The crying man and the content of sadness

In the latest in our series on men and masculinity, psychologist Roger Bretherton reflects on what he learned about being a man from his own mid-life crisis.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

A person stand looking out a wide set of windows covered in rain.

Daniil Onischenko on Unsplash.

My midlife crisis began with crying. Alone. In the car. In the study surrounded by books. Curled up on the bathroom floor. Waves of sadness crashed over me, and I couldn’t hold them back. So sudden and inexplicable was this lapse into grief that I felt the need to keep it to myself. It was shameful. It took a month before I finally told anyone and even then, my hand was forced by bursting into tears in front of them. They wondered if it was hormonal. Maybe I was eating badly or sitting still too much. But I knew the sadness had content.

I was slowly being crushed by the feeling that I had failed to be, or missed the opportunity to become, the man I was supposed to be.

It is difficult to make sense of such sadness though. It doesn’t come labelled with its own meaning. It fails to announce itself. It doesn’t ride into our consciousness on a unicycle waving a sign that reads: you are now sad about getting old and feeling like you have failed as a man. It takes a bit of detective work to find out what it all means. But in the end, I had to acknowledge that I was slowly being crushed by the feeling that I had failed to be, or missed the opportunity to become, the man I was supposed to be. In the three areas of life that mattered most to me, family, work, and church, I was a failure. I knew that’s what I thought because my tear ducts started twitching whenever I said it aloud. Of course, I couldn’t get anyone to agree with me. It’s not a fact. It is a massive unrealistic incapacitating overgeneralisation. But apparently the poor twisted neurones of my emotional brain had failed to get that memo.

Every feeling of failure implies a vaguely defined sense of the success that could have been ours but has been lost. If I had failed as a man, what kind of man was I supposed to be? I came to realise that I had unintentionally imbibed a seductive model of masculinity that was ultimately unachievable. For want of a better term I came to call it the man-at-the-centre. The man-at-the-centre game is really easy to play. It is a simple rule of thumb for what any man should be. It works in any context you can think of, and goes like this…

What should a man be at work? He should be at the centre of a team of adoring colleagues.

What should a man be at home? He should be at the centre of an adoring wife and family.

What should a man be at church? He should be at the centre of an adoring congregation.

The man-at-the-centre game requires that every situation a man enters should immediately configure itself into a picture postcard in which he holds pride of place.

Obviously, this view defines masculinity entirely in terms of power. And not even the kind of power that makes any sense. Not the power to be wise, or brave, or generous, or fair, or honest, or loyal. But the power to force other people be exactly as we would like them to be. The insistence that social life is only acceptable if made to conform to our exact specifications. The man-at-the-centre equates masculinity with being in charge, and even the tiniest lapse in control as a failure to be a man, a surrendering of one’s right to exist as a male. Kierkegaard summed up despair in precisely these binary terms, the desire to be Caesar or nothing.

A one-way ticket to Blametown

I can’t be sure if this insight is true of ALL men, some men, or just me. Maybe it has nothing to do with masculinity at all. Perhaps I’m just describing my own narcissism. But either way, it’s embarrassing to admit that I even thought this. I don’t even know where this belief came from. It goes against everything I have stood for in support of women, and in collaboration with men. It is quite frankly a ridiculous thing to believe - and yet there I was, just as surprised as anyone else to find myself believing it. It turns out the old church billboard was right:

You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.

And I don’t really want to chalk it up to The Patriarchy. Whenever anyone starts on about The Patriarchy, I have the ominous feeling I’m about to be blamed for something. It reminds me how I used to feel when I worked in mental health services in the NHS.

Two- or three-times a year it seems the national media are obligated to run a story about the inadequacy of care for people with mental illness. Usually based on a report about people being let down. The catastrophic failure of care for young women with eating disorders, or young men with depression, or women on the autistic spectrum. The stories are heartbreaking, and everyone agrees that something must be done. As a lowly frontline worker, nobody blamed me, but I knew that in the weeks that followed I’d be subjected to something that felt very much like blame. No one said it was my fault, but the demands, the hours, the targets, the scrutiny, the bureaucracy would proliferate. None of it would solve the problem, but those who were trying to help would not go unpunished.

So, as a one-way ticket to Blametown, I’m not keen on too much talk about The Patriarchy. But when I consider my hardwired tendency to think of masculinity as the man-at-the-centre, and the despair that accompanies the failure to definitively accomplish this, am I not describing something a little bit like patriarchy? A social system that offers men such a restricted view of what it means to be male, that almost no one can be happy confining themselves to it. An invitation to inhabit a narrow bandwidth of conversations, interests, clothing, emotions and sitting positions so as not to score an own goal for the men’s team by betraying weakness. It’s not like any of this is working for anyone but, beyond exorcism, what can we possibly do about it?

