By Joe Zamboni
I’ve been doing some inner work, investigating why I feel separate and isolated from others. Until recently I haven’t really understood why I feel like I needed to be separate and isolated. Today I’m getting that it’s directly tied-in with the cultural conditioning that goes along with being a man in America today. This brief article explores some of those investigations, and it is offered without any claim that these ideas are the full answer. Instead, I’m suggesting that this area is a very fruitful area for other men to investigate, and that such an investigation can lead to the emancipation from the cultural conditioning that we men have internalized, and so often by default simply assume to be “the way things are.”
I’ve been asking myself, “Why would I feel as though must keep setting myself up as separate and isolated?” The word on the street is that men are supposed to be independent and self-reliant. We are supposed to be able to do all sorts of things (change our car’s oil, fix the leaky plumbing, kill gophers in the garden, etc.) all by ourselves. This is totally unrealistic, and it only leads to undue pressure on men. A friend of mine had migraine headaches because he felt like the martial arts center that he headed-up was totally dependent on him. In reality we all need other people, and we always have. There is nothing shameful about getting help from others, although many of us men have been indoctrinated to believe that we cannot accept such help. Why else would we keep driving around the neighborhood, when we know damn well that we are lost, all the while refusing to ask for directions?
There is support all around us, if we will open up to receiving and working with that support. There are friends to remind us of our priorities, accountants to help us prepare our taxes, priests to help us find God, etc. Men need to allow themselves to be who they are now: imperfect, incomplete, not knowing some things, unable to do some things, and needing help. To many of us men, even considering such a possibility seems unmanly and childish. We hold rigid requirements for ourselves, we staunchly believe we must be the provider and protector (or whatever your story happens to be). We have told ourselves stories about how “people critically depending on us,” and we make those stories a source of our belief in our self worth.
If you’re a man, whatever your story about who you think you have to be, that rigidity makes you unhappy, makes you separate, makes you isolated. If you mix in a little pride, like “I’m the only one who can do it,” or “nobody else knows what I know,” then you’ve got a further reason to keep this unrealistic image of who you are in place. The simple fact is that we are vulnerable human beings, we don’t have it all together, we don’t really have the big picture about what’s happening, we can probably be replaced pretty quickly, etc. While embracing those and related truths may seem like a fall from grace, it is also emancipating and relieving.
Thus many of us American men have been laboring with a misconception, which has been taught to us from birth: that we are not worthy of love as we are now, that we must earn the love of others, that we must somehow prove ourselves. This idea was supposedly how we got our parent’s love, how we made ourselves eligible for marriage, how we proved ourselves as a good father, and much more. In reality, to think that we are not worthy of love — just as we are right now, no matter what our station in life happens to be, and no matter what we have done or not done — that thought has been a tool used by others to enslave us. Even worse, it has been a tool that we used to enslave ourselves. The core of this is the idea that we must be someone other than who we are.
To prove that we are this imaginary man, we men go to extreme lengths, such as being willing to be maimed or die in wars that we don’t even believe in (Iraq for example). Somewhere in times gone past, it probably became apparent that this distancing from our inner world, this being somebody other than who we really were, that was a necessity. In order to have a large number of men willingly go kill other people, in a war for example, it seems as though this notion must be adopted as part of the culture. Likewise, in order to prepare men to go “do battle” in the jungle of the modern economy, men must be ready to sacrifice themselves for their families. It is no wonder that men die six years younger than women do in America today. No doubt there is some chivalry mixed into this notion of who men have to be, but those notions are outdated and only hold us back today.
For many of us men even to admit that we want to be loved, that seems incredibly shameful. It seems weak, vulnerable, childish, and unevolved. It is uncharted territory for most of us, and therefore seems dangerous. But everybody is worthy of being loved. And we men make ourselves into hardened, isolated, and separate unhappy men by denying this fact.
The irony is that this hardening, this twisting of ourselves so that we live up to the imaginary standards of society, that makes us weak, that makes us vulnerable, that makes us childish, and that makes us unevolved. By steadfastly holding onto this ideal of who a man should be, we make ourselves manipulatable by advertisers, relatives, women, and others. The size of a woman’s engagement ring provides a good example. How many of us heterosexual guys have thought that we must get a big rock for that special woman, and that the bigger the diamond, the more worthy we are as men? In the process we have enriched the diamond mine owners, the jewelers, and the advertisers, and we have made ourselves considerably poorer. And the women are in on this game as well; they for instance believe that a man is more of a “catch” if he has done a better job distancing himself from his real self (in other words he has more fully embraced this cultural conditioning, and is thus able to buy his woman a bigger rock).
By this hardening, this superimposition of the ideal man, onto the reality of who we really are, we make ourselves weak. We are then brittle and rigid, unwavering and positional. Life is not like that. Life changes, all the time. By being out of touch with life, we create all sorts of unhappiness for ourselves. For example, a man who thinks he can’t cry, who suppresses all displays of his feelings (except anger perhaps) because he believes them to be unmanly, such a man isolates himself from himself. With this hardening we men become more self-alienated, and we thus loose track of what we really want, what’s important to us, what we care about, etc. Why else would a single young man so often give up his personal life goals to completely buy-into the life goals of a woman who happened to be pregnant with his child? Why else would so many young men so readily “do what a man has to do” and get married, become a father, devote himself to supporting his family via a relatively high-paying job that he hates, etc.?
By this distancing of ourselves from our true selves, we actually make ourselves more childish and unevolved. Children do not have a sense for the big picture, and they don’t understand the complexity of the world. Instead, they have formulas, or simple concepts, basic ideas of how things work. By using the formulaic stories we have heard about what makes for a successful man, and using those to run our lives, we men make ourselves simple and childish. By consistently adhering to these stories, we also block our own personal development process from proceeding. In that respect, we make ourselves relatively unevolved.
To become more adapted to the world, we need to change, we need to flexibly and dynamically alter our concept of who we are so that it is trued-up up with reality. For example, the belief that we must be the provider in order to be an attractive man would have us pay for dinner dates. But with women earning pretty much as much as men these days, this practice of paying for dates not only makes the man poor relative to the woman, it also sets the stage for a disproportionate male assumption of financial responsibility in romantic relationships (think of alimony, child support, etc.).
So how can men start the process of overcoming these misconceptions? A good place would be to start giving ourselves the love and respect that we deserve. We have been withholding this love and respect from ourselves, because we think we aren’t good enough, we aren’t doing enough, we aren’t delivering the goods that others have told us we must deliver. Whether or not anyone gives us the love that we deserve, right now we can give this to ourselves. As we open to receiving this love, this approval, this allowing, so too will we become more open to receiving it from others. And in the relaxing about the stories regarding who we think we have to be, in that there will be an opportunity for us to embrace and inhabit our true selves. Through embracing and inhabiting of our true selves we can find our liberation, in addition to a new connectedness with other people.
