That’s one of the questions I found myself thinking about watching The Invite.

On the surface, the movie puts two very different couples — and two very different men — into a situation involving sexual desire, monogamy and the possibility of crossing some pretty big boundaries. But what interested me most was what happened to Joe, played by Seth Rogen, when those boundaries began to move.

What does a man do when he finally has to confront his relationship, his sexuality and even his understanding of himself?

To mull over the incredible performances by four remarkable actors, and dive deeper into a screenplay that has to be nominated for an Oscar, I invited psychotherapist, certified sex therapist, and fellow Substacker @Chris Frier Brown to talk about The Invite with me, especially a few of the crucial scenes.

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Chris has spent more than 25 years working with relationships, was trained in the Gottmann approach and took courses with famed therapist and advisor to the film, Esther Perel.

That makes him a particularly interesting person with whom to examine Joe and Hawk, the two male protagonists at the center of The Invite.

We talked about how men experience their bodies. The difference between sexual performance and genuine sexual presence. What happens when one partner grows and the other resists. And whether a man’s response to discomfort is to protect the identity he already has — or allow himself to become someone larger.

Chris eventually describes that choice with two words I haven’t stopped thinking about: Recede or expand.

And maybe that is the most interesting question The Invite poses to men.

In our conversation, Chris and I explore:

• Why improving a relationship doesn’t necessarily improve its sex life

• What The Invite gets right about the behaviors that build relationships and the behaviors that tear them down

• Why some men can be surprisingly disconnected from their own bodies

• What Joe and Hawk represent as two very different expressions of masculinity

• The difference between sexual performance, vulnerability and presence

• Why healthy relationships require room for our partners, and ourselves, to change

• Chris’s idea that difficult moments offer us a choice: recede or expand

Watch our full conversation and then tell me: Which man in The Invite did you understand better: Joe or Hawk?

I couldn’t help but notice him, a father, maybe 45 years old. I was waiting for my dark roast — enough milk to muddy it up.

He was standing off to the side with a young man, large enough in size to at least be a teenager. The boy’s face, mannerisms and inability to speak words led me to believe he had Down syndrome.

The father spoke lovingly to the young man as they waited for a tray of drinks and a bag of breakfast.

We both received our orders at about the same time and headed for the exit together. I got there first and held the door open for father and son. He was holding his son’s hand with one hand, and the tray of beverages and balanced food with the other.

The father thanked me as we exited. I went left to my car. Father and son went right.

I watched the father place the food and beverage on the hood of his car so that he could open the passenger door and help his son get in and get buckled. As he did all of this, he continued his loving conversation with his son.

As he came around to the driver side, coffee and food in hand, I walked over to him.

I could tell that he was caught a little off guard. A stranger, a few inches taller than him, was coming to grab his attention. He placed the coffee tray and food inside the car and turned to me.

I had no idea what I was going to say. As the words came out over my lips, it felt like someone else was speaking for me.

“I just wanted to tell you that I see you, and the fine job you’re doing,” I said.

Immediately, I could tell by his face and his eyes that he knew exactly what I was trying to say.

He took a deep breath first. His shoulders sank a little, like he was releasing a weight. His eyes began to well up.

“Thank you,” he said, his eyes turning downward a little. “You have no idea what that means to me.”

Some inexplicable gravity pulled us together in a long embrace.

“You’re welcome,” was all I could muster softly as we held each other and then released.

I nodded, and we both turned back towards the day before us.

As I got back in my car, I realized that my first instinctive steps toward that man and his son were taken nearly 45 years earlier.

My oldest brother was born 11 years before me. So when he and his wife, still in the early years of their marriage, had the opportunity of a winter weekend getaway, they planned to leave their two-month-old daughter at our house.

I told my parents we should set up Gina’s crib in my bedroom. It was the warmest room for a February evening, and at 16 years old, I was curious to see if I had what it took to be a parent someday.

I’ve written about that first 2 a.m. feeding here, and how caring for my niece lit the fire in me to one day be a father.

Looking back, I see that first late night feeding, diaper cleanup and soothing my niece back to sleep as a foreshadowing of three more strokes of fate — the conception and births of a daughter and two sons.

My three children were not supposed to be born. At least that’s what two top fertility clinics told my then wife and I after more than a year of trying to start a family.

Looking back on my life, I think these two parts of my personal history are why I have sacrificed nearly everything over more than 30 years to be the best father I can be.

Like how I placed protecting my children above everything else during my high-conflict divorce. Whenever shit hit the fan, I did my best to return to my core truth – I was blessed to have those three children, to fulfill every dream any 16-year-old boy can have about being a father. They gave me the opportunity to live the privileged moments that have defined me.

I will never forget what my attorney said to me in the front seat of her Toyota minivan, as we waited for the county courthouse to open so we could finally end three and a half of the worst years of my family’s life.

Jeanne had been my attorney ten years earlier when she had recommended I file for divorce in order to get outside support so I could solve some severe issues in our home. (All of my previous efforts had failed, and Jeanne was concerned about the county getting involved with my kids if I wasn’t on the record signaling I was able and prepared to take care of them.)

Over the three and a half years of that grueling court battle, my attorney was the first person to say, albeit in different words, “I see you. You’re doing a fine job.”

Before my divorce, I had been an advocate for dads, but nothing like what I am now. And no. I’m not some “dad’s rights” zealot looking for revenge against moms. People who take the bitterness of divorce and turn to the extremes of retribution against the other gender do nothing but create more misery for their children and each other.

I have no interest in anything destructive.

Instead, I’ve tried to channel my pain (which I likely still need to process with professional help) into a positive movement to lift fathers up wherever I can. Including Dunkin’s parking lots.

Compliments build solidarity and warmth

In 1988, sociolinguist Janet Holmes published an analysis of more than 450 naturally occurring compliment exchanges. She found pronounced gender differences in who compliments whom and what those compliments achieve socially.

Compliments were much more characteristic of female interactions than male exchanges, she found, particularly as a way of establishing solidarity and interpersonal connection – something she didn’t find much evidence of in male exchanges.

Holmes believed that women were more likely to use compliments as a politeness strategy or a “social glue” designed to build solidarity and express warmth. For men, compliments were more of an evaluative judgment, a critique or grade, rather than an act of bonding.

She believed that her research supported the idea that men often view social dynamics through a frame of competition or status hierarchy, so giving unsolicited feedback can serve as an assertion of dominance or to prevent a man from stepping out of line.

Robert Herbert found similar behaviors in men and women in his 2008 research.

Janice Rees-Miller dove deeper into the topic in her 2011 study, Compliments revisited: Contemporary compliments and gender.

In her 2008 collection of data where three out of four participants were recorded in unstructured settings, Rees-Miller found that none of the young men she studied offered compliments about personality to other men, while 11 percent offered personality compliments to women.

Additionally, Rees-Miller found that “men infrequently compliment on appearance in any setting, and men almost never address appearance compliments to other men. Men are far more likely to compliment an addressee on performance, whether the addressee is male or female.”

Men just aren’t socialized to use compliments as a “social glue.” It feels awkward to us, though my anecdotal experience is that many younger men are breaking those rules.

One day, sitting in my favorite coffee shop, I saw a young man, another stranger, in his late twenties, maybe early 30s, waiting on his drink. I got up from where I was seated and walked over to him. The room was loud enough that I had to lean in to speak to him.

“Look,” I said. “I promise I’m not trying to hit on you, but I just wanted to let you know, you’re a really attractive man.”

I pulled back so we could see each other’s faces. He was beaming.

“Thank you man,” he said. “I work at it. It’s nice to hear that from another guy.”

A part of me – and apparently part of many heterosexual men – needed to assert “Hey, I’m straight.” So I thew in this:

“I always see my girlfriend and her friends complimenting each other on their hair, the way they look, something they’re wearing. We men don’t do that. I think we should. A lot more.”

“You’re right,” the young man replied. “We don’t. We should. You made my day. Thanks.”

We pulled each other in for a “bro hug,” clasped each other’s backs, and released. One last smile, and I turned away, and went back to my chair.

I recounted this exchange to a male friend of mine a few minutes later when he showed up to the coffee shop. Over the years we had known each other, he and I had talked about a lot of important topics.

His mother passing away. His father being too old to live by himself. His sister being too selfish to assist him in caring for his father. How he was attracted to his single next door neighbor, and how he was trying to understand why she had dabbled in being flirtatious with him at times, and indifferent at other times.

He’s much closer in age to me than the young man who so warmly received my compliment. But my telling that story garnered no visible reaction or verbal response.

Men need more solidarity and warmth

What a shame that some men are just too removed from the power of compliments. I know that my life has been richer on the rare occasion when a man has, unsolicited, complimented me on my character.

One of the most powerful moments happened about two years before my encounter with that father in the Dunkin’s parking lot.

Tyler, my youngest, had just graduated high school. The ceremony was over. The parking lot where it was held was nearly empty and staff was folding up the chairs, audio equipment and risers.

All three of my children were with me. This was my last high school graduation, and the bittersweet emotions of the last few hours made me want to linger there as long as I could, holding on to the hugs and joy my little family had shared in that school district over more than 20 years. They were the best years of my life.

Tom, my middle son’s varsity baseball coach was still there with another coach. I love Tom dearly because during the divorce, he supported my son emotionally when he noticed Chris was feeling down. Both coaches knew all three of my children, from all the time we spent at games and practices.

We walked over to say goodbye.

The other coach had been Tyler’s gym teacher, and he complimented my son as a fine young man.

Given what had been said about me in court and how some members of my community had come to support those claims about my character from local gossip, Tom’s compliment caused my whole body to flush with warmth.

This was the first time that a man who knew me and my children offered their positive opinion of the father and man they witnessed. I walked over to Tom and hugged him tight and told him “thank you.”

America talks shit about dads. We’re mostly seen as bumbling fools, the Ray Romano of the parent set.

Thankfully, is documenting just how unfair and ridiculous America’s cultural presentation of fathers is.

Do we have a ways to go as parents to be better? Of course we do.

You know how we can get there faster?

Straight men need to compliment men more about their character, like what they see in a man who lovingly cares for a child with developmental disabilities… or the man who:

• takes his child out for breakfast in the morning -- not to give mom a break, but because he wants “alone time” with his child

• joins a group of stroller dads so that he has male friends to share his experiences with

• prioritizes the hearts and minds of his children in divorce court to his own financial detriment

We straight men need to get over the homophobia that makes us fear complimenting other men in an intimate platonic friendship, and as total strangers.

We need to start now. Too much is at stake.

And who knows? You just might make another man’s day.

Men are so much more complicated than how we are traditionally portrayed in the media, and the only way forward for American society is to explore those complexities and help men where they face challenges in creating a whole self free from constrictions that harm them.

We men are a constantly evolving jumble of the societal forces that shape us — see my interview with Dr. Andrew Smiler for more about that — with some biology thrown in just to make the challenges more complex.

The clinical, quantitative part of my brain conducts thousands of hours a year researching men, masculinity, fatherhood and gender norms, with a special focus on research and studies that aggregate male experiences, behaviors and beliefs into fairly representative benchmarks.