The real Man-at-the-centre

It's not a huge surprise that this midlife crisis struck when it did. Every crisis has a context. Every breakthrough starts with a breakdown. Sometimes I feel like I invited it, because for the last five years I have been practicing contemplative prayer. Twice a day – on a good day – I hole up somewhere alone. Sometimes the study or the bedroom, my office at work, a bench in the park or a seat by the window. I pray in the same places I cry. The twenty-minute timer on my smart phone begins and ends with the sound of a monastery bell. And when it is set, I close my eyes and follow the simple rule of contemplative practice: lifting my heart to God with a humble stirring of love. And for twenty minutes that is all I do. In response to every distraction or entertaining thought, I turn from the noise of my mind back to being lovingly present to the mysterious Presence in the present moment.

Among all the well-intentioned ideas, initiatives, and apps that promise a solution, this is the only answer that has truly addressed the crisis of my own masculinity.

One of the central tenets of contemplative prayer is that when we make space for God like this, we not only meet Him, but we also meet ourselves. I don’t think my insight into needing to be the man-at-the-centre would have been available to me, if I hadn’t been practicing its polar opposite several times a day. In the discipline of contemplative prayer, we decentre the ego, we step over our self-absorption, we fill our consciousness with something that is not us. My experience of it is that when I turn to God with love, I find myself held in a vast field of loving attentiveness, infinitely greater than my own. And over time, this creeps into every corner of life, infecting every moment of contact with family, friends, colleagues, and students with the supreme joy of simply being there for that unique unrepeatable moment of their existence. Whether I am the man-at-the-centre of home, work or church becomes an irrelevance. What matters is not what these situations give to me, but what I can give to them.

This speaks to the supreme paradox at the heart of Christianity. One that is in constant danger of slipping through our fingers. If we grasp it too hard it crumbles in our hands. It stems from the fact that there is a man-at-the-centre of the Christian religion. Arguably the most famous man of all time. Depicted in icons, brushed into frescoes, melted in stained glass, moulded in sculpture, and portrayed on camera. His face appears everywhere, and if we are not careful, we may mistakenly assume that we are celebrating his fame – the greatest influencer ever born. But what makes Jesus the man-at-the-centre is not the ingenuity with which his publicity machine crowned him king of the hill, but the absolute giving of self that characterised his life. The real Man-at-the-centre is the radically de-centred Man.

Personally, I find there to be a seamless continuity between the Jesus I meet in scripture, and the Spirit that animates the life of prayer. Among all the well-intentioned ideas, initiatives, and apps that promise a solution, this is the only answer that has truly addressed the crisis of my own masculinity. Not a humiliation of masculine power, but a profound transforming and redirecting of it. It is the only thing I have yet found that can truly photosynthesise the carbon-dioxide of fear, rage and self-hatred that suffocates so many men, into the liberating oxygen of joyful loving strength that is their birthright.

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Change

Mental Health

18 April 2024

7 min read

Love is easy to say but hard to live

Love is not a one-time event. It is a practice.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A man stands and looks at a neon sign reading 'need love and... '

Chester Wade on Unsplash.

Over Easter, Christians contemplate the love that the cross represents. But what does love mean now, in the world as it is – and how do we live it?

Love is one of those words that feels easy to say but hard to live. Like interdependence, like justice, like forgiveness. It is a word that can quickly get bent out of shape – mistaken for romance, twisted into desire, flattened into niceness, reduced to an emotion or a feeling. Still, we reach for it, or an approximation of it. We know we need it; we know it is a good and important thing. And yet for something so important we are never taught how to do it. Author and critic bell hooks (sic) said, “schools for love do not exist. Everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively.”

The times we live in, though, are calling out for people who know how to love – for people who love well and who love much and who love like it has the power to heal and guide us – because the times we live in ask a lot. The forces and systems and ways of being that we’re so entangled with now are, I think, strengthened by lovelessness. Never-enough consumption, divisive politics, ruthless economics are all bolstered by lovelessness — by loneliness and othering and fear and greed. Still, like hooks, I think we “yearn to end the lovelessness that is so pervasive in our society.” She goes on: “To open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice…”

Sometimes though, it seems Christians are as clueless about how to love as anyone.

