IN DECEMBER 1944, SIX months into his period of military service in the Caribbean, George Johnstone Brown made his feelings for his wife explicit. Only with her could he find emotional satisfaction and fulfilment. Wartime service represented an interruption to their life together, a necessary, dutiful but irritating interlude before they could resume their married love affair. In this chapter a neglected facet of Scottish men's sense of self is under scrutiny. Emotional openness, vulnerability, affection, devotion, romantic love and desire – these are not qualities commonly identified in the accounts of masculinity in Scotland in the twentieth century, a history populated by the so-called hard men of the shipyards and coalmines, the heavy drinkers, the gang members of city streets and the political heroes, some of whom appear elsewhere in this book. Historians have tended to portray work, and the leisure activities contingent upon that work, as the key to masculine identity despite evidence that romantic love and its expression in the couple relationship was a key characteristic of the modern age. The emotional turn that is shifting historical attention and interpretation away from publicly articulated standards and cultural discourses towards subjectivity is beginning to recast the historical landscape and has the potential to complicate and expand understandings of male identities. By recovering articulations of selfhood and emotion, by bringing ‘subjectivity and emotion back into view’, historians have begun to write an alternative history of men and masculinity that privileges subjectivity and the self.