But that data really comes to life when I engage in direct experiences with men —across the full spectrum of male varieties (reflected to some degree in the Bell Curve series I completed earlier this year).

This week, I posted the following in Substack Notes to encourage more of those direct experiences:

Nine men and three women replied. Most of the responses were heartwarming and gave me more confidence about the future for men, women and our society in general.

Like Shlomo Homnick:

Or Bryce Walat and the incomparable Stephen Bradford Long:

One of my favorite people to interact with here, The Long Brown Path, answered my question with his own question — which was a really cool answer because it said a whole lot about men today and their challenges simply trying to be human beings.

And as I fully expected, there were the typical humorous responses.

Like “Penis” — of course.

How could we get through a discussion about measuring men without heading down to his genitals.

Or this penis adjacent answer: “A ruler, preferably in inches.”

I’m guessing only rulers that measure more than six inches qualify for the job.

Humor is often an easier knee-jerk way for men to respond to questions that touch on emotional subjects like the value of men. And penises are one of the easiest ways for some men to erect barriers around internal conversations that get too emotionally deep.

When I challenged the male comedians on this thread, most of them followed up with extremely thoughtful responses. Thank you brothers. I mean that. We’ve got this Whole Self thing down. We just need to practice it more often.

And then there was Travis.

But before I discuss him, one final measure of gratitude; to the women who responded with answers that I wish more men would pay attention to. Women like Lena, The Quiet Drift and Erin Alexander. Thank you sisters. We are building a better world side by side, the best we can.

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Men only own themselves

The deepest conversation I had was with Travis Neville, a Substacker who works in the male space like me.

As you can see from this screengrab, the conversation started off with a totally legitimate answer. Travis believes that the way a man’s value can be measured is by the “quality and behavior of his woman and children.”

I see “kernels of truth” in what Travis writes, especially as a father and ex-husband.

The people who surround us tend to reflect some of the qualities and behaviors of men. But I would never measure my value or a man’s value this way for one very important reason — human beings are complex independent organisms. There is no guarantee that another independent being like a female partner or child will be a direct reflection of the primary man in their life.

1. Humans inherit approximately 50 percent of their DNA from each biological parent, and many psychological traits show moderate to substantial heritability. So a child will have a biological influence from their mother. Similarly, a woman entering a man’s life brings with her the DNA of her parents.

   While a man can influence some of a person’s character and behaviors over time, he’s swimming up against a very swift genetic stream.

2. Peer influence and non-shared environments are significant factors. Peer and parent influences co-exist in a person’s life, and can wax and wane depending on circumstances outside of a father/husband’s control.

3. Finally, assuming an adult woman will reflect a man’s character diminishes her agency, independent judgment and personal identity. Even in healthy marriages characterized by strong mutual influence, each partner retains personal agency and is responsible for their own conduct.

So, I asked Travis about autonomy and agency, and here is how he replied:

People acting independent of the primary man in their life is only an “exception” in his opinion.

We explored that concept further:

I do not know Travis and this is the first time I’ve interacted with him specifically. But I have interacted with dozens of men who speak like this, and I see a pattern that I think can be extremely dangerous for men — making external measures a man cannot control the “gauge of success as a man.”

Researchers like Ron Levant believe that making your identity contingent upon successfully fulfilling male gender norms can increase stress, shame, and psychological distress when life inevitably becomes more complicated.

And life rarely doesn’t become more complicated.

As someone who has walked this earth for more than 60 years, I can attest to the surprises thrown at men every step of the way.

Look. I don’t disagree with Travis on so many of his points — like the fact that it is extremely important that men do their best to help raise “excellent young people.”

I have helped raise three children, coached little league, taught religious ed to 13-year-olds, and in general, tried to be a mentor and “father figure” to as many young people who engaged with me that way.

Be a Self Governed Man

My concern is Travis’ belief that somehow the way women or children behave governs a man’s perceived value. (I’m leaving aside his use of the word “quality” because he and I never discussed how that would be defined.)

At the end of our Notes conversation, I think Travis and I finally started to find some common ground. I agree with him that a man’s “leadership” can be a true measure of his value. A man who carries the banner for kindness, who teaches a class of wondrous children, who works to lift up the lives of others, who leads a firefighting team or a tank platoon into battle, is demonstrating leadership.

Those acts are within his agency and are thus directly attributable to his character.

But how and what those children will learn, how his firefighting crew or platoon will perform, is totally outside his control. And healthy men learn to develop strong character traits knowing that they are not ultimately responsible for how anyone responds to them.

I need to be totally transparent about my interaction with Travis. I checked out his Instagram feed. When I found a post with this infographic, I think I came to understand what he wrote better.

I don’t dispute Travis’ views that some of these visible pieces of a man’s life might indicate some elements of his character. But seriously? A W2 job means a man is “domesticated & weak?”

Firefighters and police officers file their taxes every year off of W2-stated income. They’re domesticated and weak?

I lived next door to firefighters and police officers for 25 years in a subdivision. That meant they weren’t “independent & strong?”

I got a vasectomy a year or so after my third child was born because my wife and I both agreed that three was the right number of children to stop at. My initiating that action was my way of showing my wife that the burden of contraception wasn’t hers anymore.

What I did was an act of independence and strength, for her, for me and for my family, who could not avail themselves of infinite resources.

Labeling external factors as some kind of measure of manliness is aiding and abetting the often fatal Role Self dilemma men struggle with, as Equimondo found in their 2025 study of men and fathers.

The “Provider” role in particular can be extremely fraught for men.

I don’t think men will be whole until they understand their own belief systems and hold themselves up to values that are wholly dependent on how he acts consistently over time — and not dependent on the independence and interdependence of the world he lives in.

That’s a Self Governed Man.

Until then, he’s performing roles and is governed by others.

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Travis,

If you’re reading this, I would love to host you on the Mindful Masculinity podcast to keep this conversation going. There is so much we share in common. I’d like to explore that common ground, and also, respectfully, try to understand our differences, how you see your beliefs empower men, and explore how your beliefs might potentially harm men.

Men taking ownership of their character and behaviors? I’m with you on that brother.

Men outsourcing their value to how the world responds to their character and behaviors? Let’s go deeper on that.

Last year, when Equimondo, a global non-profit organization seeking to promote gender equality and social justice, surveyed 2,454 men, women, and nonbinary people about topics related to masculinity, 86 percent of men chose “provider” as the top trait men should have when asked to finish the sentence: “In my opinion, being a man is…”

More than three out of four women said the same thing.

Equimondo’s research is supported by a host of other studies conducted over the last 20 years.

In 2016, a group of UConn sociologists, using 15 years of longitudinal data, concluded that as men became increasingly responsible for family income, their psychological well-being declined. Further, men who were the sole breadwinner showed lower happiness and poorer health than men in more egalitarian earning arrangements.

And worse, Equimondo reports that men who face financial instability are much more likely to consider suicide as a solution to their troubles.

That’s why I thought it was important to invite author, men’s coach, and fellow Substack writer Taylor Ashton Ellwood to talk with me about provision and masculinity.

I wanted to get to the bottom of questions like:

• What happens when a man starts believing that his worth rises and falls with his income?

• What happens when he loses a job, retires, gets divorced, or simply can’t provide in the ways he once could?

• If his sense of self has been built almost entirely on being the provider, what remains?

Our conversation moved beyond the usual debates about who should pay for dinner or whether men should still be providers. Instead, we examined the psychological relationship men have with money itself, and why financial success has become such a powerful measure of masculinity.

We talk about how much of a man’s attachment to “Provider Masculinity” comes from our childhood, and how often men think they’re angry about money problems, when what they aren’t identifying are feelings of shame, rejection, and insecurity.

Along the way, Taylor shares stories from his coaching practice, while I reflect on my own years as the sole financial provider for my family and the pressure that role created for me.

This conversation isn’t about blaming women. It isn’t about rejecting ambition or pretending money doesn’t matter. Bills still have to be paid. Families still need stability.

It’s about asking a much deeper question:

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In this podcast, Taylor and I cover the following:

• Why so many men describe themselves as feeling like a “walking ATM.”

• How the provider role became so deeply intertwined with American masculinity.

• The difference between being valued for what you provide versus who you are.

• How childhood experiences with financial insecurity can shape a man’s identity and relationship with money.

• Why purpose, mission, and meaningful work can become a stronger foundation for self-worth than income or status.

• Practical ways men can recognize when their identity has become overly dependent on provision—and begin building a healthier sense of themselves.

• Why authentic communities of men may be one of the most powerful ways to discover purpose beyond the paycheck.

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Spoiler Alert: This essay reveals part of the storyline of the just released 3-hour epic interpretation of Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

In essence, that’s what Christopher Nolan did, when he omitted the pivotal scenes from Book 8 of Homer’s poem — Odysseus’ sojourn on the island of Scheria.

While millions of Americans might be familiar with the Cyclops and Trojan horse, or recognize the names Odysseus and Penelope, it’s safe to say that only a fraction have followed Odysseus all the way home from the blood-soaked city of Troy.

Christopher Nolan’s epic film, its movie trailers and publicity tour very likely will be their only exposure to the tale. For them, The Odyssey will remain what American culture has always portrayed it as — a homecoming adventure and a political drama about reclaiming a kingdom.

Few will realize that Odysseus’ temptresses and his monster-filled adventures make up less than a third of Homer’s epic, and that the poem is significantly a meditation on male identity.

So when Nolan transports Odysseus directly from Charlize Theron’s hypnotic embrace to the shores of Ithaca, in essence the director eliminates the internal threshold the king needs to cross after 20 years of temptation and threat, to the comfort of home that he incessantly yearns to return to.

When Odysseus is found exhausted, naked, and battered on the forest floor of Scheria — the curse of Poseidon once again preventing him from going home — every member of his expedition has reached his final resting place. Odysseus alone remains suspended between war and home, unable to bury the past because he has not yet completed the journey that would honor their suffering and sacrifice.

In the palace of the Phaeacian King Alcinous and Queen Arete, a feast is set for him in the Greek tradition of xenia — showing hospitality to every guest because they may be a god in disguise.

During the feast, the blind bard Demodocus recounts the Trojan War in song. Unaware that their guest is the Ithacan king and mastermind who broke the war’s ten-year stalemate, they pay no heed when Odysseus covers himself in his cloak, weeping to Demodocus’ verses.

During a second recital, Odysseus cries again. This time, King Alcinous stops Demodocus to ask his guest to reveal his identity, which Odysseus does:

“But your heart prompts you to ask of my sad troubles, and make me weep and groan the more. How shall I start and end my tale? First let me give you my name, so you all know, and if I escape from pitiless fate later, I will play host to you, though I live far off. I am Odysseus, Laertes’ son, known to all for my stratagems, and my fame has reached the heavens.”

After more than eight years of wearing the masks of warrior and sailor, liar and lover, beggar and “Nobody,” Odysseus is finally himself. As the only surviving member of his expedition, he now can tell the tale of everything that happened after he and his men left Troy, which he does in Books 9-12.

In essence, throughout The Odyssey, Homer has been posing a timeless question: “Who are you when no one recognizes you, when no one knows your story?” On the island of Scheria, Odysseus is finally able to tell his story, with all of its heroism, and its failure, and own it.

