Dec 03 2023
Being a man in the 21st century and what a man needs in a relationship
Since it is the end of the year 2023 when I’m writing this entry, a year in an age of insane political and social agendas, I unfortunately need to address certain topics around the actual subject first.
An introductory detour
Nature has designed our species to have exactly two genders: Female and Male.
Reports dating back to the Roman Empire, and maybe even before that, speak of an additional but very seldom phenomenon: The Hermaphrodite; a human who physically has both sexes, as in literally being born with both a functional penis and vagina. I’m not a biologist, but I presume this is caused by a very rare event happening during Meiosis – the process during the first two rounds of cell division, when the cells rearrange their DNA inherited from the parent cells and form four daughter cells. (In Gary Jennings’ magnificent novel Raptor the protagonist is a Hermaphrodite – read that book if you can still find a copy.)
But for what I want to talk about about, there are only two biological sexes, and each of us are born into one sex and its respective traits.
I don’t care about the woke agenda or gender politics. There are biological, natural differences between men and women, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. We are not the same by nature, and we shouldn’t even begin to pretend to be the same.
While there are natural differences, I do not for a second believe that one sex is superior or inferior to the other. If anything, I have had plenty of opportunity in my life to witness that in any given crisis, women are generally stronger than men and are not shaken as easily as men. To give just one example that for me spoke volumes: In the morning after the flood had hit the Ahrtal back in 2021, I saw grown men crying in desperation while the women were already working to clean up the mess.
For the record, I also do not believe that one race of the human species is genetically superior or inferior to another. But there are significant differences in our civilizations and cultures, which are both man-made things, to the point that they become completely incompatible with one another and that one civilization might attempt to politically dominate – or even eliminate – another. There are currently two huge wars raging that could both spark World War III exactly because of that.
I firmly believe in equal rights and equal status in society, no matter what sex or race anybody has. Injustices trouble me deeply. (There was a reason why I studied law until circumstances in life forced me to earn my living with work instead of studying.)
I have also learned to respect – and embrace – the differences, may that be gender or cultural differences. While we all ought to share the same rights and status in society, we are not born the same, and in a better world the differences would be what enriches us. But respecting, tolerating and living with those differences is something every human needs to learn – which, as it turns out, is a tough challenge for most people and our cultural backgrounds and upbringing do not make it any easier. As a species, we just have not yet evolved enough, so constant work on ourselves is required.
I know very well that everybody with a woke agenda will still find plenty of reasons to burn me at the stake or stone me to death for what I’ve said so far. That’s why I generally do not engage in discussions with that intolerant lot, because they don’t want to discuss – they only want to force their opinions on everybody else and they want to dictate and control what people are allowed to think and say. There’s nothing liberal about wokeness, it’s just as Ronald Reagan once said: “Should facism ever come to America, it will be in the disguise of liberalism.” Well, Mr President, you were right all along: Fascism has arrived in the disguise of wokeness, political correctness and so-called social justice warriors.
Back on topic
But now I’m going back to the topic I actually wanted to write a few words about: Being a man in this time and age and what men need in their relationships.
Brilliant women like Sarah Dawn Moore, Alison Armstrong, Emily W. King or Courtney Cristine Ryan have very interesting YouTube channels on that topic and as a man, let me tell you this: They absolutely get it. They get us men. So maybe you’re better off watching their content instead of reading the next few paragraphs. Courtney Ryan’s channel is better suited for understanding and giving advice to younger males under the age of, let’s say, 30 or 35. Sarah Dawn Moore’s content is more relevant for the ages beyond 35. Since I’m a member of Generation X and over 50, I can say with certainty that Sarah Dawn Moore really gets us middle-aged creatures – kudos to her.
Men are simple creatures. It doesn’t take much to make us happy – or unhappy. But just like cats and dogs have a very hard time communicating with each other because of opposing body language, men and women also fail to communicate with each other on a very basic level.
In relationships, these are the things that men absolutely require:
- RESPECT. We feed off respect, as much as women need to be told that we love them, men need to feel and be treated with respect. If the women in our relationships no longer make us feel respected or if they regard and treat us like children or “one more thing they need to take care of and look after”, they will lose us. (This ties directly into the point VALIDATION AND AFFIRMATION below.) We will first become miserable and then withdraw from our partners – and then just watch the whole thing die without putting up a fight, because it isn’t worth it anymore for us.
