Chapter 1

1. Expectations of Manhood

The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Doug and Tom were best friends who worked for the same company. After the company underwent a change of leadership, Doug worried what that might mean for the company, and he shared these concerns with Tom, figuring his friend might have some insight.

“I think everything is going to be just fine,” Tom said.

Doug found his friend’s response odd, but he let it go. Tom probably just wanted to play the good soldier.

A few months went by, the leadership problems grew worse, and so did Doug’s concerns. To Doug’s frustration, every time he brought up the topic, Tom continued to deflect the conversation, insisting that everything was going to turn out fine. Doug was certain Tom didn’t believe what he was saying, and yet every time he challenged Tom on it, his friend held firm. Doug didn’t get it, but if nothing else, he respected his friend for holding to his beliefs.

Then one day, Tom stopped talking to Doug altogether. Just like that, they went from being best friends to awkward work acquaintances.

Doug was bewildered, and once again confronted his friend about it. “I miss talking to you,” Doug said. “I feel like something’s come between us. Did I offend you when I challenged you about the leadership change?”

“No, you didn’t offend me,” Tom said, but then the conversation turned ugly. Tom accused Doug of being weak, claiming he didn’t have what it took to handle a tough transition. Doug countered that he’d handled the transition just fine; he was just worried about the big picture for the company. The pair traded a few more barbs, but eventually cooler heads prevailed, and they agreed to disagree.

A week later, Doug learned that Tom had accepted a new position with a competing company.

Suddenly, it all made sense. Tom had been misleading Doug this whole time. Tom may have seemed like he was putting on a brave face, but he had actually been using his friendship to pump Doug for competitive information about the company—all while secretly looking for a new job over the course of several months!

Tom acted like nothing had ever happened between them. In fact, the second he accepted the new job, he began trying to patch up his friendship with Doug.

It was too late. Doug felt betrayed, and rightfully so. No matter what Tom did or said from that point on, Doug couldn’t trust that his former friend was being genuine. In fact, he began to question their entire relationship. How many other times had Tom been inauthentic? How many other times had Tom simply played out the “man script” as a way of furthering his own position?

Eventually, Doug realized that was part of the problem: Tom believed that he had done nothing wrong. He was just behaving the way he was taught men should behave. Tom had even echoed something Doug had heard his own father say thirty years before: “It’s not giving up. It’s growing up.” For months, Doug wondered if both Tom and his father had been right. Now, he knew that both had just been hiding behind these platitudes to mask their own selfish interests.

Doug isn’t the only person to question the lessons he learned from his father. For many of us, the lessons we’re taught in childhood stick with us throughout our lives, forming our idea of what it means to be a man. Some of these lessons are helpful, and some aren’t, but most are what we make of them, offering us useful guidance in some situations and challenging our sense of fair conduct in others.

If we want to cultivate close, meaningful male relationships, we must begin by understanding a little bit about our social makeup and the kind of ideas that drive us. In this chapter, we’ll examine some of the common expectations of manhood that are engrained in many of us. Then, we’ll discuss how they can influence our decisions—both for good and for bad—and what we can do as men to navigate these expectations in a way that is productive to our goals and friendships.

Boyhood

I got involved in more than a few playground scuffles as a boy. Perhaps you did too. Never once was I or anyone else I knew punished for this. Instead, the principal would wave his hand and say, “Boys will be boys.” This didn’t excuse our behavior, exactly, but it did provide us with a rationale for our playground fights. We learned that fighting was simply how boys were supposed to settle their grievances with each other.

This idea that fighting is to be expected is just one of many ideas boys hear constantly as they grow up. In my interviews, I learned that many of the following concepts come up repeatedly for boys as well.

Boys Don’t Cry

Every boy has heard this one. In both my own experiences and those of my interviewees, this idea was intrinsically tied to sports—Pee Wee Football, Little League, and so on. Usually the message is delivered in the form of someone’s dad yelling from the bleachers or sidelines during a game. There are a few variations, which go something like this:

“Don’t cry. You’re a big boy!”

“There’s no crying in baseball!”

“Man up!”

Whatever the exact phrasing, boys are given the same message over and over again: expressing emotion is an expression of weakness. This is the furthest thing from the truth, but a lot of us grew up believing it to be true.

When I was about fourteen, I was in the car with my uncle Jack and my two cousins, Jackie and Vince. Throughout the car ride, Jackie had been acting a little off.

Never one to beat around the bush, my uncle asked, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Mary doesn’t want to see me anymore,” Jackie replied.

As Uncle Jack saw it, there was only one solution to heartbreak: toughening up. He saw this moment as an opportunity to teach not just Jackie, but all of us, to be tougher. Once we got back to their place, my uncle sent us to the backyard for some bare-knuckles boxing. The way he saw it, the experience would help us man up no matter the outcome. If Vince beat the shit out of Jackie, Jackie would learn to take his lumps. If Jackie got pissed off, fought back, and landed some punches of his own, even better.

Jackie was the same age as me, and no match for his older brother, Vince. I could only watch for so long as Jackie got the snot beat out of him before I stepped in and was quickly greeted with a slug in the stomach for my trouble. As I lay on the ground seeing stars, I remember hearing Uncle Jack call out, “Come on, Mark, you can take him. You’re bigger than he is. Don’t be a scaredy-cat!”

Growing up, most boys are taught to guard their emotions and disguise how they really feel, especially when it comes to feelings of sadness or depression. A few of the men I interviewed said it was almost as if they could hear their father whispering in their ear every time they felt a negative emotion. “What are you doing?” the voice would say. “Big boys don’t cry.”

Boys Aren’t Vulnerable

A corollary to the “big boys don’t cry” expectation is the idea that all boys must display a certain degree of mental and physical toughness. This idea isn’t always made explicit, but it often runs as an undercurrent through childhood.

I remember those days in gym class, for instance, when we were all expected to shimmy up a rope to touch the ceiling. Some of us couldn’t get going on our own, so the gym teacher would offer some momentum to get us started, teaching us how to shimmy. It was a useful lesson, and yet the perception was that anyone who required this sort of help was weak—physically for sure, but emotionally as well.

Luckily, I also learned through other encounters how healthy showing vulnerability could be. One time, a classmate and I got to talking, and he admitted that he was worried about an upcoming trigonometry test.

“Trig is actually pretty easy if you know a few tricks,” I said. “Let me show you.”

I could have shoved that moment of vulnerability in my classmate’s face and teased him, but because I appreciated his vulnerability, instead I got a study partner out of the deal. I came to find out this kid was absolutely killer in English, and he helped me immensely in sorting out my sentence structure. Thanks to him, I understand the difference between adverbs and adjectives.

For weeks, he and I traded homework back and forth. I’d look at his math and give him pointers, and he’d do the same with my English papers. We both felt that we were contributing to the other’s success, and that kind of reciprocity felt good. All of this because we were both willing to show a little vulnerability, admit that we weren’t confident about a certain subject, and seek the help of others who were.

The older I’ve grown, the more I’ve realized that the level of vulnerability I enjoyed with my classmate was often the exception, not the rule. Many of the men I know have been terrified to express vulnerability.

For instance, recently, one of my friends, Brian, opened up about his personal life on Facebook, sharing the demons he’d been wrestling with since childhood and the steps he was now taking to confront them. As I learned, Brian had many demons. He was struggling with his weight, leaning irresponsibly on pills and alcohol, and going through a wicked divorce.

Even he hadn’t realized how low...