In many respects, the poem’s depiction of Odysseus’ courage and guile are diminished if we fail to realize that Homer is telling us the greatest act of heroism is becoming worthy of one’s own home. And that worthiness starts with embodying to the fullest our character’s strengths and weaknesses.

Not that Homer (if there even was such a person) was capable of creating a narrative about a man journeying to his internal autonomous self. The ancient Greeks didn’t distinguish between what we might call our “interior consciousness” and the external life we live. The two were inseparable.

In 700 BCE, the Greeks believed a person’s identity was very relational to external conditions, like family and ancestry, their role and relationships in their community, obligations and reputation (kleos), and their relationship to and with the gods, rather than an autonomous inner essence.

But there are parallels between what modern psychology tells us and what Homer and his peers might have felt reacting to performances of The Odyssey. They might have seen Odysseus’ “homecoming” journey as him recovering all of the external conditions that once made him fully Odysseus.

Odysseus’ household on Ithaca wasn’t simply something he possessed. It was where his identity was validated. If he lost his throne and place in Ithaca, the largest part of his self would be lost as well.

So his journey through the poem is an attempt to recover the conditions under which he can once again become fully Odysseus.

When Ithaca’s noblemen repeatedly show up in Odysseus’ home to guzzle his wine, devour the meat from his slain herds, and plead for Penelope’s hand in marriage, they are not simply trespassing; they are attempting to erase Odysseus as a father, a husband, king and bearer of his descendants’ ancestry.

This concept is not foreign to modern humans. I have countless friends and acquaintances whose identity is deeply dependent on their profession, the college they graduated from, being members of the military and law enforcement.

This is an especially precarious dynamic for men. Much contemporary masculinity discourse emphasizes either external achievement (career, status, provision) or internal authenticity (”find yourself,” “live your truth”). Homer offers a third possibility.

Mindful Masculinity was literally launched because I was exploring the concept of “divorce memoirs” and why men don’t write them even a fraction of the times that women do. Eventually, I wrote about this philosophical journey here.

Belle Burden has been widely hailed this year for her just published Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. There’s Lyz Lenz’s 2024 This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life, and Maggie Smith’s 2023 You Could Make This Place Beautiful.

On her media tour promoting her 2021 book Both/And, the former political operative and aide to Hillary Clinton Huma Abedin repeatedly told interviewers and audiences that “… if you don’t tell your story, somebody else is writing your history.”

The recurring theme of these memoirs, and what appears to resonate most deeply with women who read them, is the liberating journey of personal discovery the authors embark on, and how they reclaim empowering but suppressed identities.

This is what Christopher Nolan omits from his epic movie (which I thoroughly enjoyed this past Thursday night).

So when we see Matt Damon, playing the role of Odysseus, reconnecting with his son, played by Tom Holland, and his wife, Anne Hathaway, are we seeing only the heroic Provider, Protector and Procreator valiantly vanquishing the noblemen trespassers plaguing his home and his kingdom?

Or are we seeing the fuller picture of a man becoming whole again — albeit in an ancient Greek context more akin to traditional masculine norms.

I won’t spoil the movie’s ending for you by pointing out yet one more Nolan edit that detracts from a fuller picture of the man Odysseus is, the one Homer intended us to explore. If you see the movie and notice the change, please come back here and let me know what you saw.

It’s easy to view Homer’s original Odyssey as a testosterone-fueled adventure, depicting a man determined to get home, no matter what monsters, warriors, physical challenges are placed before him. And to some degree, Christopher Nolan’s 3-hour epic movie captures that perfectly.

It’s just that movies and the portrayal of great literature in pop culture too frequently flatten men and reduce their complexity, at the expense of American society flourishing.

Being a father who simply earns a respectable living, cares for his children, partners with his wife to run a household, was labeled “actually quite boring” by the progressive magazine writer, podcast host and author, Derek Thompson, during his June 9 2026 Plain English podcast, How Modern Fatherhood is Changing Men’s Brains.

During a lengthy leadup to one of his final questions for his guest, the USC psychologist Darby Saxbe, Thompson says “I feel like it’s a challenge maybe to screenwriters and cultural producers” to not make every day fathers “seem like some kind of… somewhat denuded male representation of masculinity that just is like a little bit milquetoast and not that interesting.”

“Like he changes diapers and makes a couple hundred thousand a year and goes on one vacation and like that’s actually quite boring. Like that actually sounds very basic rather than sounding like a hero in a story that has some kind of core tension.”

“Movies are compelling because they have compelling characters that have compelling internal tensions. And so, like one of the issues here is like what is the internal tension of someone who’s like generally like a pretty good dad?”

Thompson then specifically pointed to Nolan’s upcoming movie premier.

“… look, I mean, the Odyssey is coming out this year. Christopher Nolan, like the OG father just trying to get home story. Um, which, you know, half of every movie or half of every sort of epic film has a father trying to get home message.”

As I wrote in my Father’s Day Substack, “Let’s Not Make Fatherhood Another Boring Job,” even so-called progressive thinkers like Thompson tend to flatten the value of average men, doing the everyday work of diapering babies and nurturing their families. We are only real men when we are living out an epic hero’s journey.

This persistent mentality contributes to the culture that prevents men from coming home to their fuller selves.

(Interestingly, Saxbe interjected during Thompson’s monologue that the boring and uninteresting average father he described “sounds like a winner to me. He sounds terrific.”)

Where is the courage in men and America to simply let men be human?

David Denby ends his June 21, 2026, New Yorker essay, “Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers” like this:

“On Ogygia, Calypso makes Odysseus an extraordinary offer: if he will stay with her, she will grant him immortality and eternal youth. He refuses, choosing to return to his aging wife and to the certainty of death… He accepts death, and that’s one reason he remains essential to us. Nolan faces the challenge of creating a hero for the multiplexes who is ruthless and at times cruel. The audience faces the even greater challenge of accepting a man far more complicated than any superhero of recent years. What’s called for in successfully adapting the Odyssey is a great director and — how else can one put it? — a movie audience capable of courage.”

Watching the polarizing debate about Nolan’s movie and what Homer wrote, I cannot help but ask myself this question:

It pains me to even write this, but here we go:

Men are far more complicated than so many pundits want us to believe.

That sounds obvious at first.

Of course we’re complicated.

Every human being is.

But our modern culture often tells us a very different story.

The more I’ve studied the research — and the more I’ve listened to men tell the truth about their own lives — the harder it has become for me to tolerate this simplification about men and masculinity.

Which is why I was so excited to sit down with psychologist, researcher and author Dr. Andrew Smiler.

Andrew has spent decades studying boys, men, masculinity, dating, therapy, and identity. He’s the author of multiple books, including Challenging Casanova, and his latest, Clinical Work with Men: Understanding Masculinity in Psychotherapy, and has helped shape how psychologists think about working with male clients.

What struck me most about our conversation wasn’t simply his knowledge and experience.

It was how often he challenged assumptions that many of us rarely stop to question.

What if boys don’t become men by discovering masculinity...

but by negotiating it?

What if many of the behaviors we associate with masculinity aren’t expressions of authenticity...

but adaptations to environments boys grow up in?

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And what if those adaptations slowly become identities?

One of Andrew’s most powerful insights is that masculinity isn’t one thing.

It’s something that waxes and wanes by day, month, year, and is something boys and men are constantly negotiating — between family expectations, peer groups, popular culture, work, relationships, and their own personalities.

This wasn’t just a conversation about masculinity.

It’s a conversation about identity.

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In this conversation, Andrew and I explore:

• How boys learn what it means to “be a man”—through playgrounds, gym class, movies, locker rooms, and the subtle messages that become internal scripts.

• Why masculinity often feels like a performance—and how the roles we adopt to survive can slowly become identities we no longer question.

• The surprising research on male sexuality—including why the stereotype of the endlessly sex-seeking man describes far fewer men than our culture assumes.

• The hidden emotional needs beneath sexual behavior—and why what looks like promiscuity can sometimes be a search for connection, belonging, or security.

• The influence of pop culture, from Porky’s and The Breakfast Club to the action heroes of the 1980s, in shaping a generation’s understanding of manhood.

• Why work, status, and achievement become so central to male identity—and what happens when a man loses the role he thought defined him.

• Andrew’s groundbreaking Multifaceted Masculinity Framework, which offers a richer way to understand how men develop, negotiate, and redefine their identities throughout life.

• What therapists—and all of us—often misunderstand about men, and why seeing men as psychologically simple can become one of the biggest obstacles to helping them flourish.

• And perhaps the most important question of all: What does it actually mean to become a conscious man—not one who suppresses his desires, but one who understands them well enough to choose the life he wants to build?

My youngest, a creative artist, was trying to safely navigate the push and pull of two very separate dwellings, instead of a traditional single home. Waking to the quiet of that Sunday morning, the hope of a new day’s light just starting to warm our small apartment, I found his present and this note on our kitchen table.

My divorce, and its aftermath, is the greatest challenge my masculinity has ever faced. It was three and a half years of living in a relentless state of hyper vigilance, constantly trying not to doubt myself as a father and a good man.

Looking at my son’s gift that morning, I realized my little family was going to make it. I was going to make it too.

This Father’s Day was my Independence Day, a chance to find the real me, unhindered by accusations that I was dangerous, harmful to my children, that I was a failure as a father, husband, provider — as a man.

Not that the critics in my head and all around me were going to disappear just because of a divorce decree. Reality was still going to be a challenge to my masculinity and self-identity.

I was officially a single dad. I’d left behind a four-bedroom, 2,400-square-foot center hall colonial for an 800-square-foot apartment. My children occupied our home’s two bedrooms, and I slept on a futon in the living room.

A business I had purchased was in financial ruin. I lost everything I invested in it. And none of the corporations I was applying to for lucrative marketing and communications roles seemed to think I was relevant.

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Things change. Life goes on.

I purposely hung my son’s painting in that apartment’s hallway. Those words, floating in outer space, were to be a daily reminder about how the universe was challenging me. The soul of the man I was — and not the man others said I was — could only be found in how I responded to these cosmic shifts.

That’s what Tim McGraw understood when he decided to include “Things Change” on his 2001 album Set This Circus Down.

Firstly, McGraw saw the changes happening in himself.

For six years, he had been riding high, the black hat with tight abs carrying the banner of a new generation of cowboy crooners. He was a celebrity, a heart throb, and winning music awards. He had won the heart of and married Faith Hill, a woman gracing the covers of popular magazines. He also was the father of two girls, with a third daughter on the way.

Fame and success had so destabilized McGraw’s identity that he was leaning on alcohol to buffer his lack of self-esteem. (He wouldn’t go completely sober for another seven years.)

Secondly, McGraw was very purposeful about collaborating on “Things Change” with the songwriters Marv Green, Chris Lindsey, Bill Luther and Aimee Mayo, to address the criticism being leveled at singers like him and Faith Hill.

At the time, a group of vocal writers, singers and composers were decrying how the injection of rock and roll and pop styles was supposedly destroying country music.

McGraw refused to back down and instead used the song to remind anyone paying attention that country music had a long history of innovators like Hank Williams, Elvis Presley and members of the Outlaw Country movement of the 1960s and 70s, who challenged tradition with their own unique talents and perspectives.

