I read this twice and felt both seen and unsettled in a good way. Your refusal to reduce masculinity to a cartoon of strength or performance really resonated. The idea that real strength lives in staying present inside uncertainty, grief, fear, and love feels honest and earned, not aspirational fluff.
What struck me most was the warning against abandoning the self in order to become someone else’s fantasy. That rings true. So much quiet damage happens when we live by someone else’s compass and mistake approval for integrity. The way you speak about nervous systems, trauma, and the long work of learning to stay instead of flee felt deeply grounded.
I also appreciated the compassion for both partners. No villains, just two imperfect people carrying their histories while still trying to love well. The music metaphor captured that tension between drive and softness beautifully.
This felt less like advice and more like permission to stop performing and start telling the truth about where we actually are. Thank you for trusting readers with something this real.
To the letter writer: Anymore, I just want to be around people who are living in reality.
Violence, guns, fear, tragedy, abuse, early death are shitty ways to grow up. That's real. And those things aren't happening now, even if your nervous system insists otherwise. That's just as real.
Avoiding therapy wasn't facing either of those realities; now you are. Neither was self-sabotage or financial chaos. You know.
Now you say you are no longer hiding from the truth, but that's not true, is it? Because you avoid reality when you try to bend yourself into some Modern Male Perfection Archetype for your wife, who is a real human herself, not a Modern Woman Perfection Archetype. You set yourself up with a daunting impossible assignment, so you can never win, so you never have to try, so the marriage is doomed, the cycle continues, you remain powerless.
And that isn't reality. What is? Only you know for sure. But it's simultaneously more terrifying and more confront-able than the untruths that keep you safe. At every moment we confront the real truth, we actually get to change the false "truths" around us.
The problem is never the problem. It's the crap we create so we don't have to focus on the part we can change by just being more of ourselves.
This is where a man who at least halfway knows himself comes from—relentlessly looking at the situation and facing the realities within.
Really great one Polly, thank you. Masculinity / femininity are mostly a crock in my view: they're small boxes that don't fit most people. Being a decent, honest human being of any gender is super hard, genuinely, ongoingly. Childhood trauma can = CPTSD so it becomes a lot, lot harder to know what's right & OK, it's a really long process of trial & error to learn what works, & often what is comfortable ('safe') can be a trap too: because it's too small & risk-averse (hello)
I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of 'congruence' as a word to explain the feeling when things look OK from the outside but don't feel OK from the inside. Because congruence is a felt thing, about relationship with self, you know if you've betrayed you or acted well by your own lights. There are no tricks to it! You can fool others, but you can't fool yourself! (Well, you can, but you have to shut down whole chunks of your consciousness to do so, then you suffer.)
I'm big into the idea of unconditional love, that feels really safe to me, that means people loving all of each other, all the shitty fucked-up bits & all. Not to fetishise or glorify suffering but just to be like— yeah— this is the actual reality, this is the truth. There's a great relief in total truth when you customarily pretend. My ideal of relationship is the kind of true long-lasting friendship where both people can say whatever they want to at all times. Good luck letter writer, & congrats on sticking around & raising good sons, that is already a massive achievement & a big difference you've made in the world!
Funny timing this letter and reply. I've been exploring a question. It came up when I observed that I was having a hard time with something, something personal and I asked myself, how much must I hate myself to do this? This isn't self destructive, it's more like a kind of tease. You've threaded a certain needle dozens of times perfectly and all of a sudden you're 0 for 2 and then you can do it again as if it never happened. Inconsistency. Or, you can't remember what you just wrote, or said.
How much do I hate myself to notice this, to do this? Then I asked, where did a learn to hate myself? When did I learn that, how?
I started to breathe a little bit easier when I noticed that even though I make a fuckton of mistakes, only a few of them cause any kind of harm. Most of those that cause harm can be handled with an apology and some effort to avoid doing the same thing again, not withstanding the caveat I started with.
Some fuckups are low harm, what a relief. Move along, nothing to see here. One true failure is to failure to learn. But when something doesn't work out this time is it really a failure?
Twenty five years, three children, and my partner is still here, but so am I. The questions are as important as the answers. I'll try to remember that.
Beautiful! Gender stereotypes be damned, be whatever you are and whatever you want to be. Be what other people want you to be if it suits you and throw it away if it doesn't. A lovely piece on our shared humanity, the music made me cry, thanks for sharing
I read this twice and felt both seen and unsettled in a good way. Your refusal to reduce masculinity to a cartoon of strength or performance really resonated. The idea that real strength lives in staying present inside uncertainty, grief, fear, and love feels honest and earned, not aspirational fluff.