- INTIMACY. We need to be intimate with our women. It’s not just about sex or having orgasms. If anything, good men want the woman to have the orgasm (first), because this will make them feel masculine and it will validate their manhood. But there is one important thing in this context where I’m afraid that I cannot speak for all men, because this might just be me, so I use the first person for this next sentence: When a woman causes so much “gravitational pull” – attraction – that I seriously want to court her and regard her as a potential partner and mate, as contradictionary as this might sound in this context, I could not ever objectify or sexualize her; she’s too important and precious for me. Most men’s desire for intimacy is not as simple as most women might believe and it certainly is nothing like pornographic material depicts it. Being intimate with a woman is our way of staying connected to our partners. It is also our way of feeling validated in our relationships. It is how we communicate with our mates. It is what enables us to stay faithful and loyal. Withdrawing intimacy from us is the safest and fastest way to kill a relationship and lose us.
- VALIDATION AND AFFIRMATION. We need to always know that we are your exclusive number one, that there is no other, that we are good providers for you and that you feel safe with us and trust us. When it comes to our role as providers, the male psyche is wired in a way that criticism and nagging will drive us away, it won’t motivate us at all to improve. Tell us we suck at supporting you in the household, and we will just drift away from you further. Instead of criticizing us, just nicely tell us what you need and want us to do and we will do it. Give us positive affirmation, and we will go out there and conquer the universe for you. This is what we do, this is what we are. We want to provide for you. We want to be your hero. But we certainly do not want to be your doormat or listen to your wailing and moaning how bad we are as husbands and housekeepers.
As far as males are concerned, I learned over the years that I am much more empathetic than most other men that I have met. I will not be able to tell you what clothes people were wearing when I was in a room with them, but I can tell you about their feelings at the time. I sense the emotions in a room. Which is a curse, because I also feel and experience those “third party” emotions myself and this has become one of the reasons why I tend to separate myself from a crowd of people very quickly – or I go and get a strong drink to numb that emotional perception; only with alcohol can I bear large social events.
But being empathetic does not mean that I can read minds. And that closes the circle to this specific point that I share with all other men: We generally suck at guessing what our partners want. We also suck at picking up on signals or female body language. We need to be told in clear human language what you need and want from us. Only when we know we can give it to you. And we will move heaven and earth to give our partners, our mates, what they desire. Because that validates us as men. Giving a woman what she asks from us satisfies our own needs, it makes us feel good about ourselves and successful as men.
A few examples that look simple enough on the outside, but can have the potential to ruin any relationship:
If you want flowers and we haven’t given you any in a while, it won’t hurt you to drop us a comprehensible hint. We don’t do things like this intentionally. We love courting our women, but once we’ve settled, our focus drifts to the bigger war that we’re waging outside of our homes. But when we then bring you flowers after you have given us the hint, don’t complain that you needed to tell us about it and that those flowers are now worthless to you because you had to ask for them. This makes us feel disrespected and rejected, and we will withdraw and never get you flowers again.
When we took the initivate to do some work on the house or its decoration, don’t immediately go and re-do it or re-decorate because it didn’t live up to your standards or taste. You do this once, and we will forever be discouraged and not ever do it willingly again. This, too, will make us feel rejected and disrespected and we will withdraw.
If we don’t do our own laundry, don’t do it for us and at the same time complain loudly that you feel like you have another child in the house that you need to take care of. This clearly means that you have lost any respect for your man, and to a certain degree also for yourself. When women enter that stage and tell their men things like this, they usually also stop being intimate with their men – and that will with absolute certainty bring about a slow and painful death of the relationship.
Without intimacy, men will not further invest themselves in a relationship with a woman, no matter how much they are still attracted to her or in love with her. From here on, it will only go downwards and the relationship will end in separation and divorce. Once a woman told her man that he is just something else she needs to take care of, he will never recover from that. He does not even want to get back from there. He will just wait for it to end and in the meantime dream of finding a new life somehwere else, with someone else who sees and treats him as a man.
If we don’t take out the trash, because we might have been overloaded with the demands of our daytime jobs and come home mentally depleted, don’t complain and critize, just drop us a friendly hint that you would feel better supported if we could take that burden off of you – and we will happily do it on top of the other war that we’re fighting outside of our homes.
Men don’t publicly speak about this anymore, but we cannot defeat instincts that are thousands of years old. Women ought to understand that this is how we really see the world and that going to work fundamentally translates to this for most men: War.
In modern Japanese culture, there is a phrase that Business is War. In our minds, hearts and souls, we men go to battle every single day. Which is something we won’t complain about, because deep down, even in the 21st century, men know and feel that they were born to hunt, fight and provide and we don’t question that. In fact, despite the burden that it is, we love it. We might grow weary of battle with age, but in an ideal, intact, traditional world we will then hopefully be able to advice and support our sons in their battles while we look after our grand children and pass our gained wisdom on to the next generations.
