The truth is that as a prepubescent young man I stood outside the usual images of masculinity. I started to see the Water, not because I consciously and thoughtfully reflected on the Man Rules, but because I was not a man. As I felt myself in the Water, I also felt the dissonance between what seemed to be the ideal masculinity and me. I was drowning in the Water and desperate to find some degree of solace. Burning in my psyche was this constant and resounding voice telling me that I was not a man. I believed it. That voice haunted me. The worst part was that once I grew to almost six feet tall and matured into what many people consider to be a handsome man, it was too late. The damage had been done. Like anorexics wasting away on death’s door who still see themselves as fat, it has taken twenty-plus years for me to not see the gaunt, prepubescent five-foot boy looking back at me in the mirror. And he can still show up when I’m under stress or feeling threatened.
From my sophomore year of high school until my senior year of college, one thing helped to quiet the voices and allowed me to feel less insane and a little more comfortable around people: alcohol and other drugs. In that sense, initially, they saved my life. I needed numbness. And, of course, that boomeranged very quickly. When you search for sanity by turning to something that is known to destroy sanity, your problems are likely to get worse. The relief didn’t last long and I spiraled out of control, still tortured by the voice telling me I was not a man, that I was a freak.
Alcohol and pot served another important purpose, though: They were the only tools I had to help me talk to girls. Before I hit puberty I could talk to girls, but even in my most drunken state I had to be hypervigilant so that I didn’t get too close or have my shameful secret found out. One girl in particular thought I was funny and cute and I started talking to her on the phone after New Year’s Eve of my sophomore year, and then I realized, why am I talking to her? There was no way I could go on a date with her. Or be intimate with her in any way. So I just stopped calling her. That was what helped put me over the edge and led to the cutting incident that brought me to the attention of medical professionals.
Even when I finally hit puberty, I continued to look for evidence that I was still not a man. I didn’t have enough hair under my arms and none on my chest, I had no real muscle tone, and I hadn’t yet started to shave. I started drinking more and smoking pot, which made it easier for me to meet more young women. They liked me. They thought I was cute and funny. They liked that I was smart and self-deprecating. But I still didn’t date. I went on one date in high school. It was with a young woman who one summer worked at the same telemarketing business as me, and I only asked her out because my friend, a quintessential stud visiting from Australia, asked her sister out. I had no idea how to talk to her or be with her, and yet somehow I was still able to lose my virginity to her. And that was also humiliating. I did not have a clue what I was doing or that it was extremely common for young men to experience orgasm within seconds of penetration. I only saw it as more evidence that I was not a man and that there was something wrong with my body.
When I started working out to build muscle, my only coach was the voice inside my head constantly calling me a “pussy,” a “wimp,” and every epithet a young man can hurl at himself to bench-press a little more weight or do a few more curls. No matter how much muscle I may have developed, I still could only see myself as a puny weakling. My wife would often comment on my muscular body or how I compared to other guys at the beach, and my first thought was (1) She is making fun of me, or (2) She is lying to me. It has taken a long time for me to see my body accurately, as it is rather than as it was. When I was forty years old and writing this book, Nancy encouraged me to walk down the airport walkways and notice how many men I was actually taller than. I laughed it off when she suggested it, but when I did it I was amazed that I was taller than 80 to 85 percent of the men I encountered.
Under the influence or not, the shame I felt about my body and about not being a man was constant and had me always on guard. The saying that “addicts don’t get into relationships, they take hostages” was absolutely true for me. I lured women in as a nice guy, but if they got too close to me or hit any of my wounds, I reacted intensely. I became my father. I was an asshole. Mean. Enraged. Abusive. I watched a person whom I barely recognized come out of me. And that just added more fuel to the fire of shame that burned inside me.
My life changed irrevocably in 1994, my senior year of college, in two very important ways. I discovered the concept of gender, and I was confronted by multiple people about my use of alcohol and other drugs, and consequently got into recovery. Those two forces coming together offered me more hope than I had ever felt in my entire life. I learned that gender-based reality was painful for a lot of people. As a result of the social upheaval of the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were people thinking very actively and critically about the expectations around how women and men “perform” our scripts for gender. Because of my experience in adolescence I was more than eager to listen to those who were deconstructing male expectations. My process of recovery gave me permission to begin to give voice to the incredibly painful emotions and thoughts that were killing me from the inside out. I also learned something even more powerful from both of these experiences: I was not alone. I began to see the Water more clearly.
But the shame ran deep, and recovery made it harder to hide all of the pain. I started to learn how to talk to people sober. I learned how to just hang out and have friends. I learned how to connect. I wanted to connect with others so badly. That was always a core part of who I was, and still am. Slowly but surely, I began to learn how to crawl socially, then walk, and then even run. It was terrifying at times. Other times it felt like I was destined to be alone for the rest of my life. Long into my recovery I carried the shame and the feelings of worthlessness from my trauma around with me. It controlled so much of my life, yet I was still unable to talk about it.
Every relationship I ever had was affected by the core belief that there was something wrong with me, and that I was not a man. When I was still active in my addiction, I would only have one-night stands with women. That continued in recovery, despite it being generally against my values. I rarely connected with women in other ways, not because I was trying to be mean or hurtful, but because I was scared shitless. I didn’t have a relationship longer than a month until I was twenty-two years old, and that was long-distance. After that, no relationship lasted longer than a month until I was twenty-five, when the woman I was seeing actually asked me if I was interested in her or just trying to stay in a relationship longer than a month! I was unable to let anyone get too close. The women usually ended up breaking up with me long before I broke up with them. Any woman with the slightest amount of self-esteem would drop me as soon as she got a glimpse of my darker side. Sadly, part of the Woman Rules is that women are supposed to put up with that guy and be able to change him. Several tried with me, but not for long.
I would not be naked in front of women. I would never raise my arms. I spent every second I had with any girlfriend wondering how she could be interested in me. I could never trust that she would stay with me. Or really like me. Or want to be with me over someone else—someone manlier. If I was drunk, that didn’t matter as much. However, once the special elixir wore off, I was left to face me, and one look in the mirror was all I needed to be reminded that any woman who was with me was a fool. And a liar. And just waiting to find someone better.
That was my experience for a very long time, even in recovery. It made it easy for me to choose the work I did for my master’s degree, as well as the focus I have now. At some deeply emotional level it has all been about trying to prove to myself and the world that I am a man. As silly as it may sound, it is true.
This is only a small part of my story but a huge part of the trauma that has shaped my perceptions of myself as man, as well as the man I have become. I now spend a lot of my time going around the country talking with others about the Man Rules and their effects upon how men see and conduct themselves. It is amazing to me, despite how much personal work I have done, how often the Rules control my behavior and lead me to act in ways that are contrary to the man I truly aspire to be. I write this not in a spirit of self-shaming, but rather to impress upon you just how tenacious these Rules are. You may very much want to be a different man than you are, but you also find that you are controlled by the Rules more than you ever realized. And until you can see the Water you swim in, you don’t even know these Rules exist.