Imagine a young woman caught up in “the college experience”. Her life consists of drinking, partying, all sorts of lewd behavior, the worst excesses of hook up culture. She’s the kind of woman you see stumbling up to a reporter on a beach during spring break offering slurred answers to his questions in a micro-bikini or less. Consider, too, her male counterpart. He’s slovenly, withdrawn, exudes a passivity tinged with anger. He consumes copious amounts of pornography, avoids conflict and work, lives for ease and lusts satisfied.

You might think you know everything there is to know about these people. Nevertheless, upon reflection, most of us realize we can never know the depths by looking at the surface, never know the heart by contemplating the skin. Despite all her surface-level enthusiasm, she may not be at peace inside. He may very well know, deep down, that his behavior is damaging himself and others.

You can’t assume that just because a person engages in a behavior that they like engaging in that behavior. We are the kind of beings capable of regretting our actions as we take them. When Walt Whitman said “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes!”, he wasn’t talking just about himself. He was talking about your cousin Lonnie. He was talking about the creepy, low-hygiene guy down the hall. He was talking about you.

The point is that people are complicated, and you can’t always easily surmise their motives from their behavior. You can’t assume they really even want to do what they do. You can’t assume they like it. Christians should be most cognizant of this reality given St. Paul’s description of his own inner life in Romans 7:15 :

”15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[a] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”

Unfortunately, many people, regardless of their religion, forget this principle. This tendency was on full display recently during the massive Ashley Sheatz dust-up. The “formerly promiscuous” wife and her husband drew a great deal of criticism, some of it much deserved.

Some of it was inexcusable. From the name calling to the threats, our collective lack of mercy was undeniable. Not that a lack of mercy is unusual for Internet mobs, but in this case, the mercilessness seemed to, in the words of Nigel Tufnel, “go to 11”.

At no point did the main thrust of the discourse consider her full story: the childhood sexual abuse, the lack of guidance, being forced to fend for herself as a girl in a predatory and hostile world. No, to most, she was not a complicated person with a story, but a sort of moral criminal trying to use Jesus to get out of taking accountability for her wrongdoing. She was cast in that role and there was no getting out.

It’s natural, I suppose. We have an inborn tendency to think in reductive ways about people we consider a threat, people who strike us as dirty, immoral, or otherwise unacceptable. Thinking about people in complex ways muddies the waters of our certainty, undermines the clean distinctions we make between them and ourselves, and thus subverts our pride, our sense of superiority. That’s why we avoid more subtle, comprehensive thinking by default.

The Internet intensifies our natural tendency to think this way. We don’t even have to deal with the person in front of us. We don’t have to share a community, friends or acquaintances. The fact that the Internet allows us to vent our hatred at others who live at great distances means not even a shared faith is an impediment to the most bitter venting of our outrage.

None of this should be a surprise. If remembering that others, even Ashley Sheatz, were complicated human beings existing in history and vulnerable to all its formative forces were easy, mercy wouldn’t be a virtue. Mercy sees the whole person. Mercy refuses to reduce or blind itself to the many ways we are, in fact, very similar to the objects of our scorn.

This requires practice. It’s precisely because Mercy is a virtue that we must cultivate it. We must override our natural impulse to strike the vulnerable, to seek revenge, to indulge in moral status games. This is where the real work is. This is the spot of real spiritual growth. And this is where we fail most often, hoping the more fervently we point to our caricature of another, the less the crowd will turn its vicious gaze toward us.

Years ago, I went on a retreat with a group of men from various Christian backgrounds. At one point, our leaders told us to form small groups for prayer and encouragement. Someone said that if we felt it was appropriate, this might be a good time to confess sin. I wasn’t expecting much of this, considering that I barely knew the other guys.

Immediately after beginning, a man in the group rushed forward to spill his guts. “Well, I’m not going to hold back from you guys,” he said, and went on to confess a moment of mundane solo sexual sin. Nobody wanted to hear this.

The group grew silent, the grip of awkwardness spread like a fist of ice around the circle. Everyone instantly became powerfully interested in what the floor looked like. I can’t remember how we moved on, but I’m very grateful we finally did.

The whole incident was manipulative, inappropriate, and embarrassing. The troubling nature of the moment was multiplied by the fact that to point out that such exposure was awkward and inappropriate in such a group would have been to mark oneself as spiritually immature, low status, and probably not serious about Jesus.

To understand why, you have to understand the unspoken culture in many low church evangelical settings. In these, being willing to make uncomfortable and shocking confessions in groups of people with whom you are barely familiar is taken as a sign of sincerity, high-status, and maturity.

This is true for the same reason people whose lives were disasters prior to their conversions are looked up to for their amazing and powerful testimonies. The more messed up a life someone lived prior to conversion, the higher the status they attain in these circles.

The status ladder in these settings is often reversed from what it is in more mainstream groups, leading a lot of people, including me, to be put off by what we witness in such surroundings. I remember feeling mad in the moment of the other guy’s confession because it was clear he was stealing the limelight and that doing so, for him, outweighed the virtues of modesty, propriety, and genuine concern for others.

I thought about all this after reading a recent tweet from Trevor Sheatz in which he described his wife as “formerly promiscuous.” The tweet blew up and got lots of attention. It sparked so many thoughts in my mind that this may be the first part in a series.

The first thing I wanted to say is that this kind of tweet can’t be understood outside the social dynamics I describe above.Talking about his wife’s previous “promiscuity” isn’t, in Sheatz’s circles, a way of shaming her; it’s means of elevating his and her status by doing something that will be read as bearing public shame for the sake of the gospel and in an attempt to bring glory to God.