What struck me most was the warning against abandoning the self in order to become someone else’s fantasy. That rings true. So much quiet damage happens when we live by someone else’s compass and mistake approval for integrity. The way you speak about nervous systems, trauma, and the long work of learning to stay instead of flee felt deeply grounded.
I also appreciated the compassion for both partners. No villains, just two imperfect people carrying their histories while still trying to love well. The music metaphor captured that tension between drive and softness beautifully.
This felt less like advice and more like permission to stop performing and start telling the truth about where we actually are. Thank you for trusting readers with something this real.
To the letter writer: Anymore, I just want to be around people who are living in reality.
Violence, guns, fear, tragedy, abuse, early death are shitty ways to grow up. That's real. And those things aren't happening now, even if your nervous system insists otherwise. That's just as real.
Avoiding therapy wasn't facing either of those realities; now you are. Neither was self-sabotage or financial chaos. You know.
Now you say you are no longer hiding from the truth, but that's not true, is it? Because you avoid reality when you try to bend yourself into some Modern Male Perfection Archetype for your wife, who is a real human herself, not a Modern Woman Perfection Archetype. You set yourself up with a daunting impossible assignment, so you can never win, so you never have to try, so the marriage is doomed, the cycle continues, you remain powerless.
And that isn't reality. What is? Only you know for sure. But it's simultaneously more terrifying and more confront-able than the untruths that keep you safe. At every moment we confront the real truth, we actually get to change the false "truths" around us.
The problem is never the problem. It's the crap we create so we don't have to focus on the part we can change by just being more of ourselves.
This is where a man who at least halfway knows himself comes from—relentlessly looking at the situation and facing the realities within.
Really great one Polly, thank you. Masculinity / femininity are mostly a crock in my view: they're small boxes that don't fit most people. Being a decent, honest human being of any gender is super hard, genuinely, ongoingly. Childhood trauma can = CPTSD so it becomes a lot, lot harder to know what's right & OK, it's a really long process of trial & error to learn what works, & often what is comfortable ('safe') can be a trap too: because it's too small & risk-averse (hello)
I've been thinking a lot lately about the idea of 'congruence' as a word to explain the feeling when things look OK from the outside but don't feel OK from the inside. Because congruence is a felt thing, about relationship with self, you know if you've betrayed you or acted well by your own lights. There are no tricks to it! You can fool others, but you can't fool yourself! (Well, you can, but you have to shut down whole chunks of your consciousness to do so, then you suffer.)
I'm big into the idea of unconditional love, that feels really safe to me, that means people loving all of each other, all the shitty fucked-up bits & all. Not to fetishise or glorify suffering but just to be like— yeah— this is the actual reality, this is the truth. There's a great relief in total truth when you customarily pretend. My ideal of relationship is the kind of true long-lasting friendship where both people can say whatever they want to at all times. Good luck letter writer, & congrats on sticking around & raising good sons, that is already a massive achievement & a big difference you've made in the world!
Funny timing this letter and reply. I've been exploring a question. It came up when I observed that I was having a hard time with something, something personal and I asked myself, how much must I hate myself to do this? This isn't self destructive, it's more like a kind of tease. You've threaded a certain needle dozens of times perfectly and all of a sudden you're 0 for 2 and then you can do it again as if it never happened. Inconsistency. Or, you can't remember what you just wrote, or said.
How much do I hate myself to notice this, to do this? Then I asked, where did a learn to hate myself? When did I learn that, how?
I started to breathe a little bit easier when I noticed that even though I make a fuckton of mistakes, only a few of them cause any kind of harm. Most of those that cause harm can be handled with an apology and some effort to avoid doing the same thing again, not withstanding the caveat I started with.
Some fuckups are low harm, what a relief. Move along, nothing to see here. One true failure is to failure to learn. But when something doesn't work out this time is it really a failure?
Twenty five years, three children, and my partner is still here, but so am I. The questions are as important as the answers. I'll try to remember that.
THIS SONG!!!!
Beautiful! Gender stereotypes be damned, be whatever you are and whatever you want to be. Be what other people want you to be if it suits you and throw it away if it doesn't. A lovely piece on our shared humanity, the music made me cry, thanks for sharing