Don’t Leave the Relationship – Leave the Model
While living in Phoenix many years ago, I sat on my couch one evening with Pam, the woman I was dating. I was trying to answer her request to feel my emotions and explain my thoughts. Pam kept saying patiently, “I don’t feel you.” After a few minutes, sharing my thoughts on the subject, I finally heard what she wanted: she wanted me to express my feelings.
Finally I realized that my thoughts – as brilliant as I thought them to be – weren’t my emotions. I got it. It didn’t mean I could immediately shift. But it did mean that I realized I didn’t need to leave the relationship; I just needed to leave that masculine model I bought into of a relationship. It also meant I needed to go out and learn what was never taught to me. I knew I needed to learn how to man up emotionally.
Communication Challenges
Most relationships end because of communication issues. If this is to change, we need to create a new model of Masculine Emotional Intelligence. We also need a way for men to learn it that is fun.
When fathers left the farm for the factory 200 years ago, we lost our men. They were at work, while women were home raising the kids, teaching them how to express emotions – or not express them. Generations of feminine training skewed the emotional intelligence scale towards the feminine for men.
When a man attempts to communicate solely from a feminine perspective, both he and his partner become frustrated. It’s as if he’s walking around in an emotional dress. No one is happy.
In our men’s groups, we continue to see men step out of the model they were trained in to learn a more masculine model. These men learn their native emotional language. They learn how to open up, feel, and communicate their feelings in a way that doesn’t emasculate them.
Every week a man learns more, not by some didactic lecture, but by practicing in the moment with his fellow group members. He learns how to win emotionally, and he learns the five MQ (Masculine Quotient) skills. In the process, joy and hope replace the anger and despair.
A New Model
Men aren’t bad, broken, or doomed. We just never had the role models we needed to learn how be vulnerable and powerful emotionally. Taught by our mothers, teachers, girlfriends, and then wives how to be sensitive like a woman, we continually fail. Either we just give up at the start, or we try to be that sensitive, nice guy. That doesn’t work, though, and we end up with women giving us more instruction.
Both women and men bought into the idea that men experience and share their emotions in similar ways. While it’s true, we are more similar than not, men need a unique skill set to succeed with relationship issues. For example, when we can be vulnerable and assertive simultaneously, everyone is happy.
Men often join a men’s group because they are failing or failed at another relationship. Most men want to succeed. They are serious about the suggestions they get from their emotional experts: women. Yet it always seems like they end up flunking out of the course.
Both sexes need to realize that, as men, we want to connect to and love our partners. What we learned works for a while, but invariably, trying to express like the women we love chokes us. We work at sitting and listening while feeling this urge to jump up and say what we feel. For many of us, it evolves to be sitting through conversations that have us feeling as if we just got the flu.
No one is to blame for this. Men are running the wrong program. Being raised by women, we naturally assume we need to feel and express like women. Put a man in a good men’s group, and he immediately sees men being emotionally real—in a masculine manner. He slowly tries out these new skills only to find them easy and fun. To his amazement, he goes home being authentic like he’s learning to be in his group, and his partner melts.
The collective of his group teaches each man what none had growing up. The men of the group model MEI – Masculine Emotional Intelligence. A man begins to practice being his own man emotionally in his group with the feedback only men can give. This is NOT therapy; it’s men being real as men.
Photo by David Olkarny
It’s not only men who tend to like to stick to fact based communications. In fact, I have been known to be that way, too.
It was a statement from my best friend that turned that light bulb on for me. We were just hanging out one day when she looked at me and said, “You know, despite how you seem, you’re not really a very open person.” When I asked her what she meant, she elaborated. “You don’t have any problem talking about the things that have happened in your life, good or bad. What most people never realize is that you rarely share the emotion behind those moments. You don’t really talk about how they made you feel.”
She was right. These days my deeper emotions are shared with the people closest to me or in my writing. It’s not that I’m unwilling to share. I’m just selective in who I will trust with the information, at least in my everyday life. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
Thanks for saying it’s not only men.
Many of us were not encouraged to open up… then it becomes a habit in spite of what we might think we are doing.
One reason I started my men’s groups was to create a safe place to open up. You are right, many circumstances aren’t conducive to vulnerable communication.
i have read the book twice and several of the articles on this site. and have a question that may upset people. why are women so important?? Really, as men why can’t we becoming a better men purely for own sake? I think if you are becoming a better man for a woman you are doing it for the wrong reason. I am undertaking this process for own benefit. Also why is up to the woman to determine if we are deficient and need to improve. As men when did we give up our own right to self determination and allow women to determine if we are adequate or sufficient to be worthy of them?.
Also where is the inverse. Where is the woman’s’ equivalent book or program to being a better woman? Are we assuming all women are perfect and therefore qualified to render judgement on the deficiencies of men?
Just a few thought to generate discussion. maybe I am the only one who has these questions or there are other men who have the same questions.
Robert, you are right; becoming a better man for yourself is the way to go. That said, I find that most men enter men’s work because of relationship issues. Women and relationships are our catalysts. The deep growth I see men do comes from their desire to grow for themselves. As they do that, all their relationships benefit.
At the risk of pissing off people, I found women much more willing to step into working on themselves. I find men in spite of their resistance to be likely to stick with the work. We see men in our groups leading their partners to go deeper in their own growth—often after the woman ‘pushed’ the man to join one of our free groups.