Tough Guys and Tenderness: how to be two things at once
As men we’re mostly raised to be tough, athletic, competitive, fearless, and with an ability to withstand pain and anguish. From a young age we hear signals like ‘don’t cry like a girl’, ‘stop your whining and get back in there’, ‘come on, toughen up’. We’re similarly rewarded for our toughness and prowess with awards, accolades, prom dates, and popularity. Thankfully, for today’s high schoolers these gender boxes seem to be softening, but for us… let’s say more ‘mature’ or older guys, the signals we got decades ago often still resonate.
This toughness and holding back our feelings works great at first, especially as 20-somethings who dated to meet a partner and start a family. I often hear from wives and girlfriends, in heterosexual relationships, that they were first attracted to their partner’s looks and, sometimes, toughness. Let me be clear, there’s nothing wrong with first being attracted to someone’s exterior — it’s natural to seek people who appear ‘healthy’ to our eyes and want to have children with them, but when we lose ourselves in how we are supposed to look or act then we lose our authenticity and our ability to nurture deep, lasting connections.
The rub for couples, and one theme that I often see in my couples coming to me for therapy, is that sometimes us guys don’t embrace our vulnerable emotions just below our shell. Our female partners wonder, ‘why can’t he be tender’ or ‘I want to have an emotional connection with him’. There sits the challenge. We’re being asked to be both tough and tender and until now we’ve been rewarded most for being tough — so, why invest in the work to embrace tenderness? Most of us assume that connecting to our sadness, fear, or confusion might drop us down a rabbit hole of tears or depression, but in my experience the opposite is the case. Once we give ourselves permission to embrace the full spectrum of our humanity we can no longer jump to anger, rage, alcohol, or addiction. When we have the gift of feeling fully heard in all of our suffering we build trust and connection with the listener and this extends outside of our work in therapy to your relationship, family, and career.
The work we do together, either in individual therapy for men or couples counseling, is to gently co-explore the pros and cons of experiencing new emotions and vulnerability. We work together to see how expressing sadness, fear, confusion, or frustration might be challenging or scary. To take pressure off and create space for connection, we zoom out and co-explore how it was to be raised in your unique family and culture. We also consider the ways not being vulnerable has supported us to this point — being together in a relationship is sometimes a part of this!
As a therapy client, you get to choose if and when we go deeper and try on for size emotions that feel harder to access because you’ve been asked to not access them for so long. Similarly, if you grew up never having juggled a soccer ball and then your partner clued you in that deftly handling a soccer ball would bring you two closer and likely bring about intimacy you might feel frustrated at first, ‘hold on, I grew up playing baseball, now I have to learn soccer!’. But, here’s one important part that makes being vulnerable with our loved ones easier… when we’re born, we are emotionally connected to our experience. The doctor first slaps our behind to help clear our lungs, it startles us and we cry. We go home and fuss when our diaper is soiled, or become agitated when we’re hungry. So, aha, we all do know how to connect to our authentic feelings, which is vulnerable. Coming back to being connected to ourselves and expressing those emotions to our partners in a loving, heart-felt way, that doesn’t include blame or criticism is the path to deeper connection in our relationships.
As a relationship therapist, it’s my core belief that people are not problems and in relationships when we can look past each other as a problem and connect to our hearts we are best able to reconnect soulfully, sensually, sexually, and erotically. It’s these vulnerable moments of connection during the day that bring about space for passion and possibility. This path of connecting to our deep emotions perhaps sounds scary, but it’s work that is worthwhile that will ripple through your friendships and relationships. Let’s talk and co-explore the possibilities for deeper connections with yourself and others. Learn more about Therapy for Men or contact me directly.
