By all accounts, I’m a normal guy. Grew up middle class, graduated school and got a job to begin a working career. Met an amazing woman, got married and had kids. Bought houses, moved a few times, added pets and lost them as the years ticked by. Missing in all of that “normal” stuff that so many men can relate and aspire to be a part of was a world that we were told from an early age to ignore.
We’ve all heard it as boys, anything emotional is bad. Don’t cry. Don’t act like a girl, whatever that is even supposed to mean. Don’t show emotions, ever. This advice made it easy for us growing up to not challenge ourselves to learn how to engage with emotions from anyone else, even our own.
For far too long, I did not hear what my wife was trying so hard for me to get about emotions. I fell back on my early training as a boy to not interact with her words as emotions were tied to it. This disengagement created hurt in her that I did not fully understand until recently. There will be time to chat about the layers of that later.
So, what started the growth journey for me personally? Life has a funny way of picking at the things that might be the hardest for us to address and process. It knows where we are strong and where we might be a bit weaker. For me, I was very weak in emotional maturity. I did not have confidence in that part of life and it was a missing skill for much of my time on this planet. As I was not proficient in this skill, I could not be there for my family in that capacity.
Back in 2022, our oldest child felt discomfort in a way that led him to seek medical attention. Long story short, we went from thinking he strained his oblique, to a possible hernia to concerns about testicular cancer. A few tests and a biopsy confirmed our fears, cancer. There is something about hearing that your child has cancer that will change a person in ways that words cannot describe.
This was a shock to all of us in a multitude of ways but it exposed a massive hole in my life and the most important relationship a man can have, his marriage. I had not created an environment where my wife felt emotionally safe with me so she could not come to me with her feelings about our son’s diagnosis. To make matters worse, I was almost completely unavailable to her as I was struggling with my own feelings about his situation. It took quite a while for me to even understand what was going on for me at that time.
His cancer diagnosis forced me to finally open my eyes to parts of my life that I had pushed away for far too long. I’m still learning, and I hope that I never stop, but I feel that I’m at a point to open up a little bit and hopefully help other men who are just starting on their own journey of growth, regardless of what triggered them to start.
Even to this day, our society has a stigma attached to men who are emotionally mature. We see it on social media, hear it on podcasts, etc. If a man sheds a tear, we hear what that could mean. If he doesn’t ‘look” like a man should look, it could mean something else.
There is nothing wrong with a man who understands emotions, period. The women in our lives desperately want men to understand emotions. They live their lives in an emotional world so having a seat at their emotional table would be appreciated.
As men, it is our responsibility to put in the work and to learn what we were never taught about this emotional world. It is not an easy journey, just a warning. As hard and as uncomfortable that it can be to reprogram our training as men, the potential to be a more complete person is such a beautiful possibility.
I truly hope that sharing some of my story will be a benefit to whoever finds my posts. Most people would label their family as the most important thing to them. If more families are able to stick together and be more fulfilling, how great could our world be?
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