“Well they like to call them hippies,
Outlaws with guitars.
But they brought a little poetry
To the honky tonks and bars.”

Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and “outlaws” like Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings, didn’t see themselves as change agents in the country music world. They were individuals trying to manifest their personal and creative integrity inside a rigid system.

Up until my divorce, I spent my adult life complying with the narrow expectations that earned me my “man card.”

It wasn’t until I was truly listening to “Things Change” in my family’s new, much smaller home, that the real Richard showed up again.

I saw him in how I decorated the place, the holidays I hosted in my home, the meals I prepared for me and my family.

After a few months, it all started to feel instinctual. I stopped doubting myself. No longer did I need to ask anyone for permission about how to be me. For the first time, I felt at home, in my home, in my skin, in my soul.

I felt a kinship with Tim McGraw when I heard him sing:

“Now some say it’s too country,

Some say it’s a little rock n roll.

But it’s just good music,

If you can feel it in your soul.”

THIS should be the guiding principle for men trying to face the conformity demanded by masculine norms.

• Do you genuinely feel what you are saying, doing, thinking, rises from a place deeper than how you’ve been socialized?

• Does the life you live feel true to you, or something you are performing for everyone else? Some one else?

So many men today struggle with the changes happening in our society which are having a very tangible impact on our ability to live up to traditional masculine traits and behaviors.

Whether it’s the workplaces occupying so many of our waking hours, the economy and professions we trained for (that may not want us anymore), or what is expected of us in relationships and emotional expression, in the end, the only way we are going to be happy and truly flourish is if “we feel it in our soul.”

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What will be your “ad-lib fade?”

I have never counted how many times the two words “things change” are repeated in this song, but the one occasion we all should be especially sensitive to is when it follows the question:

“Don’t you know they change?”

Men are especially sensitive to changes involving status, identity, role clarity, and masculine legitimacy. We adapt more successfully when change is framed as competence expansion and self-authorship rather than moral inadequacy.

But the fact of the matter is, male identity, roles and status, are subject to how our world is constantly changing, just like music genres.

“It doesn’t really matter.
It’s always been the same.
Life goes on, things change”

We all lose when we resist change that builds on the past and broadens horizons where we have the opportunity to flourish.

If we cannot honestly answer that “Yes, I know things are constantly changing. I accept that things change. And I accept my responsibility to maximize everyone’s ability to adapt to those changes, especially my own,” then we are doomed to suffer individually and collectively.

There are so many verses in this song that resonate with me, especially as I was living through my first post-divorce Father’s Day. But the ones that mean the most to me are at the very end of “Things Change.”

McGraw is improvising underneath the background vocals, what musicians call an “ad-lib fade.” Gene Miller and Chris Rodriguez are singing over and over, “Things change,” while steel and electric guitars fill the same frequency range as the vocals.

You have to listen closely to hear McGraw put his personal stamp on the song and its message, telling everyone — critics and supporters — that he is committed to evolving, as long as he can feel it in his soul.

“They can’t keep me from changing.

Gonna keep on, keep on, keep on changing.

Cause things change.”

We Americans kid ourselves that “we’ve come a long way” when it comes to freeing men from outdated expectations. I have written about this repeatedly over the last two years of this Substack, including just last week, on Father’s Day.

For so many men, these tangible boundaries lead to everything we are supposedly concerned about — male deaths of despair, suicide, loneliness, opting out of family building and relationships, etc.

I have one last question to add to Tim McGraw’s: When are we as a society going to allow our expectations of men to catch up with the changes in our society that prevent men from meeting those expectations?

Life will go on, with or without our answers, or the choices all of us make about masculinity.

I’m with Tim.

I’m gonna keep on changin’.

On a surface level, Thompson’s omission is of small consequence. But when you consider how easy it is for America to devalue fathers, we all should be concerned about what Thompson’s views mean to the momentum we have gained raising more active, loving dads.

On “The Gray Area,” host Sean Illing asked Thompson to explain what unfolded during the opening of Thompson’s Feb. 5, 2026, interview with Scott Galloway on the “Prof G Podcast.”

Thompson had announced to Galloway how, after the birth of his second child, the interview marked the official end of his paternity leave.

After a few comments about what his experience was like, Galloway leapt into a long monologue about “the uselessness” of fathers in the first few weeks, months and years of a child’s life.

(I published a Feb. 22, 2026, Substack about the episode. Galloway has since tried to claw back his comments, claiming he was only joking around. In a March 15, 2026, Mindful Masculinity essay, I analyzed Galloway’s response to the widespread criticism he received.)

With the table set, Illing followed up by asking Thompson:

“Do you think we have a coherent modern conception of fatherhood in this culture right now? It seems very confused right now and I think some of that confusion has led to a lot of very interesting things in the discourse.”

Thompson responded by first paraphrasing what Galloway said to him in February about how “there’s nothing for the dad to do” on paternity leave other than taking some of the stress off of his wife. A better use of a father’s time, Galloway said, is getting back to the office to keep a paycheck rolling in.

“I like Scott a lot,” Thompson said, “but I disagree strongly with that sentiment.”

“Great!” I thought. Here’s a millennial challenging a boomer who hasn’t kept up with the times.

I was wrong.

This is what Thompson told Illing:

“Paternity leave is not just for men. It’s also for women in heterosexual households, and for children, right. It’s really nice to have two parents home for the child. It’s really nice for the mom to have a dedicated deputy, because like raising a kid, if listeners, viewers haven’t done it, like weirdly requires just like an absurd amount of… like, I mean, just bottles and bottles and towels and little parts that go into bottles and pumps and parts that go into pumps. And like then like the mom sometimes is just like in a bed for a long time and she like she needs her coffee and oatmeal, and ‘Can I have a diet coke?’ And ‘I’m pinned here because the baby’s feeding. Could you refill my water?’”

At no point during the podcast did Thompson talk about the emotional benefits to a man and his child when a dad dedicates time for quiet, close contact with his baby. Never did he talk about the known physiological benefits men and babies receive when dads nurture their newborns the way moms do.

Thompson’s best effort was a vague reference to paternity leave being “great for men. I think it’s great for kids,” with no further detail about how it’s “great.”

In fact, Thompson leapt from those two brief sentences straight back to the utility a father provides to a mother. “…it’s absolutely fantastic for moms.”

He then trailed off into a discussion about the wage disparity between “prime age men and women in the workforce,” when women take maternity leave.

“And if you put men and women on relatively equal footing, you might reverse a bit of that motherhood penalty.”

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Dads are people too

Look. I am not denying the wonderful benefits to mom and newborn provided by a father’s functional support. But for more than a decade, there has been a growing body of research from people like Dr. Darby Saxbe documenting how important direct caregiving is to a father’s biological and mental health.

That same direct caregiving is incredibly important to the development of his child. We know today that babies learn their father’s distinct smell and his voice. With consistent engagement, they learn his movement patterns, emotional tone and regulation style. And all of this contributes to baby and dad building strong bonds that last.

Meanwhile, a father’s feeling fully embodied as a dad rises from a wide variety of activities, like touch, soothing, carrying a baby, nighttime care, face-to-face interaction, and responding to distress.

Without this kind of regular direct interaction, a man’s caregiving circuitry develops more slowly, or could stall. His confidence may unnecessarily lag, and his attunement to a child’s emotional cues may become less intuitive.

As a result, a father may begin to adopt a mindset that he is peripheral to parent bonding, that he is less needed emotionally –- something Thompson himself related to in the original Prof G Podcast interview when he told Galloway that a newborn father’s job “is to be the perfect life sustaining deputy to your wife.”

This can then lead to men becoming hesitant about intervening in direct child care because they are intimidated by the mother-baby bond and feel dependent on gaining “permission” from mom to perform child care, gradually weakening paternal embodiment.

If we are going to fight for more paternity leave for dads, what we need are commentators like Thompson and Illing encouraging men to use that time to its fullest — like holding a crying newborn at 3 a.m., so dad can learn:

• “I have the power to soothe.”

• “I can remain confidently calm when my child is in distress.”

• “My child knows me.”

In so many ways, I found Thompson’s “Gray Area” conversation more disturbing than his interview with Galloway, because while he and Illing are progressive millennials, they’re defining the primary role of fathers of newborns like it’s 1955.

• “I’m useful.”

• “I show up.”

• “I handle things.”

• “I support the family.”

In fact, Thompson demonstrated more of his disconnection with the full emotional experience of being a dad when he recently hosted Saxbe on his own podcast, “Plain English.”

At one point in the conversation, Thompson was wondering whether the reason why men weren’t generally more dedicated fathers was because it simply isn’t interesting enough. Speaking about how dads are portrayed most frequently in movies and television, Thompson said:

“And feel like it’s a challenge maybe to screenwriters and um and cultural producers everywhere to make that figure interesting rather than to make him seem like some kind of kind but somewhat denuded male representation of masculinity that just is like a little bit milquetoast, and not that interesting. Like he changes diapers and makes a couple hundred thousand a year and goes on one vacation and like that’s actually quite boring. Like… that actually sounds very basic rather than sounding like a hero in a story that has some kind of core tension.”

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Wanted: Men who feel fatherly love deeply

As we celebrate Father’s Day 2026 (which also marks the second anniversary of the Mindful Masculinity Substack), is this really how far progressive male public commentators have come? Does fatherhood have to be a hero’s journey for a man to feel attracted to the experience, to dedicate himself to living it fully?

Good grief.

I raised three children. I diapered and bathed them every chance my work schedule allowed. Walked endlessly around the first floor of our home soothing colicky babies at 3 a.m., so the rest of the house sleeping upstairs wouldn’t be woken up. I regularly read them bedtime stories. Watched endless episodes of Dragon Tales when I was dead tired. Helped them complete their homework after a ten-hour workday and four-hour roundtrip commute.

Were those stressful times sometimes? Yes!

Was I so tired sometimes that I had to grit my teeth to push through? Yes!

But those moments make up the bulk of being a parent, so get used to it.

The truth is it was all interesting. Seeing your ten-month old daughter exploring the tactile sense of water in her bath fascinated me. Watching a child grow increasingly capable of completing a shape sorter puzzle can be thrilling.

And there is no man more courageous than the one who looks upon the face of his sleeping child and recommits to keeping her safe and helping her thrive.

In the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life,” George Bailey grew up chasing heroic dreams. After traveling the world, he was going to get a degree from college and then build airfields, “skyscrapers a hundred stories high,” and bridges “a mile long.”

He never got the chance to chase those dreams.

Yet when he is confronted with the greatest crisis of his life, personal scandal, financial catastrophe, jailtime, he realizes that his boring life was pretty damn wonderful after all.

He comes to understand that every mundane day he finished being a decent husband and a father made a difference.

I don’t find that life uninteresting or boring. I think it’s something to be proud of.

What Derek Thompson’s podcast comments show me is the importance of educating men (and a lot of women) about the truth of fatherhood, especially given how society still rigidly boxes men in to functional fatherly roles.

Mindful Masculinity wants to give dads permission to just be humans who love and care for their kids and enjoy everything the greatest job in the world reveals to them every damn boring day.

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We celebrate you all and thank you for the work you put in to making a difference in your child’s life, while giving your own life greater meaning.

