbreak is commonly understood as an intensely personal emotional experience, yet little is known about how men negotiate romantic loss through everyday social practices. Drawing on narrative interviews with young Indonesian men, this article examines how heartbreak is socially organized through emotional restraint, moral expectations, and relational practices. Rather than expressing sadness openly, participants managed vulnerability through silence, selective disclosure, humor, late-night companionship, and shared engagement with melancholic music. These practices enabled emotional support while preserving masculine respectability. The findings argue that heartbreak is not simply an emotional event but a social process through which masculinity is continually negotiated. By shifting attention from emotion as an internal state to emotion as a socially organized practice, this article contributes to scholarship on men and masculinities by showing that the fragility of masculinity lies in the continuous social labor required to regulate emotional visibility.