Love, Masculinity, and Reflection
Some reflections on my inner work past trauma and how this relates to our political reality.
Doing the work of peeling back our thoughts, beliefs, and experiences is painful.
It is painful in a society that tells you to suppress your emotions, be detached, and that the only appropriate response to conflict is domination. As a man, I always received these messages that told me to feel less and control more.
These messages came from family, friends, and the overall culture. I honestly didn’t comprehend the unconscious beliefs I had shaped from these experiences. These beliefs told me that I needed to be afraid of connection, that I needed to control instead of understanding, and that I needed to avoid feeling instead of embracing it.
I realize these beliefs, while unhealthy, were there to protect me from what I saw and went through. It feels isolating not being able to connect or even feeling like you cannot connect to someone.
These fears culminated when I started my first real romantic relationship. I didn’t have healthy scripts for navigating romance. So, I went to what other men in my position typically go to: social media and my friends.
My friends would tell me to get dating advice from social media influencers, pages, and videos. Dating advice for men on social media is mostly terrible. What gets the clicks and views is the ‘red pill’, ‘alpha male’, and ‘rizz’ nonsense.
This type of content teaches men…
Detach first to avoid rejection.
Manipulation is relationship success.
Avoid giving too much to avoid being used.
See women as games and conquest rather than people.
It’s a way to protect men from feeling in anticipation of being hurt. It reinforces the stereotypes and power plays in our world without challenging them. However, it offers certainty and guidance in the complex world of human relationships. Manipulation makes sense when you’re a person who has only known manipulation and only known dysfunction.
So, I fell for many of these ‘techniques’ and ‘tactics’ by deploying them in my relationship. When these tactics failed and my relationship fell apart, I felt riddled with guilt.
Could I have done something different?
How was I showing up in my relationship?
What unhealthy patterns was I repeating?
Grief kicked in, depression made itself at home, and anxiety announced itself. The next few years, I spent blaming myself, blaming her, blaming women, and blaming the world. I then realized, with the help of my therapist at the time, that I needed to stop blaming and start healing.
I needed to let go of the guilt and pain I had from my last relationship. The mistakes were already made, so I had to accept the past and move forward. My response of withdrawal and avoidance made sense given my history, but it didn’t help me.
I still felt alone, I still felt stuck, and I still felt lost. Rather than avoiding the problem and the accompanying emotions, I decided to face them head-on. I am still a work in progress, like anyone else, but I am learning to work past my grief. This work has led me to be more compassionate, empathetic, and patient with others and myself.
Why am I mentioning grief, loss, and pain?
These are everyday experiences and emotions that everyone feels at some point, often triggered by something. Men go through these things too. This is where there is so much talk about a ‘male loneliness epidemic’ and men’s mental health.
However, these conversations concerning men’s mental health rarely cover the systemic reasons behind the outcome. Individuals, on and off social media, will readily use the concept of ‘men’s mental health’ to disparage women, marginalized communities, or whatever scapegoat is in fashion at that time.
No one ever asks why we have fewer close friends, fewer connections, and feel increasingly isolated from one another.
Does this relate to the fact that millions of Americans hold multiple jobs?
Does this relate to overall worsening mental health under capitalism?
Does this relate to economic and political instability?
Or is it a combination of this, along with other factors?
It is often that we are encouraged to blame groups of people different than us rather than the society that creates these conditions.
Men will have issues related to their lives. They will go through financial stress, lack of housing, lack of healthcare, dysfunctional family patterns, mental health struggles, etc. Sometimes the easiest way to deal with this reality is to escape into someone else.
We think getting into a relationship and having sex with multiple partners will ‘fix’ what is harming us. We come into situations with people who have their own issues, and eventually, it becomes toxic and unhealthy. Rather than reflect on the situation that unfolded, we would rather blame and escape from it.
We, as men, would rather blame women for our struggles and our problems with relationships. We grow combative and emotionally detached, we are fed these conditioned lies about being ‘alpha’, and we are encouraged to ignore our problems rather than face them.
This is not to say the other party had no role in the disintegration of the dynamic. We all have our blind spots, conditioning, experiences, biases, and baggage. Instead of working through these differences, we are told to play a role. Men must play X role and women must play Y role, while those who do not fit neatly into any of those roles are disregarded and attacked.
For such a long time, I was told to hide my emotions. I was told to “be a man” as if being a man meant abandoning compassion, softness, and understanding. Many people are told to suppress their emotions, especially men. Rarely do men reflect on their experiences deeply and question what they have been told productively.
I often think about an article written by Dr. Gabor Mate related to fascism and masculinity. In particular, I think about this one quote:
Self-reflection, something the fascist mentality cannot abide, can soften the heart.
Fascism is grounded in fear, hurt, grief, and various other negative emotions. Without an outlet for these emotions, many give in to fascist rhetoric as it gives them a sense of control and power. Power and control, they probably felt they were lacking before.
It is easy to become rigid and closed. It is easy to point to others when we are hurt. It is challenging to reflect on ourselves and understand why we felt the way we did in the first place.
Hate thrives in ignorance. Rather than doing the difficult work of opening our eyes to the world around us and seeking answers for tough questions, many would rather hate. They will hate themselves and the world around them.
How do we combat hate? I think this is a threefold problem.
Hate exists on a societal, relational, and personal level.
Hate on a societal level props up in the form of right-wing political ideology that tells people to hate immigrants, trans people, and anyone else different from them. Hate on a societal level tells us we must be hostile towards anyone other than us and actively harm them.
Hate on a relational level means hurting the people around us. For men, it means hating the people we date because of our experiences, pain, and baggage. It means pushing away those close to us and manipulating others.
Hate on a personal level means hurting ourselves because of our perceived deficits. It means internalizing the negative scripts in our minds that tell us we are not worthy of love, happiness, and compassion. Personal hate tells us that we must take out our frustration on ourselves, which eventually leads to taking it out on others, and then the world.
In my view, we need to combat hate on all fronts. We must continually do the inner work of trying to resolve hatred within ourselves. Doing the inner work enables us to cultivate and maintain healthier relationships in our lives, while also navigating the more challenging relationships and aspects of ourselves more effectively. Having better relationships pushes us to care about the world around us. This is where we seek to become informed and organized around the societal issues of our day. To combat hate on a societal level, we must do it together, but we must never forget to work on resolving it within ourselves.