Christians should know something of love in theory and in practice. In the Bible, love is a command, love overcomes death, love serves, love lays down its life, love is God. Love is the cornerstone of all of it. Jesus calls another world into being when he tells his followers to not only love their neighbours, but to love their enemies too. He was consistently community-oriented in his teaching and living and loving, demonstrating love for his closest companions as well as for strangers and social outcasts. Love in the gospel is practical, unromantic, beautiful.

Sometimes though, it seems Christians are as clueless about how to love as anyone. If non-believers see judgement, infighting, division, or other signs of lovelessness when they look at the church and its members — when we Christians feel these things ourselves — then we know there is work to do. There is of course always work to do, even when we love well, because love is not a one-time event; it must keep flowing, it is a way of being, it is a practice.

A couple of the churches I went to early on in my Christian journey made me feel unwelcome. They were glossy, wealthy – not necessarily bad things in themselves, but here they felt like a silent sifter of belonging. Once, someone only half-jokingly corrected me for cutting the ‘nose’ off a wedge of cheese at a church event. I never felt relaxed, never myself. This was partly me, too – I realise lately that I have declined many invitations to belong. But the church we go to now is what I think perhaps an ideal church looks like. It’s an eclectic, scrappy group of people who tolerate some big differences in opinion and belief because they believe that love is bigger than those differences. There is no cancel culture, no shutting people out, though often it would be easier to do that than to stay, to keep coming back. A few weeks ago, I gave a sermon and in it, referenced the fact that over 30,000 people had been killed in Gaza, 70 per cent of whom were women and children. I said that if we were led by love – which is not selective, which is not reserved only for people we like the look of, which is never on the side of war and oppression – perhaps we might be doing what we could to make this dying stop: rage, protest, petition, pray. As I expected, the Minister had a complaint – that church shouldn’t be political, that I had been one sided, and so on. This is not an essay about that topic, but the reason I share this is because I knew some people would disagree with me, and I knew that would make me furious, and yet I also knew that our church holds the space for all this. I knew we would still all keep showing up, keep living alongside each other, keep encountering each other and being together in our unity, even when we infuriate each other.

In the age of the individual, healing and development has become a personal mission, peddled as products by distant companies that do not really care about our hearts and souls and lives.

There are other fault lines in our church – political, theological, economic, creative. But, just as fault lines on the Earth cause violent earthquakes yet still enable the plates to move and exist alongside each other, shaping and reshaping and evolving this one shared planet, so I think do the fault lines in church, in community, in the world. Perhaps they provide edges along which we can encounter each other, along which we can shape and reshape humanity. Fault lines can bring quakes and tremors, but they can also bring new shapes, new realities, if we’re willing to do the work. Rather than turn away, perhaps these fault lines offer the chance to choose to stay, to be curious, to encounter, to listen — to practice love.

bell hooks again – she speaks so thoughtfully on the topic of love – said: “I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.” I am struck by this too — in the age of the individual, healing and development has become a personal mission, peddled as products by distant companies that do not really care about our hearts and souls and lives. In our church though, and in the similarly infuriating and beautiful town it is in, I see – not always but often – how love blazes brightest in the context of relationships and community. It is a commitment, a deeply practical virtue that fosters togetherness, even along fault lines if we believe it can. Love lives in relationships that nurture us and challenge us, that shape us. And I think that is how the kingdom comes — not through grand gestures and money and tech, but person-by-person, through the everyday and lifetime work of love.

Love asks – no, demands – that we root it in practice. It demands that we really see each other, that we encounter each other even along our messy and many fault lines. It demands that we listen, make space for dialogue and difference, seek to understand and be compassionate. This feels countercultural in a time when it can be easier to turn away than to stay. Love demands that we coexist together in our differences so that we are better able to see and unite against our real adversary — lovelessness, and all of its friends. This is holy work, I think, in the sense that it is about wholeness and that it really is work.

At Easter, the cross we reflect on is a symbol of love, and it is also a critique of lovelessness, of empire, of religion that pretends to be about God and love. It is a looking glass, showing us who we are, and who we could yet be if we sought to embody the radical love that Jesus demonstrated even in his final moments, praying for his crucifiers “father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Love, I think, wants us to let it take more weight than we do – to trust it, to use it, to wield it like others wield weapons and hatred and judgement. This Easter and beyond, I am reflecting on what love really means in the world right now, and I am praying that we open ourselves more fully to its reality, its concreteness, its demands, its power, its practice. Finally, I am reading again the familiar but ever-challenging verses in St Paul's letter to a church in Corinth:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.