September 13, 2022
This evening, my (brand new!) wife and I went out for dinner on our quick little pre-honeymoon honeymoon — how millennial of us. As we sat outside on the patio enjoying the September evening air turning a little crisp, admiring the serenity of the pond adjacent to the patio and the passers-by enjoying all that Blue Mountain has to offer, we entered into one of my favourite types of conversations; theoretical, sweeping, and ideological — we started to discuss masculinity.
“The old me would have thought the new me was a big giant pussy.” I bluntly stated to Amber as I gingerly sipped from some type of Blue Curacao lemonade concoction.
She laughed, but had to agree, “Yes, yes that’s probably true.”
But why? I pondered it for a little before choosing to advance the conversation. The discussion is one I’ve skirted around before, though it was with my therapist and not my wife to be.
Earlier in my life, I suppose I thought ‘masculinity’ to be almost synonymous with ‘dominance.’ Universal dominance was best — over peers, co-workers, significant others — to be masculine was to convey confidence and control. Muscles. Straight faces. Lack of emotion. Stoicism. To be masculine was to be a provider, to be somebody who outwardly projected a hardened exterior and focused there, not internally. I had achieved those things; I’d packed on enough muscle to garner many unsolicited comments about my body and paired it with a crafted sneering expression, but, to my surprise, they did not make me feel like any more of a man.
I was jostled from my thoughts by Amber, who interjected with some logic and evidence, continuing with, “babe — this morning I saw you use an EYE ROLLER. I don’t even have an eye roller.”
It’s true. I do have an eye roller. Whatever man, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes when I don’t sleep enough or stay out late, my eyes look like they have big giant buttholes around them, a la Pete Davidson. The eye roller makes it marginally or sometimes incrementally better. Using one doesn’t make me a “pussy”, it makes me somebody who doesn’t want to lurk around in public looking like a creature of the night. I nodded to Amber solemnly, “if using an eye roller makes me a pussy, then I guess I am.”
The truth is, it doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other, because I am happy — and I want those in my life to be happy around me too.
That time I dodged the topic with the therapist, she suggested that maybe I had maintained a tough and hardened exterior through my youth and adolescence because it was something I truly needed — a survival tool of sorts for growing up in a world and situation that could be unkind. She said, “Jesse, now that you don’t need it anymore, maybe it’s time to let certain parts of it go.” And despite my best efforts to torpedo the conversation by launching into telling her about something like my grade 11 basketball stats and how I’m still mad Chris Craig missed a game winning layup in the COSSA championship, her comments must have resonated.
In the past month, I’ve cried in front of other people on 3 separate occasions — the first one was mostly funny; I took mushrooms with my friends at a bachelor party and got VERY emotional when I dropped a ball out of my cup playing beer pong. Strange times. A week later, a close friend passed, and I got the news in the middle of a workout — very awkward to see somebody bench pressing 250 pounds and subsequently weeping. The most recent time(s) were at the wedding this weekend, when I was so overwhelmed with joy that I felt those lumps in my throat before Amber even got down the aisle.
This notion would have horrified me before, to project such ‘weakness’ in front of an audience. The newer version of myself understands that it’s not weakness at all, it is just a person experiencing the world around them — still, I understand and accept that some people with the outdated version of masculinity in their heads will see it as such.
The conversation continued, and we decided that on some subconscious level, I had probably at least agreed with the therapist’s assertion about the projection of masculinity that day, if not incorporated some of her advice. I mean, the fact that I was actually IN therapy having that conversation in the first place is a small miracle; Amber had been suggesting it since the very first time she witnessed an explosive episode.
These ‘episodes’, I call them, were infrequent, but also incredibly frightening for both myself and those around me. I would spend so much energy on bottling everything up so that I could project my image, it was as if I were an overfilled tire, waiting for the next pothole to come and make me explode. When it did, I would yell, scream, punch myself in the forehead, destroy an inanimate object, storm off in a huff and imagine setting the world on fire. One time, I put a stranger’s head through the drywall at a party because he said my shirt was gay. Honestly… bit of an overreaction.
Very few people were ever witness or privy to these episodes (after all, I had taken so much care in curating my image), but those who have seen them will understand what I mean when I say that I had to address them and change my mental state.
I am not ‘better’ than I used to be, and I am not ‘better’ than someone who thinks that acting like some watered down version of Andrew Tate is masculine — I am just trying my best to evolve and understand the world.
My new version of ‘masculinity’ looks entirely different than the one I had 10 years ago, and I suspect the one a decade from now will be different again as I reflect on life with children, a family, and all that comes with it.
For now though, my understanding is this —to be masculine is not about my muscles, or how stoic I can be in a shitty spot — to be masculine is to be someone who can show love, who can show empathy. Somebody who can reflect and see that they’re wrong sometimes, and act accordingly. Somebody who has female friends, influences, and mentors simply because they are good, intelligent people. To be masculine is somebody who tries to build themselves and others around them up, instead of focusing on maintaining some level of dominance.
So it is true, Amber and I decided. Maybe the old me would think those things, it just doesn’t matter — all that does is moving forward in the most healthy way possible; that’s all any of us can do.
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