Article
Why are Men Like This?
Men learn from an early age NOT to feel.
It starts at six years old or sooner. Don’t cry. Don’t complain. Downplay
any feelings of pain. Play even when you’re hurt. Never show you’re scared.
Ignore the messages your body is telling you short of needing to go to the hospital!
So when a woman asks her husband to
pay attention to the relatively small and subtle feelings she’s feeling that
are signaling to her that their relationship is in trouble – and, worse yet,
insists that he pay attention to and express his own small, subtle, heartfelt
feelings – no wonder he goes nuts.
We got it at the movies.
John Wayne, James Bond, Clint Eastwood, Rambo. “Real” men are cool, tough,
independent and unfettered. Single-handedly killing 250 bad guys, or being a
multi-million-dollar football player, is the role model our culture gives boys
for how to be a man. Being a loving father and community member isn’t.
We get it at work.
It’s a very lucky man, working in a very unusual field or company, who manages
to climb the career ladder without being pressured to ignore his own inner voices.
Men get rewarded for being cool,
competent, thinking linearly and strategically, and working overtime to
“win.” Of
course, there are often a lot of very satisfying, fulfilling and useful
things about this.
But along with the good things, men
learn that success comes from “playing the game” – a game whose rules
include, “Don’t speak your mind,” “Don’t be honest,” “Don’t let
your (ugh) feelings get in the way,” “Suck up to the boss” and “Tell
people what they want to hear.”
"Playing the game," especially
this game, is the very opposite of being genuine. And being genuine is the most important skill for being in a
relationship.
Women get many of these same
pressures at work too, of course. But
since women’s identities and self-esteem are usually not as bound up in their
work as men’s are, they have less on the line. They’re more capable of filtering out the craziness and switching roles
when they get home. All their lives
they’ve been trained to be more than just workers. But men haven’t been.
Daddy’s from Mars, Mommy’s from Venus.
Often, some truly wonderful partnerships begin to go awry only after the children
start arriving. Our society makes it enormously difficult for people to arrange
their work commitments in a way that allows them to be equally breadwinners
and caregivers. So instead, one partner (usually the man) takes the role of
primary breadwinner, stepping up his work commitment, while the other (usually
the women) becomes the primary caregiver, either quitting work altogether for
a number of years or else working at a less demanding job that leaves her more
energy and flexible time for the family. Soon, Mom and Dad are living on separate
planets, made worse by the sheer noise – and distraction-level created by children.
They get caught up in playing the roles of Mommy and Daddy and literally lose
touch with each other.
The situation is even worse if a man hasn’t found his true vocation before his
children come along. Then he can feel utterly trapped by the responsibility of
his role, and drained by the soul-destroying quality of his worklife. He becomes
jealous of what he perceives is his wife’s “freedom,” being home all day with
the kids. Not surprisingly, his wife, who has just spent her entire day with a
couple of preschoolers, furiously resents this. The last thing she wants to hear
at the end of her exhausting day is how miserable her husband is at work. She
definitely doesn’t want him upsetting the fragile economic applecart that maintains
their home and family. His pain becomes forbidden territory. Soon their marriage
is in trouble.
We don’t lose our hearts all at once.
They leak out over time. Often men get so rewarded at work they have no idea
that in other ways they’ve gone dry. They don’t have the skills to pay attention
to what’s going on in their hearts, and they’ve learned that doing so would
somehow be unmanly. So little by little, simply in the process of coping with
the normal stresses of careers and families, men disconnect more and more from
what’s going on inside them. Gone are their youthful ambitions, dreams and passions.
Even as they get what they’ve been working so hard for, they don’t really enjoy
it that much. Life becomes duller and flatter.
Why don’t men care? That’s the way it seems to women, when it comes
to how men act about their marriages. After all, marriages are like houses.
Even the ones with the strongest foundations need regular maintenance. But,
strangely enough, men who wouldn’t dream of ignoring a leaky faucet, clogged
down spouts or a weedy lawn will ignore the signs of a frayed or “leaky” relationship
until the roof is about to cave in.
It’s
not because men don’t care, it’s because they don’t know what to do. What they think will work is often the wrong thing. So, often they give up.
Most men want more than practically
anything in the world for their wives to be happy. So much so that many, if not most, men, when their wives criticize them,
go a little bit crazy, becoming either extremely defensive or withdrawing.
Their wives, faced with
defensiveness and withdrawal, become even more miserable and demanding, causing
the men to defend or withdraw even more. It’s
a vicious circle.
Just as men have learned to ignore
and disconnect from what’s going on inside them, in the same way they ignore
all the little events – the fights, misunderstandings, little lies or
cruelties – that make couples disconnect from one another – especially wives
from their husbands. And their
marriages become duller, flatter, less alive.
The good news is, men don’t have to stay this way!
In your 30s, 40s, 50s and older (or sometimes younger) you can look all that
old programming in the face and challenge it. Is it really smart and manly to
act independent and unfettered – or is it smarter to connect? Do you
really want to spend the rest of your life following just your head – or do
you want to have more of your heart? Do you want your home life to be
a war zone or a “demilitarize” zone – or do you want to make exuberant love?
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