What Do Men Want? #2
In the first blog in this series I mentioned that I’m delivering (for the second time) a 1-day course in Queen’s University called What Men Want: How To Manage the Men in Your Life. Although this is a course about men for women, it got me thinking about what it is – if anything – that all men might want. Here are some suggestions.
Author John Eldredge has a very frank take on What Men Want (as he explains on this video clip). For Eldredge, it consists of three things:
- A battle to fight
- A beauty to rescue
- An adventure to live
Jayson Gaddis, men’s coach and counselor, likewise posits a three-fold want in an excellent articled called Why Many Men Are Still Boys and What Can Be Done About It. Jason’s ‘solution’ for modern men is a potent mixture of:
- Initiation into manhood
- Mentorship
- A Men’s Circle
Or trial, teacher and tribe, to put it a little differently.
For myself, I find it easier to answer the question of what we men need. Martin Seligman makes a three-part distinction between:
- The Pleasant Life – a life of pleasure
- The Good Life – a life of engagement
- The Meaningful life – a life of purpose
Although a meaningful life is the ‘highest’ level lived experience for a man, it doesn’t negate the other two. They are not like different judo belts that you must put off and take on as you ascend to mastery. I think they are better pictured as concentric circles with the meaningful life encompassing and providing perspective for the rest.
As a man matures i.e. transforms from a boy to a man, he shifts in three ways:
- His experience of pleasure moves from the quantitative to the qualitative, with greater powers of impulse control and responsibility available to him.
- The tasks he chooses to engage in require increasing levels of challenge and skill, and so that he constantly experiences new levels of learning about and leadership within the world.
- He discovers or creates a purpose in life that over time becomes more explicit, more focused than before, and from which he prunes the necessary until all that remains is a destiny. Such a man of destiny will aim to serve a cause greater than himself, but will make himself greater in the process.
At least, that’s what I think! And the old question remains as to how to do this for men. Jayson seems to use wilderness trips as a means to facilitate growth in male maturity. I’d like to experience this method before commenting much on its effectiveness. But I guess it beats any classroom or training room as a learning environment for guys. Can you think of a better one? The pub doesn’t count…
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I had to read this post a few times to get my head around the points and digest their meaning properly. It definitely got me thinking but I find myself agreeing with them as the basis for answering the question.
All stereotypes aside, we are pretty simple creatures, and that makes me say the word “simple” again and again.
I’m not sure if this covers the the whole spectrum but for me, I hate the complicated. Simplicity is bliss to me, and making things simple, even if they start out as something super complicated falls into the “Meaningful Life” as simplifying things, breaking them down and pulling them apart, allows us to pass that knowledge or information on easy and effectively to our kids or friends and family. This makes us feel that we can, in some small way, live on in the work we do.
I would also guess that a major factor for us is that scary word “respect”. I think self respect is obtained by making progress in aims and goals we set, so that’s pretty much up to us, but gaining respect from peers, spouse, family and friends is just as important and arguably more difficult today than it has ever been.
We can excel at work but then are not spending enough time with the family, vice versa, we can be with the family and then we are not making enough money. (small example, I could go on!) These mixed signals make it difficult for men to decide categorically what is “right” and what is “wrong” because we equate the right decision to be both the respectable one and the best one.
I don’t think I’m making myself as clear as I would like, but I’m hoping its expanding on the question a little.
Justin, mucho gracias for a thoughtful and thought provoking comment. Two points by way of reply.
I would guess that the quest for simplicity of a certain sort is indeed a male obsession. Why? We are better an analysis than synthesis, stripping down to the parts rather than seeing the whole. Also, our brains are directed towards system-building, which is nothing else than seeking a simple way to understand complex phenomena.
At its most common, this tendency shows itself in the cut-the-crap, cut-to-the-chase type of mentality for which we men are famous. At a more sophisticated level, I think we can spot it in various species of reductionism, which is the tendency of males to say that x is ‘nothing but’ or ‘nothing more than’ y e.g. when behaviourists say that thinking is ‘nothing more than’ behaviour they are reducing all thinking to baviour.
As far as respect is concerned, have you heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? It says that in terms of human priorities our need for respect comes after our need for community. For men, I’m not sure this is true. Like you tellingly said, self-respect is probably more important for a man than peer respect. Or at least for a well-adjusted men! We’re loners at heart. Does a “real man” care for ‘mere’ respectability, or what society thinks?
Personally, it fascinates me/freaks me out to think now much of what we guys consider ‘normal’, ‘objective’, and ‘the way things are’ is essentially gender specific. That’s a point the feminists have made for some time but I’m only getting it now.