We need our women to look deeply into our eyes and give us their heart-melting smiles when we come back home, and then we know that everything we did on that day was worth it. And we will happily get back into the fight the next day, because you will be waiting for us when we get home and make it all worthwhile.
I told you we are simple. And it really doesn’t take much to make and keep us happy.
I keep hearing and reading about so-called toxic masculinity. I still don’t know what that even is, and I also cannot say that I ever met a man in the real world who would even remotely qualify as having toxic masulinity. Yes, I’ve met braggers, big mouthes, roughnecks, men who love to pick fights in a bar and I have also met men that were generally very insecure and who tried to hide their insecurity behind extremely stupid things that came out of their mouthes or stupid things they did in miserable attempts to show off what they believed is masculine, what they falsely believed would make women and other men respect them.
Masculinity, in general, isn’t toxic. We do things to be respected and validated and to earn the privilege to be intimate with our women. Again, we’re simple. We don’t dance around the bush and hide behind secret signals or signs – we’re direct and we only understand direct communication, but get conditioned to read between the lines, interprete weird behavioural code and to engage in strange social rituals and we completely suck at that and usually fail, which then makes us appear awkward in modern society.
Men were not made for this artificially complicated code of conduct. We still just want to grab a battle axe and smash our competitor’s brains in so we can take our princess home. Then we want to roam through the early day’s mist and hunt to feed the family that we started with her while she keeps the children safe and the home welcoming. This is our true nature, and it just hasn’t caught up with all the artificially made-up first world problems. There really is nothing complicated about our main urges and drives.
At the same time, yes, maybe it is true that there is no easy or simple man or woman. But this then has to do with our personalities and characters and larger ambitions and interests, not with our basic drives that I am talking about.
It is true that many men feel insecure around strong, intelligent, independent women in leadership roles. Especially when these women also happen to be physically attractive and beautiful. I do not have that problem per se – only women that I am really attracted to can still make me nervous, and that only when I’m single, because being single means that I’m “on the prowl“, as my Irish friend would say. Maybe this is because I did not have a male role model dominating my world as a child, but was mostly raised by women alone, so I’m very used to that specific kind of female energy. But unfortunately, being raised almost exclusively by women has many negative side-effects on a man. Men badly need a father when they grow up, for reasons I will explain in a bit.
It seems to be a cultural consensus that men should not show their emotions in public. I do not believe in this. The metal band Accept have written a nice line of lyrics about this for their album Russian Roulette that has always resonated with me: “Are you man enough to cry?”
But unfortunately, most men have extreme difficulties showing and sharing their emotions, and unfortunately for very good reasons.
There is a very specific loneliness that all men feel throughout their lives. Frank Sinatra has frequently spoken about these lonely moments, especially in the morning, when men feel this very specific loneliness. He even wrote a song called A Man Alone about this basic truth about men.
The main job of any father is to prepare his son for this specific loneliness that all males experience and what it means to be a man in this world. It is the single most important thing a father must do for his son. Like many other men of Generation X, however, I grew up without my actual father, so I never received that essential preparation for what was to come. I had a grandfather who was wonderful to me, but when he and I actually bonded deeply enough, I was already too old for those lessons and he couldn’t give them to me anymore. I fully lived through my Sturm und Drang phase during my puberty and adolescence and got my heart broken very badly. Also, the relationship between my grandfather and I was not based upon words or talking – we communicated mostly without exchanging words, which was a wonderful, great thing in its own right. I deeply loved my grandfather and when I was 28 years old, it shattered my world when I was holding his hand while he took his very last breath. The year before that I had to organize the funeral of my biological father, who had only reached the age of 56. I barely knew the man and only had very few early childhood memories of him, but when I saw his body in the cooling drawer in the hospital and gently touched his chest, it deeply hit something in me and changed me.
We men might share parts of what we feel deep down with our very best and closest male friend. (Yes, usually singular.) Unfortunately, all men will make destructive experiences when it comes to sharing our true feelings with our female partners. Only very few women that we meet in our lives understand us. And even fewer will not at some point use it against us. We get conditioned to omit parts of our actual truth when we’re talking about it, to protect ourselves. Of course, this doesn’t make it easier for our partners and mates to reach and understand us.
I think the simple message to women is this: Don’t worry about your man’s specific loneliness or him not telling you everything that moves him – it’s part of being a man. Men want to provide for their mates and families. Give us your smile, respect, intimacy and validation and affirmation – and tell us in friendly, clear words what it is that you need and want from us and we will walk on our bare feet through hell to give it to you.
Comments Off on Being a man in the 21st century and what a man needs in a relationship