Understanding Positive Masculinity (Or How I Stopped Confusing “Strong” With “Silent”)
Let’s get one thing out of the way, when I first heard the phrase “positive masculinity,” I rolled my eyes so hard I nearly saw my own brain.
It sounded like something a wellness brand would print on a tote bag. Or the title of a TED Talk given by a guy who definitely does cold plunges and definitely wants you to know about it.
But then I actually sat with the idea instead of mocking it from a safe distance, and it turns out there’s something real underneath the buzzword. So let’s talk about it. Without the tote bag.
What it’s actually about
Here’s the simplest way I can put it: positive masculinity is what’s left over once you strip out all the stuff that was never really about being a man in the first place, it was about being afraid.
Afraid of looking weak. Afraid of needing help. Afraid of crying in front of someone who isn’t a dog.
The traditional script told us strength meant silence. Don’t talk about it, don’t feel it, definitely don’t text your friend “hey, I’m not doing great”, just go to the gym and grunt your feelings into a barbell. I did this for years. It worked about as well as you’d expect, which is to say: it didn’t. It just delayed the conversation until 1 AM, alone, staring at the ceiling, wondering why I felt like a stranger in my own life.
Positive masculinity flips the script. It says the strength was never in the silence, it was in being able to say the hard thing out loud. Confronting a problem instead of outrunning it. Asking for help and not treating it like a moral failure. Turns out admitting you don’t have it together is, paradoxically, one of the more “together” things you can do.
The emotional intelligence part (yes, really)
I know, I know. “Emotional intelligence” sounds like something from a corporate seminar with bad coffee and a PowerPoint. But hang with me.
It just means, noticing what you’re feeling before it notices you first. For me that used to look like snapping at my partner over something dumb, a dish left in the sink, a wrong turn on the highway, when the actual problem was a work stress I hadn’t said out loud in three days. The dish wasn’t the issue. I was the issue, wearing the dish as a disguise.
Learning to catch that earlier, and say “hey, I’m stressed about work, not actually mad about the dish,” didn’t make me less of a man. It made me significantly less insufferable to live with. My partner would probably write you a testimonial if I let her.
The body keeps score too
Physical fitness gets roped into this conversation a lot, and for good reason, moving your body does wonders for your head. But let’s be clear about what that means, because the version I see online is usually a guy with a six-pack doing pull-ups on a cliff at sunrise, and that’s not the assignment.
The assignment is: move enough that your brain remembers it’s attached to a body. Some days that’s a real workout. Some days, and I say this with love, it’s walking the dog around the block while internally negotiating with yourself about whether today counts. It counts. Discipline isn’t one dramatic gesture, it’s showing up to the boring, unglamorous version of the thing on the days you don’t feel like it.
Building a life that doesn’t feel like a costume
Somewhere between ages 22 and 45, which, conveniently, is most of adult life, a lot of us are trying to do several things at once: build a career, build a self, and figure out which parts of “being a man” we actually believe versus which parts we just inherited like an ugly sweater from an uncle we don’t see anymore.
That’s the real work of rebuilding. Not becoming a new person, but going through the closet of who you were told to be and asking, item by item: does this still fit, or have I just been wearing it out of habit?
Some of it will fit. Keep that. Some of it won’t. Donate it, or better yet, set it on fire in a safe and legal manner.
The goal isn’t some finished, polished version of masculinity where you’ve got it all figured out and never raise your voice and meditate for an hour every morning before your green juice. The goal is just, a little more honest than yesterday. A little less performing, a little more actually being there. That’s it. That’s the whole project.
Coming up next
Next time, I want to get into the loneliness thing, because I think a lot of us are surrounded by people and still feel like we’re on an island, and nobody’s talking about why. Until then: go talk to a friend about something other than sports. I dare you.
— Sean
Founder, Migrant Me