Today's men don’t fail loudly; they erode. They make private promises to themselves to be braver, to leave, to begin, to stop, and then, with heroic consistency, they break them.
Each broken vow is a tiny embezzlement from their own self-respect. Over time, the account runs dry.
So he withdraws. Not dramatically, but with the quiet dignity of a wounded animal that’s learned the world is not a sympathetic audience. He becomes a lone wolf, not out of nobility, but out of caution. Solitude is safer than explanation.
Women, on the other hand, are allowed, even encouraged, to share. They can unburden themselves, pass the weight around, turn grief into a kind of communal project. Men can do it too, in theory. In practice, when a man opens his mouth and lets something soft fall out, the room changes temperature. The sympathy is brief. The jokes are forever. The confession is archived and, at some later date, produced as a punchline.
So men learn. They learn to carry their failures like concealed weapons. They learn that silence is cheaper than honesty. And they learn that dignity, however threadbare, is best preserved by saying nothing at all.
Read on, for the man in your life.
Graeme & Phylipa Dinnen
ResourcesForLife.net
