Dude, we gotta talk

An intro to my half of this Substack, all about men's issues

An odd thing happened to me a few weeks ago.

I was out having some beers with a buddy, and after quickly burning through the typical dude-bro small-talk about sports, tv shows, and sandwiches, not to mention a riveting debate over which 90’s film has the best action sequences (the correct answer is Predator, duh), I noticed the muscle in his jaw was flexed up tight as a knuckle. I could tell something was eating at him, but he wasn’t offering anything up. He was, you know, being a man. Instead of prying, I decided to tell him about how my wife had recently returned from a business trip and instead of asking her how it went, like I should have, I got all passive-aggressive about how hard it was to watch the kids while she was gone. I told him about the ensuing fight and how much I had to grovel for forgiveness because I’d screwed up. From that little opening, he told me about what was going on in his life, and we ended up having —get this— an actual conversation about something other than Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Now that may not sound like a big deal, but trust me, to us forty-something dudes, it is. We don’t usually like to talk about the deep dark stuff, we pivot to fart jokes or whip out a painful nut-tap, anything to keep from actually vocalizing what’s going on down at the core of us. Hell, even our spouses aren’t privy to a lot of our inner lives. Not because we have this, like, desire to be solitary, no, we don’t talk about stuff because we never learned how to.

See, men my age were raised in a time when talking openly about your emotions was akin to stripping down naked and doing cartwheels across the school quad. You just didn’t do it. Every guy who grew up in the 80’s or 90’s was trained from a very young age to bottle everything up, like a man, and quietly get on with your life. Showing emotion was considered a ‘feminine’ quality that could quite literally get you beaten up back then. There was no ‘talking it out’, no ‘holding space’ between boys. The role models we had for masculinity were muscle-bound freaks who would rather use their machine guns than their mouths. That’s what being a man was.

Fast-forward a few decades and all of us bottled-up boys have grown into emotionally-muted men. And it sucks! For everyone. Our spouses get pissed ‘cause we can’t open up, our kids get sad ‘cause we don’t fully engage, and we start to hate ourselves when we can’t figure out how to vent until all the pent up emotion before it blows up in our faces. Believe me, I should know. The inability to verbalize my difficult stuff almost cost me my marriage. I went through a bout of depression in my thirties and my wife got me into therapy, where I learned some tools to actually open up. And that’s the only reason I was able to speak up to my buddy at the bar. It’s something I’ve been trying to do more and more because I swear, it seems like every guy my age is going through something and needs to talk it out. But unless someone goes first, we get a little stuck.

That’s what I want this Substack to be: Me going first. I’ll tell you all the dumb stuff I’ve done, all the mistakes and failures, all the anxieties and doubts I have, and hopefully it’ll make some dude out there feel safer talking about his own stuff. I’ll be the surrogate drinking buddy for anyone who thinks they’re alone. Or even the surrogate partner for any spouse who just wants some insight into the male mind. I’m not a therapist or an expert on anything, and I sure as shit don’t have the answers. All I can do is write as honestly as possible and hope it starts some conversations.

Over the course of the Substack, I’ll be exploring all sorts of men’s issues, pulling from my own personal stories. I’ll walk you through my journey with therapy and how it saved my marriage. I’ll try to tackle questions like: How does it feel to be the husband of a breadwinner? How does being the lead parent affect my masculinity? Why do I still have a hard time talking to my wife about certain things? Why do I sometimes withhold affection? What’s with me taking other people’s recommendations over my wife’s? How do I raise a boy in today’s culture? Why am I still insecure about sex after all these years? Oh, and penises! There will be a lot about penises.

I also want this to be a dialogue, so I’ll be answering reader questions each month— well, ‘answering’ isn’t quite right. But if there’s anything you’ve been struggling with at home or in life, with your spouse or partner, I’ll give you my honest take from a male point of view.

Kinda like Ask Amy, but with a jock strap.

There will be blind spots— I’m just a middle-aged straight white-dude after all. But hopefully, if it’s candid enough, there will be some universal nuggets that pop out. Who knows. Fingers crossed.

My first official post will be about the specific kind of therapy that saved my marriage. If you’re interested, or have any burning questions for me, please subscribe and let’s get the conversation started. I’m so excited to see where this goes.

Sincerely, your digital drinking buddy,

Brian