How Men Thrive

If you're a man, sit with this question for a minute. It could change your life. Have you been called "needy"? Or are you the self-reliant, all-providing hero you're supposed to be? The truth is that neither suits the natural dignity that belongs to men. More often than not, we drink the "liquid hero" and end up kicking ourselves for giving too much, too soon — and frequently to the wrong people, in relationships, at work, and in our communities. Add the media's stereotypes about who we're supposed to be, and it's clear men need to define themselves and their relationships more accurately.

I asked myself these questions when a friend sent me the findings of Harvard's Grant Study on happiness and men. George Vaillant, who directed the study for over three decades, published the results in Triumphs of Experience (2012). He followed 268 male undergraduates in the longest-running longitudinal study of human development in history, asking what most strongly predicts human flourishing. The finding he returned to most: the powerful correlation between the warmth of our relationships and our health and happiness in later years. He insisted on it, placing it above every other factor.

Let me make this personal. I once sat under a large oak tree with a woman I was set to marry — we'd met two years earlier in Europe. I was raising money for my second startup; she'd been covering Eastern Europe for the Economist and wanted to move to America and have a baby. She was cold-blooded in decisions; I tend to be diplomatic, emotional, and blunt.

We knew the sacrifices: she'd give up journalism, and I'd quit startup life to support us through corporate strategy. We talked, cried, and cursed our way through it. In the end it was too much for two fiercely independent people, and we had the agonizing conversation about not being together. (Never break up over email, if you ever want to speak to them again.) She left within days. We'd been close friends for two years, speaking almost daily — and then she was gone.

We were both trying to live up to unrealistic archetypes: she the award-winning journalist and future French-cuisine-cooking goddess; I the man who'd shelve his own goals to support her fully. She needed 100% support; my work suffered, and the A-round I'd been pursuing never came in. I wonder whether I'd been distracted by a deep need to save someone — to be the hero, to be a real man. I was ignoring my own needs.

What the experience taught me — and what I've heard echoed by other professional men — is that men routinely ignore their own needs to meet a partner's full emotional, financial, and psychological needs, because it's expected. We do it unconsciously — giving up on ourselves stoically, rarely asking whether our own needs might get met. Here's some advice: just ask. Ask a new company or a potential love interest what their values are before you dive in, and watch whether their actions back them up.

Good men sacrifice everything for families, wives, houses — and end up bankrupt, emotionally and otherwise. We need to own that the valiant, heroic impulse carries the seeds of emotional irresponsibility: dispossession and neglect of one's own needs. I'm not sure we even think about this. We should.

Men don't thrive on toys, a partner half their age, or money. Men thrive when their needs are validated the way their partner's are — not less, not more, but equally. Men thrive when they're discerning about their bandwidth — about whom and what they lend their attention, strength, and energy to — and most of all when they have supportive, loving partners they can rely on.

There's little room in the stoic-caretaker role for men's actual emotional needs, and that's exactly what needs reevaluating. Men carrying unexamined childhood wounds bring that legacy into their marriages; men with developed emotional intelligence are better leaders, fathers, and friends. If our culture has no room for vulnerable men, we'd better make room — those are the very qualities that make men better and stronger.

Men need only be directed toward the middle ground: reciprocity, compromise, mutuality. More than once I've attached myself to someone whose needs quickly became paramount to mine. That's on us men — we must discern true relationship from the outdated myths in our heads.

What the Harvard study tells us is that men thrive when engaged with affection and warmth — starting with our mothers and extending to our partners. Men need to stop engaging from what we think we should be, and engage from vulnerability instead. We ought to seek those with whom we can cultivate our natural dignity as men — because that is what we need most.