for men to learn how to “do” relationships well without forfeiting their masculinity. I want to help those of you who, for fear of being vulnerable, have been unable to take off the armor that prevents you from being yourself and speaking your truth within your relationships. I want you to be one of those people who dares celebrate how wonderful men are. With all of our contradictions, imperfections, immaturity, and goofiness, we are still awesome. You are awesome. You may feel hopeless at times about your relationships. You may feel lost. But you can find your way with the help of others and a good map, such as this book.
Men Learn by Doing
In my many years of experience working with men, training others how to work more effectively with men, and in my own personal growth, it has become clear that many men learn by doing. We can read the ideas and even agree with them. But in order for many of us to truly learn it (whatever “it” is), we have to practice it. For that reason there are sections throughout the book with suggested assignments. I recommend that you buy a notebook specifically for completing the assignments. These are called “Into Action” and offer ways to practice applying the concepts and lessons in each chapter and sharing what you find with those closest to you.
It took many years to get this book published, because there is a prevailing myth out there that men will not read a book about relationships. The fact that you’re reading these words proves that “they” are wrong. Men are not as predictable, stubborn, or one-dimensional as many would believe. I have known that for years now. So have many other men—and women. Now it’s time to make sure that every man, both in and outside recovery, gets the same chance at having loving, quality, and healthy relationships. You deserve them. And everyone who loves you deserves to have them, too.
“Recovery has allowed me to question the measures of manhood I had set for myself.” —Jim
Has it ever felt to you like you were following some set of unwritten rules on how to be a man? Men can do this but can’t do that. These are the Man Rules I referred to in the Introduction. They are unwritten yet very real, and they guide our lives from an early age, telling us how to be boys and men. We follow these Rules to let the world know that we are real boys and real men. When we don’t follow them we run the risk of being viewed by others and viewing ourselves as being less than real boys or men. Where did the Rules come from? The answer is that they come from many different sources, some personal and some societal. The Rules come from both of our parents and other caregivers, from other family members, from coaches and teachers, from the kids on the playground, and from the media based on the images of “real” men presented on television, in movies, and in print and broadcast advertising. Adolescence can be a particularly brutal period of indoctrination to the Man Rules.
Think about your day-to-day experiences and look at how many Man Rules you follow. Think about how you may judge yourself as less than manly if you don’t follow them. There is the Rule that real men do not ask for help. This rule contributes to many men remaining lost for much longer than necessary, among other problems. You may be pretty good at asking for help, but how do you feel when you do it? It’s still hard for me to ask for help, and when I do it is frequently accompanied by some sort of self-criticism. If you are anything like me, every time you ask for help it is a struggle just to get to that point, and once there you probably have at least a twinge of shame around feeling or appearing weak or incompetent or stupid. But with time and practice, it gets better. Luke spoke for a lot of the men in recovery whom I know: “I had a huge amount of self-hatred before recovery, due to the nature of my acting out and hiding my true self from others. I had issues and doubts of myself about even being a man. Since recovery, the self-hatred has been greatly reduced, and I’m more confident in my masculinity and how I express it out in the world.”
Some of the most common Man Rules I hear about from men and women are:
• Don’t be weak.
• Don’t show emotion.
• Don’t ask for help.
• Don’t cry.
• Don’t care about relationships.
Do these sound familiar?
Into Action
What does your list of Man Rules look like? My guess, if your experience is anything like the majority of the men and women I work with, is that you have not previously spent a lot of time consciously thinking about and attempting to identify these Rules.
Think about what you learned in elementary school of how Europeans imagined the New World (the Americas) looked before they actually had traversed the territory and were able to map it out. In some ways, those are just like the maps men have been using to navigate their way in relationships—out-of-date and inaccurate. The available maps for men are guided by the Man Rules. Like those who sought to explore the New World in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, we may imagine monsters lurking in the oceans and dangerous creatures dominating the land, along with the possibility of falling off the edge of the Earth. We have no real idea of what the landscape actually looks like. And, as the first explorers discovered in traveling previously uncharted territory, the risks were great, but so were the rewards. Yet the only way to learn this was to take the journey and face the many challenges and struggles along the way. Welcome to the new world of healthy relationships.
There is a story of two fish swimming in the ocean when a third fish swims up to them and says, “Hello, gents. How’s the water?” and he swims away. The two fish look at each other and say, “What the hell is water?” In this way, the Water becomes a metaphor for those built-in aspects of our experience we take for granted to such an extent that we don’t even notice them. That is how the Rules show up in so many of our lives. We have no awareness of them; we do not see them because we are so used to them being there as a natural part of our experience. We react to them as if they are the only version of reality—the one truth. However, they are social constructions that have been created by other men (and women) and passed on. Most of us were never given a choice. Nobody sat us down, reviewed the Rules with us, and asked us which ones we wanted to follow and which ones didn’t fit for us. In all likelihood we became immersed in them early in our lives when we were incapable of thinking about them critically. We never had the opportunity to consider whether the Rules made sense for who we were and who we wanted to become.
When I walked into my first recovery meeting a man tried to hug me as a welcoming gesture. Another