To help you get more out of life as a man (and as a father if you are one), Mindful Masculinity is launching a 4-week, live program this July, where men can collectively explore the messages we receive about masculinity and decide which beliefs and traits we want more of in our lives.

We call it The Self-Governed Man, a combination of virtual live conversations, weekly challenges and tools that help men ground themselves in ways of thinking and living that promote their own flourishing, and the flourishing of others in their lives.

Over four weeks, we will examine and help you think about:

1. Today’s landscape for men and how gender norms influence the beliefs we carry inside, as well as how those beliefs can manifest in our words and actions.

2. The vocabulary men apply to our thoughts and beliefs, especially those that encourage self-judgement and those that open greater horizons for flourishing.

3. How we regulate or suppress our emotions and reactions in situations that probe our feelings about what it means to be a man.

4. The broader opportunities for men to define manhood beyond dominant themes like provision and protection.

To enroll in the program, simply click on the button below, and we will email you with more details about the program and how to participate.

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Sports is one of a handful of venues that provide us a chance to watch men in an authentic real-time moment, reaching for words that express their emotions. Unfortunately, for so many men, publicly finding the words for our most vulnerable thoughts is like stepping back to a masculinity three-point line, and sinking our shot — with nothing but net.

Brunson literally could find no words as he stood on the court, just minutes after his team’s incredible fifth game performance in the San Antonio Spurs’ arena. Three times the reporter tried to extract something she thought her viewers would connect with, but Brunson was unable to satisfy her queries.

“Take your time. Take your time,” she offered. Time would not help Brunson.

“Waited a long time for this. I got no words. Everything I ever dreamed of,” he replied.

She immediately tried again. “Just you’re obviously feeling a lot of emotions. Can you tell me just what you’re feeling?”

“I don’t know what…” he stammered, trying to hold back tears. “I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’m just like, I’m in awe. I don’t know.”

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What strikes me first is that unlike common stereotypes about men, Brunson is not emotionally disconnected or shut down. What we see here is precisely the opposite. He’s so flooded with emotions that language eludes him.

Take the one noun he is able to conjure up — “awe.”

Many researchers describe awe as a secondary emotion that occurs when someone encounters something so vast or significant that their existing mental models struggle to absorb it.

What tends to flow underneath are a host of potential primary emotions, including relief, gratitude, joy, pride, vindication, disbelief and accomplishment.

The problem isn’t that Brunson isn’t feeling one or more of these emotions. Too many of them have arrived simultaneously.

When pressed again about what he is feeling, Brunson deflects to the actions he and his teammates took to win.

“Whenever, whenever someone counts us out, we find a way to come back and do something about it.” He spoke about his confidence, his work ethic, and all of the time he had spent practicing alone in a gym, to hone his skills.

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This is often how men narrate emotional experience – not through internal states but through concrete events, behaviors, and achievements.

The reporter eventually asked Brunson about what it felt like to share the victory with his dad.

For several seconds, Brunson was completely unable to speak.

He looked off into the distance, his lower lip trembling.

“We can see it,” the reporter interjected. “That’s it. We can see it.”

This is the emotional center of the interview. Brunson is confronted with his emotional attachment to his father, a former NBA player who had a less illustrious career than his son.

Finding the meaning in his emotions requires journeying down distinct and different neural pathways than the ones Brunson’s brain fashioned that helped him talk about all of the practices and preparation that led to the team’s victory and specifically his own contributions.

Winning a basketball championship is a spectacular achievement. Sharing that moment with a parent who helped shape you, supported you through your pre-professional development, attended your professional games, is an infinitely more difficult task for a man.

Not because men don’t feel emotional about seeing how the pieces of our life’s puzzle come together in our answers. It’s because presenting that completed puzzle publicly is a hell of a lot more vulnerable.

Compare Brunson’s responses up until now with how quickly and easily he was able to answer the reporter’s final question, at no loss for words:

“You said you’ve been doubted your whole life. Too small. Not this, not that. But what have you, what has this team shown about heart?”

“We’re going to find a way. Whatever you put in front of us, we’re going to find a way. Doesn’t matter. Does not matter whatsoever. But we’re going to find a way every single time you step on this court. Every, every time. Every time.”

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Time doesn’t offer Brunson an assist

Later, at the post-game press conference, after Brunson had more time to process the rush of his physical reactions and convert those feelings to words, he still struggled.

Right off the bat, the first question is a request for emotional expression — how does it feel to no longer have to think of proceeding through the NBA Finals one game at a time?

Brunson’s answer is not much different from his on-court interview. We’re back in those lonely gyms, watching him practice, practice, practice.

“Words can’t describe it, but I’ll say, I put a lot of time and effort into trying to be the best player I can be to try and help a team win.”

He wrapped up this answer quickly, expressing how he was grateful for his teammates, the Knicks organization and his family.

Then comes the question posing the greatest challenge to any man’s masculine vulnerability.

“Out of curiosity, between the final buzzer and now, have you cried at all? And if so, yes. Why?”

First off, the whole positioning with the preface of “Out of curiosity” softens the intrusiveness of the query, especially given that a man is asking this question to another man.

The reporter is signaling:

• “I’m not trying to embarrass you.”

• “I’m kind of interested.”

Now look at how Brunson responds:

“The good… I… the final buzzer I walked right to half court, shook Mitch Johnson’s hand (the Spurs’ coach), and then turned around. My dad was out there… and then felt emotional from that point on. And then I just remember Josh [Hart, the Knicks small forward] talking to my ear and him just saying like, ‘we did it, we did it.’ And then that was emotional for good, like five, ten minutes. And then the excitement started to kick in.”

For the most part, Brunson is factually describing what happened. He avoids the direct question: “Have you cried at all,” and barely touches on his feelings by labeling his immediate post-game experience with the ambiguous adjective, “emotional.”

Most revealing, when answering a question about how much pressure he felt being named by Knicks management as “the number one guy” on the team (in terms of salary), Brunson injects here his memories of his dad as an NBA journeyman player

(In 2024, Brunson re-signed with the Knicks, passing on the chance to be a full free agent a year later. This choice essentially said, “I want the security of a guaranteed salary and the chance to win with THIS group of players.” The decision likely cost him more than $100 million in future earnings.)

“My dad being on 8 or 9, on guaranteed contracts throughout his career and not knowing where you’re going to get cut, when a team is going to move on from you, while your, your family is on the east coast and you’re wherever you are in the country, that’s pressure. Working out three times a day in the summertime and watching him push himself just to get a training camp deal. That’s pressure. I’m very fortunate to be in the position I am, and I like to think I work pretty hard. And so, when an opportunity presented itself like it did today, I just trust my work and... if we win, we win.”

There is so much to unpack in this answer about how it relates to having his father on the court to hug in those glorious minutes after the Knicks won. As a man who has had a father similarly dedicated to being a provider, I think what Brunson is leaving unsaid here is his admiration for his dad’s commitment to his family’s financial well-being at the cost of spending time with his loved ones.

Those are powerful emotions, and perhaps why, when asked about his father during the on-court interview, Brunson’s masculine armor rendered him speechless.

Jalen Brunson is an athletic outlier, but he fits squarely inside the norm of what we know about men and emotional expression based on the research of people like Ron Levant and Niobe Way.

Men do not lack emotion.

What they are lacking is the practice sessions that strengthen their “emotional muscle memory,” far enough that standing at a pinnacle professional event, they can share their unvarnished feelings, with complete disregard for how their responses may challenge what they were taught about masculinity.

Jalen Brunson is an amazing young man. I admire his humility and character more than his talent — though he is a pretty damn good basketball player.

I hope that in private, everyone who loves him gets the chance to hear him express himself freely.

Opening my eyes, I saw how the wall of glass in front and above us produced a photo double exposure — the musicians and audience, the subtly illuminated Temple of Dendur and reflecting pool inside, superimposed on the city lights and Fifth Avenue buildings outside.

A world-renowned flutist, Robison was ending a 20-year stint of performances at The Metropolitan Museum of Art with a reprise of some of my favorite Vivaldi compositions.

Moved by the sights and sounds, I looked at my companion and gestured unobtrusively upward to the atrium glass.

She looked, smiled, then nodded. She had been taking it all in too.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer might have said what I was feeling resulted from me recognizing the abstract dynamics of my own emotional striving.

In his 1819 book “The World as Will and Representation,” Schopenhauer proposed that while other art forms mirrored worldly objects (like a landscape painting), music is a direct copy of human will — our inner drives and desires, conflicts and emotional currents.

Several years before that evening at The Met, I had stopped striving for most of my own aspirations and ambitions. I had conditioned myself to relegate them as unimportant in the grand scheme of masculinity and being a man.

One of my most visceral memories happened while driving to meet another couple for dinner. I told my wife I was interested in going back to college. I was thinking about becoming a psychologist, specializing in helping infertile couples.

Having finally made sense of how our journey as a young couple through infertility doctors, hospitals, repeated monthly grief, impacted our marriage, I felt I could make a difference in other couples’ lives.

Also, I explained to her how compared to my corporate roles in Manhattan, opening a local practice would allow me to be closer to our three children as they grew up, and have more control over my work schedule.

Before we arrived at the restaurant, my wife made every effort to convince me this was a bad idea. To make matters worse, a few weeks later, she presented to me that she was thinking of going back to school to get a master’s in psychology, so she could treat couples suffering from infertility.

I wondered how conscious she was of parroting back my dream, just weeks after denying it to me.

This wasn’t the first time the core of who I wanted to be had been dismissed. During the early years of our marriage, I had turned down job offers in Atlanta, Austin, and Chicago, because it was more important that she remain in New York. Before we had children, she also rejected my interest in teaching middle or high school as impractical.

Now, in 2006, and at 42 years old, I was only too keen about the passing of time, and the rapidly closing window of opportunity to live the life I wanted for me.

My marital relationship was like a prison sentence. I had unconsciously remanded myself to a work-release program five days a week in a corporate office that stifled my spirit. Romantically, I was sentenced to solitary confinement.

Just like the man in “Take Me Away from Here,” composed by Steve Bogard and Jeffrey David Stevens, the eighth track from Tim McGraw’s Set This Circus Down.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped inside myself.
Spinning wheels up and down, round and round.
Going nowhere, just like everybody else.
With no touch, no sight, no sound.”

At the same time that I was protecting and providing for my family, my home was growing increasingly cluttered, while our finances never seemed to improve. On a Friday afternoon in March 2006, an argument erupted when I tried to organize our home’s first-floor coat closet and retake control of our household spending.

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Our marriage finally imploded under the weight of years of resentment and disconnection.

The following Monday, we started marriage counseling with a therapist a friend of my wife’s had recommended.

Then the bombardment of calls at work began, my wife relentlessly pleading to talk about our marriage, despite the fact that we were already engaged in therapy and epic, late-night talks in the kitchen.

I warned her that work and my cubicle were neither the appropriate nor private places to discuss these things — not to mention that she was making it difficult for me to concentrate, which could jeopardize my job, the sole source of our family’s income.

One morning, after an extremely long and difficult phone call, the woman who sat next to me walked over.

“This is really awkward,” she said, “but I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation. I just wanted you to know, I’m really sorry you’re going through this.”

