As a male relationship therapist in a profession where women must make up the vast majority, heterosexual couples tell me they would like to work with me because they hope I will be better placed to understand the male perspective.
When they tell me this, I have to admit I can sometimes feel a bit daunted; I don’t have any special powers to help men to express themselves or be heard by their female partner.
This has however got me thinking about some of the challenges that men face in their relationships, within themselves and indeed in therapy, whether that’s with their partner or individually.
The obvious start point to consider is the roles that most societies historically assigned to men and women, as hunter/gatherer and child and home carer respectively. Obviously many if not most couples don’t comprise these split roles these days, but even in more egalitarian families, the traditional roles can still cast a shadow. Men are often still expected to be focused on work, career, ambition, competition and drive, not necessarily by their partners but within themselves or in many fields of work by the norms and expectations of the sector. This is often still the measure of success, and can feel relentless for many. Men can often feel trapped – the hamster wheel is the obvious analogy – that stopping running would be a catastrophe. This pressure of course takes them away from their partners and kids, leading to distance or coldness. The workplace can then act as a refuge, safer than at home, but this only increases the couple divide.
Many men I work with can start to see links between their need to be driven at great cost, to having fathers who struggled with finding their own drive and success. Repeating this must be at all costs. But with fragile masculinity, underlying confidence and security are missing or hard to find.
Back at home, perhaps there was a time not so long ago when it was not uncommon for men to rule their families and homes by dominance and aggression. While it still exists of course, that’s not how most families are these days. Finding a safer, kinder form of assertiveness can be difficult for some men however, especially those without healthy male role models in their childhoods. Men can feel unable to express or even to consider their needs; what they would like from their relationship and from life, and can feel unfulfilled and yet trapped in their provider role.
Therapy, whether as a couple or individual, can help men get more in touch with what they really want, and to explore with their partners what might be possible and what might change.
It’s often helpful for men to consider their individual version of masculinity and the origins of this, and to try to find a different, healthier and more balanced version. This can help couples as parents too, and not just what it means for sons, but daughters too.
Finally, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that social media has done more harm than good in relation to expectations of self for both men and women. While TV programmes such as Louis Theroux’s Inside The Manosphere shows some extremes, there is a lot of mainstream material which puts pressure on men, especially young men but not exclusively so. Take LinkedIn for example, where posts by Alpha men are of course countered with material encouraging a different stance, but often feel contrived and performative. In therapy, and in life, the answers are usually in the grey, not the black and white, and there’s little of that these days.