The Heart of a Man
“Be a Man”, “Don’t be a pussy”, “Man Up”, these are words we heard as boys growing up in the 80’s. Interestingly there was one major omission - the actual definition of what it meant to be a Man.
No one ever told me it would be unacceptable to cry or express and talk to my emotions, to talk of my emotions with other Men, to ask my Mates for support in matters of the heart. We just learned it, we just learned it wasn't the done thing and that it was somehow more acceptable to suffer in silence, to close down and remain alone with our feelings.
The other thing is that no one ever told me that the more I “Manned up” the harder it was to truly connect with and express my emotions.
Having looked at a number of scientific studies, It turns out us Men are indeed human and have no lesser capacity for emotion than women, but yet limited tools on knowing how to express it, talk to it, feel it, share it safely with another man or woman without judgment or the fear of it. God knows, most of my generation didn't have fathers that showed us how.
Men not only feel all of these emotions, but because of society's constructs of what it means to be a Man, Mens emotions get trapped, stuck inside their hearts, hearts very often full up with unresolved pain and regret. The result, anger, atop of a deeply buried pain, anger as an expression of hurt, an expression that further distances man from what he truly needs. This layer of anger needs to go, so that man can reach into his heart and its lovingly pure articulations that too seldom see the light of day.
For the few Men that are drawn to expressing our feelings, we can sometimes exclusively share these with women, something women complain about as being “draining”. Draining because we trust few with these feelings and generally try and do all of our expressing with one person, one woman, generally our partners. In this instance women also feel that it is overwhelming because an emotional man is a rare expression they are not used to. This rather clumsy, “Man Shaming” fuelled complaint was featured in Harpers Bazaar in May 2019 in an article titled: Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden, believe it or not claiming to be concerned about men and their need to access therapy. I think my point is made here.
I will agree that this can be a legitimate complaint, no one woman or person can hold all of the emotions of another, it's a big gig. I would also say that women find this even more difficult because they are in the emotional corners of so many, a concept men struggle to contemplate. It’s interesting however, that the forever desired emotional man doesn’t appear to get the fan fair you might expect from the women who have also said they always wanted a man like that.
For the rest of the men, their women don't get to see the expression of heart as they are closed off and alone in their emotion, a huge barrier in connection. This is more loudly pronounced when man is in the midst of struggle, something so many men face right now because of this pandemic.
The isolation of man and his heart is a raging issue, one that is statistically frightening, the degree to which man is truly lost in his purpose, and is increasingly losing his will to go on, to live. This is something that MUST be resolved by all of society, by both men and women.
Women & Men alike, have a critical role to play here to help us start to find a path back to our hearts and the starting is so very important.
We are lost, we struggle to understand the expectations of Man, and we in many cases feel so desperately alone with the responsibilities we are drawn to, to provide, to protect and to serve and the ones that are demanded of us in the ever changing mix of expectations we continue to fail to understand to any great degree of comprehension. Made even harder because we don't talk too much about it.
The age old cries of men past, my father and his father, resignations that women are too hard to understand, and that we will never figure them out, that we are better off holding a can of beer and shaking our heads has set my generation up so poorly for the appropriate rise of women’s identification and respect and now unfortunately an often misplaced aggression and assertion. Now we find ourselves in a society with so many women that are expert proponents of misguided masculinity themselves. Further exacerbating the lostness of men.
My generation, we watched our mothers battle for equality in a world of misogyny that none of us understood and importantly, none of us agreed to. Yet in my career, I have had many conversations with females that worked for me that went something like this “Jen, I am not your father, I am not even my father, so why don't you get out of my grill and know that you will be judged here only for the work. You want to throw that anger about, I get it, but call your fucking dad and keep that shit pointed at its source”
Don't misunderstand me, Sexism is lived, alive and passed on through generations and my generation has had to actively work on omitting the misogyny of our fathers under a barrage and sometimes a shit storm of emasculation and misplaced aggression.
And thus we are lost, in great numbers, we are lost.
At our best we are drawn to chivalry and protection, at our worst we are drawn to keeping people at distance and being disrespectful, all in the poorly expressed hope that at distance we can avoid hurt. Man has a heart, and it is abundant, and yet it is too often alone, poorly expressed and misunderstood.
As Eric Fromm states in his thought provoking book “The Heart of a Man” for which the title of this piece is an expression of respect;
“Man's heart can harden; it can become inhuman, yet never nonhuman. It always remains a man's heart. We are all determined by the fact that we have been born human, and hence the never ending task of having to make choices. We must not rely on anyone's saving us, but be very aware of the fact that wrong choices make us incapable of saving ourselves.”
This book was first written in 1964, and it clearly should have been heard by the beer swilling, objectifying, misogynistic men that followed. But alas, here we are.
I write this piece as a call for Men. I can tell you that Men want to talk and need help in learning how to. They need patience and love, not eye rolling and judgement. They want connection, desperately, without the tools or capabilities of knowing where to start.
For me it's taken 5 years of therapy to feel incredibly comfortable expressing my heart to both men and women. I want to remind you though, that the man who went to therapy those years ago, was very broken and had already had contemplations of leaving this life some years earlier.
So I ask, let's not let any more men get to that point, let's not let the pain in men get that loud, because not all of us choose to live and tackle the pain head on, and too many of us choose to opt out, more and more every year.
Men can no longer feel shame for feeling vulnerable or weak, men can no longer feel ashamed for wanting to be held and heard and every single one of us in society has a responsibility to help men in this realisation.
The heart of a man, in its natural expression is profound, it's important and it's necessary it finds its freedom. To get here, many men need help, from their mates, from their partners and their families, to lose the layers of misguided choice and stand true as the beautiful human beings they are capable of being, for everyone's sake, particularly their own, but they can not any longer be left alone with such struggle.
Get around them, its well past time that we all support Men to “Soften the Fuck Up” and speak of and with their hearts and for you blokes out there, its time to hear your mates, without bullshit expressions of “you’ll be right mate”, “chin up bud”, because these shut a man down from the opportunity to be necessarily heard.
Much Love,
Scott