We were barely acquaintances at the time, so I thanked her and promised to be quieter if these calls persisted.

This woman had only joined the company a few months before the day she overheard that phone call. She worked in another part of the larger organization we both served, so our interactions were primarily cordial “hellos” and “good mornings.”

Our friendship started to grow from that brief conversation. We talked more often, about work, our pride for our Italian heritage, our love for U2 and Van Morrison.

We discovered we both enjoyed the emotional and physical benefits of meditation, mindfulness and running. We did battle over the beauty of our Catholic experiences, and our desire to gain a greater understanding of love, unity and forgiveness — without the Church’s baggage from sin, sexuality and rigid gender conformity.

Eventually, over occasional lunches, we mutually disclosed our life’s mistakes and how we had integrated what we learned from them into the woman and man she and I had become. Even more importantly, we acknowledged what the other person said they sought to be.

Over the next year, we became close friends. During this time, she was pursued by several male co-workers. I felt she was attractive, but at no point did I consider her a love interest. I was still a married man, a father of three.

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Ritornello

One year before I met my cubemate, my wife and I had attended one of Robison’s concerts at The Met as part of a romantic weekend I had planned in the city.

That night (indeed the entire weekend), felt like my wife was going through the motions, making an obligatory visit to a convicted felon.

At the concert, I never saw her smile. We didn’t clasp hands or lean in close to each other. My heart stared wistfully at the orchestra’s joyous notes floating above us, unable to join them. During intermission and the cab ride back to our hotel, we didn’t talk about the music or its inspiring setting.

Despite this experience, or maybe because of it, two years later, when I received an email from the Met that Robison would be ending her musical residency with two final Vivaldi concerts at the Temple, I bought two tickets.

I asked my wife to go again, but she stated matter-of-factly, “No. Done that,” leaving me scrambling to find a replacement for her seat.

For weeks, I ran through a list of people I thought might be inclined to the emotional adventure I was striving to experience, until I heard my cubemate listening to classical music.

There was excitement on her face when I asked her. She insisted she pay for her ticket.

The night before the concert, I told my wife that my cubemate would be joining me. My wife stormed out of the room without saying a word. That evening never came up again.

Attending Robison’s performance that second time was liberating. For two hours, I soared above the prosaic, feeling like I could almost touch my dreams. All because the woman sitting next to me, wasn’t with ME, but there WITH me.

During the intermission, we talked about the reflections in the glass, the pieces we had heard, and the physical vigor Robison injected into her flute playing. I could feel us connecting in a way I hadn’t felt with another person, male or female, for years.

Psychologists call this “active constructive responding (ACR),” engaging authentically and positively with someone. These types of conversations naturally strengthen a relationship because the other person senses a reflection of themselves. They feel seen and heard when you are validating emotions and eliciting their deeper thoughts through open-ended questions.

Research shows that practicing this type of engaged communication builds trust, emotional intimacy, and rapport, because a person feels deeply valued and safe.

“Take Me Away from Here” opens with these lines:

“My body burns like there’s a desert deep in me.
A thirsty soul so unsatisfied.
But there you are, like a river to the sea.
The one chance I have to change my life.”

That second concert changed me and changed my life. On my way home that night, I apologized to the reflection of the lonely man who once sat somberly in that very same room two years earlier.

I left The Met that evening knowing that I held the power to form a meaningful connection with a woman, and more importantly, reconnect with me.

It was like taking my first gulps of water after crossing a desert, proud that I was the one who never stopped moving forward.

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Learning to love myself

Last week, I wrote about how there was no “replacement woman” in the song “Angry All the Time,” and that there wasn’t one in my marriage either.

Despite my relationship with this woman, in fact, because of her, I believe this more today than ever.

My cubemate and I never kissed. We never held hands, expressed love for each other, or talked about a future together. In fact, we eventually confronted our growing fondness and talked about it like two mature adults.

After careful consideration, including a talk with my parish priest, a personal friend at the time, I decided to go no-contact.

My work colleague and I never spoke again. Over the weeks and years that passed, the dissolution of that relationship became easier as I became increasingly aware of how much I loved the man I was striving to be.

Training for and completing eight marathons were no less joyful because I didn’t have a woman to share them with. I attended concerts — like U2 — with a male friend, and didn’t enjoy it less because the person sitting next to me wasn’t a woman.

I came to realize that any journey to “replace” my wife was a fool’s errand if I didn’t first replace the man who attracted women who couldn’t engage actively and constructively with my aspirations and ambitions.

Today, I share my life with a woman who appreciates the visual and audio beauty that sends my heart soaring. She engages in similar life questions, cares about my aspirations and my longing for meaning. Together, we strive to co-create moments where our hopes and dreams are achievable.

This man is quite different from the one who 20 years ago heard desperation in this lyric.

“Push my heart so I can fly again.”

Today, I think he’s worth every minute of my time, every ounce of my energy, and all of my love.

We talked about happy family memories.

I tried to comfort them, but I could not comfort myself.

I hid my fear and misery underneath the stoic armor I had hammered and polished over decades of being a man, so they wouldn’t sense my missing scenes from a movie of my life, flashing before my eyes:

• a loving face smiling back at me over morning coffee

• her head pressed to my shoulder on a lazy Sunday park bench

• impromptu Salsa steps on kitchen tiles as dinner simmered on the stove

I had to face the fact that I would die never having had the love affair of a lifetime.

The shock of that notion jolted me awake. Realizing I was on the couch and not my deathbed, I rolled over to find my watch on the den floor. It was a little after midnight.

I was in my early 40s, with three beautiful children whom I loved, and who loved me. My job was relatively interesting. We lived in a wonderful, four-bedroom, center hall colonial in a bucolic part of the lower Hudson Valley.

And my four-hour roundtrip commute enabled me to build a warm network of friends who led me back to my love for running, happy holiday gatherings and periodic conversations that reminded me “I was a good man.”

Yet every night I was making a bed on the couch in our den. More than a year before that dream (nightmare?), I knew I could no longer endure another evening of being disregarded and alone with the woman I still wanted to love.

I tried desperately to break down the king-sized indifference in our marital bed, but I could not scale the wall my wife threw up every evening, when she would turn off her light, turn her back to me, and not even call out “Good night.”

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The chasm in our bed, our lives, and our hearts, had widened long before the kids came along. In fact, I could feel it broadening during the nearly five years we endured being infertile.

The pain and loneliness crescendoed that night in 2001 when my mother asked my brother and I to take dad off life support.

After the business of death was legally completed at the hospital, my large family met back at mom and dad’s small, two-bedroom Glen Cove condo, exhausted emotionally, mentally and physically.

Looking around the living room, I couldn’t help but notice each of my sisters-in-law comforting my brothers. My wife had chosen not to be at my side.

What I pined for was the partner Tim McGraw sang about in the Set This Circus Down track, “Why We Said Goodbye.”

“And I remember how you held me, The night my father died.
I didn’t have to tell you, I just broke down and cried.”

Things got worse at my father’s funeral mass and the interment at the cemetery. My wife was physically distant and emotionally cool. I distinctly remember my five-year-old daughter accompanying me as I placed a rose on dad’s casket and walked away.

Years later, I mustered the courage to ask my wife about why she acted the way she did. She told me she was upset with how I had shushed our 18-month-old in the church pew during the funeral service.

The lights dimmed long before love did

My loneliness and despair grew so profound in the succeeding years that in early 2005, I initiated marriage counseling.

During our first session, the therapist asked us to talk about a fond memory of the other person from when we first came together.

I told the story about how, the winter prior to our wedding, we had escaped to a Poconos resort. After dinner one evening, we went nighttime snowmobiling. Sitting behind my fiancé, I made a point of emoting thrill and fear as she steered us with wild abandon through the winding forest course, over moguls that sometimes sent us airborne. She responded with girlish giggles, a sound I had fallen in love with when we had first started dating.

“I want to hear that laugh again,” I told the therapist, fighting back my tears.

Listening on my iPod to Tim McGraw’s version of Bruce Robison’s “Angry All the Time” during my solo marathon training runs, I often found myself back in that therapist’s office.

“God it hurts me, to think of you,
For the light in your eyes was gone.”

In her foundational book Hold Me Tight, Dr. Sue Johnson described this phase of our marriage as the pursue-withdraw cycle. I was pursuing a reconciliation in our marriage, because I craved connection and closeness.

However, my wife not only wouldn’t pursue me back, she took opportunities big and small to hurt me.

In June 2006, when I returned home from my third marathon (Vermont City in Burlington, VT), I found that my Phoenix and New York City marathon medals were gone from the baker’s rack in the kitchen where I had hung them.

When I confronted my wife about their disappearance, she offered that perhaps one of the kids had taken them. I knew better.

Less than a year later, during a long and difficult late-night argument, hushed so as not to wake the kids, I put it to my wife.

“I’m never going to see my marathon medals again, am I.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head disconsolately.

Seeing her dipping her toes into a resentment that sought to erase my accomplishments, I knew there was no saving us. I could see past her anger to even more difficult issues I had no ability to resolve.

For safety and self-preservation, I withdrew too.

With both of us emotionally shutdown and conflict averse, I entered an unbearable stalemate of isolation and barely civil communication that made the new husband in my wedding photos unrecognizable.

“I never quite made it back, to the one I was before.”

I hung on for another seven years before she filed for divorce. When I was served with papers, I felt tremendous relief. Finally, I could envision an end to the chronic emotional dysregulation and relationship burnout.

That is what makes this song so painful.

It captures a relationship where anger is not a deafening explosion, but an ambient hum from an overloaded circuit buried somewhere inside the walls encasing a couple.

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Who wants to read a man’s divorce memoir?

Writing about the darkest days of my marriage has never been easy for me. I don’t think I would have written this particular Substack if not for the memories Tim McGraw’s song so readily resurfaced.

Male divorce memoirs are an unpopular literary genre. America is much more interested in women revealing the most intimate details of their marriages and divorces, for a number of reasons I will write about later this year.

A principal reason, I think, is that our society is inclined to believe that husbands are more likely to be primarily responsible for the dissolution of marriages, and that it’s the wives who hang on sacrificially to the end — for the sake of the children.

This has caused me to both think that no one would believe my lived marital experiences, nor would they be interested to explore them with me.

Maybe that’s why I clung so desperately to Bruce Robison’s lyrics, as that four-bedroom colonial began to feel more like a prison than a home. His words gave ballast to my thoughts and emotions, pitching and rolling through the storm of my marriage’s final years.

Robison and McGraw told me, “you’re not the only man who feels this way.”

There is no replacement woman in “Angry All the Time.” Nor was there in my marriage.

There was no drinking. I had banished those demons months before my wife appeared on a dance floor when I least expected to meet “the one.”

There was no “I’m better off without you” choruses to blast at full volume, cruising down a highway.

The absence of those tropes matters — to a man’s healthy separation from a long-term relationship, and to my divorce memoir. Mindful men aren’t so selfish and self-serving as to think they’re perfect.

That’s why the harmonizing vocals of Faith Hill, McGraw’s wife, are so poignant in the song’s chorus (and a nod to Robison’s wife Kelly Willis who sang the same lines on the 1998 original recording.)

“You ain’t the only one who feels like this world’s left you far behind,
I don’t know why you gotta be angry all the time.”

The couple in this song are trapped in the same house, sharing the same sense of alienation and bitterness about how their lives have turned out, but are incapable of comforting each other.

Comfort is a crucial mental and emotional benefit for men and women in a deeply intimate relationship. James Coan, an affective neuroscientist, clinical psychologist and psychology professor, has studied how the specific touch of the hand of an intimate partner, one with whom we have a healthy and contented relationship with, can effectively reduce stress and anxiety.

He demonstrated that while a loving partner can provide us with advice, solutions, or even words during life’s difficult challenges — like a parent’s death — their true power is simply helping our nervous system feel less alone.

Peeling off the anger

“Angry All the Time” is not really a song about anger. It’s a song about emotional exhaustion wearing anger’s wardrobe — unresolved resentment, depression masked as irritability, despair and loneliness from living with an emotionally unreachable partner.

For men, who often struggle to name and label their emotions and identify the source of their feelings, the song can also act like a marriage counselor, helping him decode the dynamics of his relationship.

America needs more intimately honest male divorce memoirs if we are ever going to help men manage their feelings and their relationships before they emotionally walk out of their marriage doors.

Until then, I suggest putting “Angry All the Time” on repeat. It might help you feel less alone.

After a rapid deterioration in his health those last few months, leading to a series of emergency hospitalizations, my mother asked my brother and I to assist the hospital this time in taking my father off of life support. I told her I would stay with dad until he took his last breath.

A year earlier, three top-flight East Coast cardiologists had told dad, my mom and me that even if his second valve surgery was a success, we would add only 12 months to my father’s life. Those precious months, they warned, would be physically and emotionally debilitating.

Dad survived the surgery, only to fulfill their predictions.

Releasing his left hand, which I held throughout his final 30 or so minutes, I was grateful that my dad was finally at rest.

I also noticed I wasn’t able to cry.

Looking back now, I think I had done my crying for dad while he was still alive, mostly on those mournful crosstown evening walks alone a year earlier, from his post-surgery ICU bed at NYU Langone Hospital to the PATH station at 33^rd Street and 6^th Avenue.

It took dad two months to gain enough strength to be discharged from NYU after his valve surgery. During his recovery, once a week I would leave my job in lower Manhattan and head up to NYU by 4:30 to see my father, usually on the days that my mother, siblings or other relatives weren’t able to get into the city to sit with him.

I could squeeze out about four hours of quiet time with dad and still make the 9:50 p.m. train home to the lower Hudson Valley — if I speed-walked the one mile from the hospital to the PATH train.

On those walks, I would replay my conversations with dad, about fatherhood, about all he had learned about being a man. That’s when the tears would start. It was hard crying on the city streets where strangers could see me. I guess my mask of masculinity wasn’t thick enough.

So, when dad died, I was prepared to let him go. I had made peace with the important things between us.

Tears of loss

That’s not the case with so many men and their fathers, including the subject in the second verse of Tim McGraw’s “Grown Men Don’t Cry.” McGraw fought with his label to make this the first single released from the 2001 album Set This Circus Down.

“Keep having this dream about my old man,
I’m ten years old and he’s holding my hand.
We’re talking on the front porch watching the sun go down.

But it was just a dream, he was a slave to his job and he couldn’t be around.
So many things I want to say to him,
I just placed a rose on his grave, and I talked to the wind.”

These lyrics were written by Steve Seskin, who co-wrote the song with Tom Douglas.

In 2019, when Seskin and Douglas talked about the story behind this song with Bart Herbison, executive director of Nashville Songwriters Association International, Seskin explained that he and his father didn’t speak to each other for almost three years when Seskin was in his early 20s and had moved to California to start his career.

Then, just when they were going to have that “let’s mend fences” conversation, Seskin’s dad died from a heart attack.

“I stood at my father’s grave in Queens, New York, and had the mend fences talk that we had never had in real life,” Seskin told Herbison. “So that was the verse that killed me.”

According to Seskin, the verse “hit [McGraw] in a way” too. The biological son of major league pitcher Tug McGraw, Tim McGraw navigated much of his life managing Tug McGraw’s desire to keep his son at a distance.

Herbison opened the conversation disclosing to Seskin and Douglas how he “cried a little bit” when he first heard them perform the song live at the Bluebird Café in Nashville, TN, a few years after it was released.

“The second verse in the song is the story of me and my late father,” Herbison told the songwriting duo. The lyrics were a catalyst resulting in father and son “getting reacquainted” — enough so that Herbison had no regrets when his father passed.

When I was a small boy, my dad was a slave to his job too — a self-employed carpenter. His chains were forged by masculine necessity. As our sole provider during my earliest years, my father had seven children and a wife to feed, clothe and house. (He and mom would go on to have two more boys.)

We talked about his absence during those evening ICU visits, something my father so deeply regretted that he warned me to find a job closer to home, to give me back some of the four hours I lost with my children every weekday commuting into the city. He even urged me to cut my weekly visits with him shorter so I could get home in time to tuck my children into bed.

Tears of shame

The second verse is just as revealing about how so many men process emotions in real time.

“I pulled into the shopping center,
And saw a little boy wrapped around the legs of his mother.
Like ice cream melting, they embraced,
Years of bad decisions running down her face.

All morning I’d been thinking my life’s so hard,
And they wore everything they owned, living in a car.
I wanted to tell them it would be ok,
But I just got in my Suburban, and I drove away.”

Douglas recounted during the Herbison interview how he was rushing into a supermarket to pick up donuts for a school class event for his third-grade son, when he noticed a woman and her little boy at a payphone, the mother’s face mascara-stained from her sobbing.

“In the moment I thought, ‘I could give them ten bucks, I could tell them where the union mission is, or I could just drive off in my black, new Chevy Suburban,” Douglas recalled. “I did nothing. And I was so ashamed that something kind of insignificant could get in the way of a real-life experience.”

Men often struggle when confronted with suffering they cannot meaningfully fix. One response is withdrawal. Another is rationalization.

Like so many men, Douglas appears to have believed: “I’m a good man, but I did nothing.” The resulting discomfort can cause a mindful man to become self-reflective.

Many men are disturbed by failure to live according to their values, but the version of masculinity they have layered on top of their humanity can grow so thick that in situations like this, they default to masculine expectations like provision (getting those donuts to his son’s class) and performance (meeting a time deadline).

Douglas’s lyrics serve as a warning that a man’s life can become organized around things that prevent him from fully experiencing humanity.

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Tears of joy

While Douglas and Seskin drew the first two vignettes of “Grown Men Don’t Cry” from very personal experiences, the final verse took several days to conceive and write as they sought lyrics to present a joyful counterbalance. I’m glad they did, because its this verse that liberated my tears that summer.

“Then it’s up the stairs and off to bed,
And my little girl says, ‘I haven’t had my story yet.’
Everything weighing on my mind disappears, just like that,
When she lifts her head off her pillow and says, ‘I love you dad.’”

Research on father involvement has shown that reading to children is one of the activities most strongly associated with warmth, attachment, language development, and emotional closeness. We dads create some of the most intimate emotional spaces when we take time for these moments with our children.

Bedtime stories were part of the nightly ritual I had with my daughter at the time of my dad’s passing. While I often read her books, I also created for her a world where a little girl befriended animals in the woods, heading off on adventures with them that challenged the girl to learn about courage, compassion and love.

One evening that summer, as I was turning off her bedroom light, saying good night and exchanging “I love yous,” memories of my father’s bedtime stories about “Robin Redbreast” flooded over me.

After my father passed, I learned that “Robin Redbreast” was an established character in English-language nursery rhymes and children’s literature by the early 1930s when my father was a small boy.

No doubt, I inherited my bedtime storytelling from my father and his childhood memories. I wish I could have told him this. It would have added meaning to the times when I tried to ease my father’s fear of dying by telling him:

“You live on in the fatherly love you taught to your sons. My brothers and I promise to pass on what you taught us to our children. And they will pass it on to their children. You’re as immortal as any human can be.”

“Grown Men Don’t Cry” helped me realize I was fulfilling my promise to him.

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Grown men do cry

As I’ve written in other Substacks about this album, songs often perform the emotional work men haven’t been taught to perform for themselves. Work like recognizing and naming feelings, normalizing them, and imagining a path to a different future.

Songs can serve as a corrective emotional experience, an encounter with a new reality that challenges an old wound. This way, an estranged son who believes fathers don’t care, can’t connect, don’t apologize, can envision a healing narrative where fathers love, reconnect and cry.

This dynamic comes to life in Bart Herbison’s remarks. He called “Grown Men Don’t Cry,” “the most important song in my life,” because he could see himself and his dad in the song’s story of a father and son.

This, Douglas told Herbison, is the driving force of his craft.

“What we’re trying to do is create art that allows people to imprint their life story on ours so we can have a shared experience.”

Personally, I love Seskin’s assessment of the song.

He said it gives “some men permission to fully express their emotions. It kind of broke that barrier down a little bit for those who wanted it broken.”

Some men. Those who want to break down the barriers that block them off from their emotions, so they can live life more fully.

We find Ryan kneeling at the Normandy grave of Captain Miller, the man who led a squad of Americans to find and extract Ryan from the war after Ryan’s brothers were killed. These missions were part of what the U.S. military called “The Sole Survivor Policy.”

Ryan speaks to Miller at his gravesite about the captain’s final words to him on a bridge being overrun by a German counterattack. “Earn this,” a wounded and dying Miller had told Ryan, referring to the six members of the eight-man squad who died saving him.

Seeking validation that he has lived up to Miller’s words, Ryan says:

“Every day I think about what you said to me that day on the bridge. I tried to live my life the best that I could. I hope that was enough. I hope that, at least in your eyes, I’ve earned what all of you have done for me.”

I cry every time I watch this scene because I too believe I earn respect and validation by creating a life that gives to others. So many men do. We live every day earning our masculinity, knowing it is something that can be easily lost.

I guess that’s why I tried to take my children to our local Memorial Day parades every year when they were little. I wanted them to see my gratitude for the sacrifice of our fallen military members and appreciate the sacrificial spirit of humans.

I am taking this weekend off from publishing my series about Tim McGraw’s Set This Circus Down. It seems inappropriate to focus on anything other than being grateful for our armed services’ deceased, and letting their families and friends know that we appreciate their sacrifice as well.

They earned it.

Now it is up to the rest of us to earn their gratitude by defending the ideals of this democracy and the true spirit of collective sacrifice and equality.

While the “feeling of love” is often what draws people together, studies by researchers like John and Julie Gottman and Robert Sternberg suggest that liking someone is frequently a more reliable predictor of long-term relationship stability and satisfaction.

This liking — driven by oxytocin and vasopressin — is more often than not the result of the little moments a couple shares every day. These are the flashes of ordinary living that couples might not consciously tune into in the moment.

Like:

• quiet conversations “about nothing” over breakfast.

• texting each other news stories about something that concerns you.

• or laughing at your faults in front of your partner.

These lived experiences generate friendship and mutual respect, opening each other up to the opportunity to admire your partner’s character, humor and intellect.

It’s easier for heterosexual men to encode emotional intimacy through shared activities, locations, rituals, and embodied experiences rather than explicit emotional vocabulary. Over time, these moments integrate into what some psychologists call a man’s extended self in a relationship.

That’s what two men come to realize in two breakup songs from Tim McGraw’s 2001 album Set This Circus Down. We all can benefit from trying to examine and understand their experience.

Dropping the masculine façade

What immediately stands out about both “Why We Said Goodbye” and “You Get Used to Somebody” is that they are songs about attachment disruption and relational memory.

These two songs portray men quietly remembering lost lovers as friends they genuinely and deeply liked and appreciated. Their female partners are autobiographical witnesses, identity stabilizers, and playful companions capable of being emotional regulators.

Songwriters Steve Bogard and Tom Shapiro provide us with one of the most understated but revealing lines about men in their song “You Get Used to Somebody.”

“The way you always made me laugh at my frustrations.”

For a man to laugh at himself when a woman directs his attention at the traits he struggles to accept, we are seeing a couple who have created a place rooted in high levels of psychological safety.

She has made a series of deposits in their relationship’s “emotional bank account,” moments of positive reinforcement that make him secure in knowing she is on his side. Poking at his foibles includes her acknowledgement of his journey to be a better man, as well as their mutual intimate knowledge of his thresholds for feeling insulted.

By making him laugh, a partner helps a man perform a cognitive shift towards a shared understanding that the problem, while annoying, does not define his worth or their relationship’s stability.

Tom Douglas and William Kirsch paint a similar scene in “Why We Said Goodbye.”

“That antique roller coaster
You just had to ride.
I remember how you laughed
At the terror in my eyes.”

Research by René Proyer and others suggests that adult playfulness in a relationship is a strong predictor of satisfaction. It creates bonding moments for men where they don’t have to maintain a facade of constant stoicism or competence.

I fell into this safe place early on with the woman I love today.

On our second date, a visit to a surrealist art exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, we were standing with a crowd in front of one particularly colorful but, for me at least, completely inscrutable painting.

Baffled, I whispered to her, “What are we supposed to see in this one?”

After a second or so, she leaned back close to my ear. Thinking about the time she had spent pensively staring at the piece, I fully expected something illuminating. I was going to grow my appreciation of art from her stronger intellect in this area.

In a hushed voice she said, “I have no idea.”

I could tell you dozens of stories like this about her, subtle moments where we shared our beliefs, humor, regrets and hopes. She drew me in, inexplicably, to the woman I admired, could laugh with, could open up to.

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Love is a habit

Equally important for a man to bond with a woman are private rituals they mutually share, like getting away to their favorite dining places.

In “Why We Said Goodbye,” McGraw sings:

“I remember Sunday mornin’s,
Walkin’ on the beach.
And that place we’d stop for breakfast,
With the old red vinyl seats.”

At 14 years old, as I prepared to go to work at our family lumberyard, I had to rise at the same time as my father and have breakfast with him and mom.

Watching them move about our tiny kitchen, observing what mom made for him, the way they lingered over their coffee, listening to their conversations about big and little things, I was introduced to what it looks like to be a mature couple working as a unit at creating a life together.

I’m a better man today having been there in those moments.

Capture it. Remember it.

Love remains mostly a mystery to me. Even with six decades of experience and having spent hundreds of hours studying how neurobiology, neuroendocrinology and relationship science direct our experience of something we loosely call “love,” I remain certain of only one thing.

Sex, physical attraction and grand gestures have a small impact on sustainable happiness in a relationship, compared with the day-to-day moments that make up the bulk of living with, liking and loving another person.

Of course, to benefit from this energy, we have to be paying attention.

And that perhaps is what Tim McGraw was learning when he and his collaborators worked on Set This Circus Down, an album that represented a major career shift for the singer from pure commercial country masculinity, towards more emotionally literate, psychologically reflective male storytelling.

These two songs sound psychologically authentic to many men because they mirror how we actually remember lost attachment figures — through tiny rituals, emotional moments (like grief support), sensory details and companionship patterns.

Too often, however, men struggle to interpret these moments in real time, and for a variety of reasons. In worst-case scenarios, we only fully organize the emotional meaning of our everyday lives after a relationship ends.

This experience aligns closely with research on men about normative male alexithymia, delayed emotional processing and retrospective attachment recognition.

Mindfulness and meditation has transformed all aspects of my life, but perhaps made no greater difference than in the way I like and love the women in my life.

This whole essay came together because the woman I love texted me the link to an article about a prominent media outlet’s failure to hold itself up to fair and sound editorial standards. (We’re both recovering journalists.)

Up until that text, I was struggling with this Substack. Hours of research and random thoughts sat on pages, discordant and disconnected — like that surrealist painting that left me baffled at The Met.

But just like that, her ordinary bid for engagement weaved my half dozen wild and wandering threads of thought into a single coherent piece.

Like Douglas and Kirsch wrote, this woman is “sewn into the fabric, the pieces of my life.”

Yes. We share big holidays together. We do our best to keep the romance alive. But for me, it always was and always will be the ordinary everyday moments of the lives we try to share that keep me loving the person she uniquely is.

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Dear Men,

We can create rich, happy and sustainable love affairs by being present in the smallest moments.

Or we can let them slip through time without fully living them and find ourselves persistently alone, like the man in Bogard and Shapiro’s song, who realized after the fact:

“I guess you get used to somebody.
Kind of like having them around.”

It’s your choice how to love. Choose wisely.

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Somewhere around ten years old, I understood and related with Chris and Vin, the two main characters in The Magnificent Seven, a 1960 western about seven cowboys hired to stop a gang of bandits who regularly raid a small Mexican village for food and supplies.

These two cowboys personified masculinity for that young me, stronger than any other influence in the early days of my transition from boy to man. Even perhaps more than my father.

Two loners. Protectors for hire. Doing risky things with no emotional affect.

When the gang’s leader, Calvera, captures the seven gunslingers, he asks Chris and Vin why they took this dangerous, poor paying job. They have no introspective answer, just a stoic joke — “It seemed to be a good idea at the time.”

My young mind was incapable of connecting the psychological and societal forces placing me there in those saddles with Chris and Vin. I just knew society highly valued their character, like that portrayed by dozens of other famous silver screen cowboys.

Fifty years later, and 25 years after Tim McGraw released Set This Circus Down, I still sometimes feel myself alone on a horse, on a desolate western prairie, performing an unseen role, struggling to understand why.

And unable to stop myself from doing it.

McGraw’s album opens with the song “Cowboy in Me”:

“I don’t know why I act the way I do.
Like I ain’t got a single thing to lose.
Sometimes I’m my own worst enemy.
I guess that’s just the cowboy in me.”

When I first heard these lyrics, I wasn’t practicing meditation and mindfulness. So when any deep feelings welled up, they felt more like something I was observing in a stranger than something emanating from inside me.

So many men learn at an early age to separate themselves from their deepest inner thoughts. Dr. Niobe Way, a developmental psychologist who has worked with and studied boys for decades, calls this a crisis of connection — the result of an American culture that works hard at fracturing the link between a boy’s feelings and his ability to understand them.

“Maturity and manhood are in cahoots together in modern culture… we privilege everything we’ve deemed hard, thinking over feeling.”

She describes how boys are able to use a tender language to describe their feelings up until about their early teens.

“Then as they get older, their language starts to become a sort of stereotypic language.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It’s all good.’

‘I’m fine.’

But then they’ll start to talk about the cracks in their narrative. They’ll start to talk about their sadness, their isolation.”

Substacker Jim Chastain (please consider subscribing to his newsletter) said this in a comment on my opener, Me, Masculinity and Tim McGraw, reminding me about the Glenn Frey/Don Henley song, “Desperado.”

“My therapist once recommended that I listen closely to the lyrics of the song Desperado. Obviously, this is the Eagles and not country but it was an important insight into who I was.”

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While McGraw and his song collaborators — Jeffrey Steele, Al Anderson, and Craig Wiseman — have our cowboy ruminating over his thoughts and feelings, Henley’s and Frey’s desperado needs an observer to warn him.

“Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses?
You’ve been out ridin’ fences for so long now.
Oh, you’re a hard one,
I know that you got your reasons.
These things that are pleasin’ you,
Can hurt you somehow.”

It’s not that men don’t have feelings and don’t think about them. It’s that too often we avoid them because we don’t have the skills and emotional vocabulary to fully examine ourselves.

When “Cowboy in Me” was first released, I had a great job at American Express, two beautiful children. A four-bedroom colonial house.

It wasn’t enough though.

“The urge to run, the restlessness.
The heart of stone I sometimes get.
The things I’ve done for foolish pride.
The me that’s never satisfied.
The face that’s in the mirror when I don’t like what I see.
I guess that’s just the cowboy in me.”

This is not bravado. This is self-observation without resolution.

I could see Richard’s restlessness, his loneliness, his searching for some greater meaning and purpose. But in 2001, the Richard that felt this way was a stranger to me, a stoic cowboy I knew better than to confront about his feelings.

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McGraw and his songwriting team make a point about how a cowboy’s conditioning isn’t only a male thing.

“Girl, I know there’s times you must have thought,
There ain’t a line you’ve drawn I haven’t crossed.

But you set your mind to see this love on through.
I guess that’s just the cowboy in you.”

In fact, Dr. Way sees masculine stoicism showing up increasingly in girls and women.

“It’s shocking as a developmental psychologist. Maturity and manhood actually means the same thing. So, no wonder as boys become men, and unfortunately as girls become women and nongender kids become adults, they’re all aligning with this boy culture that puts down their soft — because that’s seen as immature, girly, and gay. Even kids who identify as gay don’t want to be the stereotype soft person anymore.

“I’m not a feminist that’s sort of saying; we only need our soft sides. I love our hard sides. It’s our autonomy, our ability to be stoic, our capacity to think complexly. I mean, all those hard sides of ourselves are equally necessary.”

“… when we only do one side, then we’re in trouble. And this is what’s so beautiful. Boys and men remind us of that, remind us of our humanity, of what it means to be human, and what’s getting in the way of us acting like a human.”

“Cowboy in Me” and “Desperado” aren’t celebrations of masculinity. They are critiques of how so many men struggle with emotional intimacy — within themselves and with others.

We see this unfold at the very end of The Magnificent Seven, after Calvera and his gang have been defeated, and four of the seven cowboys have died in the battle.

“You could stay, you know,” the elder of the Mexican village tells Vin and Chris. “The fighting is over. Your work is done,” he says, while also apologizing for the other male villagers who aren’t expressing their gratitude more deeply.

Chris replies: “We didn’t get any more than we expected, old man.”

The elder acknowledges Chris’ stoicism:

“Only the farmers have won. They remain forever. They are like the land itself. You helped to rid them of Calvera, the way a strong wind helps rid them of locusts. You are like the wind, blowing over the land and passing on.”

Riding out past the edge of the village, Chico, the third surviving cowboy, turns back to join a young, unmarried woman he met defending the village.

As Vin and Chris watch Chico staking his connection to the land, Chris speaks the final words of the movie:

“The old man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.”

I’m tired of watching boys grow into cowboys. They always lose.

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