Such behavior turns my stomach.

Maybe my reaction is too much; maybe it stems from years being around these circles and experiencing them as blind, thoughtless, and intrusive. Maybe.

Still, something deeper bothers me. It’s the same thing that bothered lots of people who showed up in the tweet’s comment section. What bothered us is that far from being a signal of piety, posting this kind of sensitive personal information is a vice.

This kind of publicity stunt rejects the virtues of modesty, prudence, and empathy, all while the people posting such things pat themselves on the back in a fit of pride and self-justification.

Twitter commenter Roland Gunn got to the core of the complaint against this kind of behavior with these tweets.

What Gunn is getting at is that these kinds of public admissions ignore the issue of modesty. Modesty means not revealing oneself or sensitive personal information in inappropriate contexts for attention. It means forcing knowledge of one’s intimate life and self on others who might be burdened by that knowledge or at least made uncomfortable by it. Sheatz, in posting this information, denies his obligation to practice modesty in order to create an obligation for his audience to bear this affront silently. Those who refuse, he can now cast as caring less about the Gospel simply because they find such immodesty tasteless and offensive.

Not only is this kind of posting immodest, it is imprudent. Parading one’s mistakes or, even worse, one’s spouse’s mistakes on the Internet is unwise. By exposing his wife in this way, Sheatz opens her to ridicule, shame, and all sorts of possible consequences he cannot predict. He leaves open the door to his metaphorical home, which he knows is surrounded by monsters, and brushes off such a critique by claiming anyone who differs simply lacks faith.

The willingness to disregard these virtues shows a lack of concern about others’ feelings. Just like that man in my small group, Sheatz no doubt believes that a willingness to be shocking, to cause discomfort, to disregard unstated boundaries is a sign of bravery and sincerity on his part, and that his desire to display these qualities outweighs any sort of empathy for his audience.

Most people think evangelicalism is conservative, but, in fact, large swathes of it are radically anti-traditionalist and, in their way, liberal. Many evangelicals see traditional social virtues like modesty, propriety, and prudence as hindrances to the practice and proclamation of the gospel. In this way, evangelicalism has been, and in posts like Sheatz’s we see, remains a cultural force behind ever increasing levels of disdain for traditional social common sense.

About the time I encountered Sheatz’s post, I also encountered an ad online for a church letting everyone know that if the church achieved some goal, maybe bringing in a certain number of visitors, the pastor would take a pie to the face. Such promotions erode the dignity of the office, juvenilize the church, and lower the bar for public behavior. Sheatz’s post does the same and proves that in spite of good intentions, evangelicals’ pride so often leads to a failure to love their neighbors, a goal that would require serious repentance to achieve.

Let’s just hope they do it in private

Here’s an archive of the most recent ones. In addition, please note that I’ll be appearing on Stephanie Winn’s “You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist” podcast before long. Keep an eye out for it.

In the meantime, a few recent ones:

Face of the Deep with :

Jen had me on to talk specifically about the emotional maturity crisis our culture is experiencing, how it affects dating and why men need to stop fearing going down into the subterranean parts of themselves.

I was recently on A Male Space to talk about male loneliness, the allure of blackpillism, and the need for male mentors.

Find it here:

The ever gracious Leslie Elliot Boyd has hosted me on her Rountable twice recently.

Here we discuss the despair many young men feel and its effects on the broader culture:

In this heated discussion, we talk about what men are looking for in women and whether men have a right to our preferences.

Finally, Leslie and I have a chance t explore these themes more deeply here in a one on one discussion:

Enjoy. With any luck, I’ll have another batch to share before long.

At the core of all our social problems is a deeper problem we’re ashamed of.

No one wants to talk about the fact that few of us feel loved, that so few of us experience the peace and safety in our relationships we long for. We mostly avoid speaking directly about this for fear of seeming sentimental or needy, two qualities that, in our heartless time, have come to be seen as death knells for romance. We’ve been taught that speaking directly about what we hope for is a surefire guarantee we won’t get it. This is only one of the love defeating lessons of our culture.

So, we talk around the issue. Constantly. Anxiety about our lovelessness gives rise to interminable levels of discourse around attraction, dating, and maintaining relationships. Naturally, some of what’s been produced is good and some disastrous. When you survey the discourse around these topics on Twitter it becomes obvious how much of it is the same tropes endlessly repeated.

A tweet from writer Rose Lyddon shows what I mean. She wrote :

At the time of this writing, her tweet has over two million views and almost 3000 likes.

The tweet’s popularity isn’t surprising since she’s repeating one of the oldest cliches in the Twitter dating lexicon: that women can’t respect and therefore lose attraction to men who show their emotions. Lots of people like that message. It implies an arrangement where women don’t have to deal with full human beings and where men can be certain their women won’t leave if they just keep their mouths shut. Simple. But also fatal.

The problem with this oft repeated advice is that when put into practice, it produces the opposite of the promised effects. Relationships conducted under this paradigm tend to be undermined by currents of fear and entitlement, like a stone wall is brought low by an underground stream.

The unpopular truth of this matter is that a woman who cannot handle a man’s full self, can’t love her partner even when he is sad is not a mature adult. A woman incapable of that kind of commitment has not yet developed the character and outlook necessary for lasting and fulfilling relationships. And thus, often finds herself rootless, empty and longing for love. All because our culture has failed to help her move beyond an adolescence spent flirting with the quarterback excited by the way he ignores her. She deserves better.

To be fair, relational and emotional immaturity is not just a female affliction. The disease is widespread in our culture today. Men are just as affected by it as women. Too many men arrive in early adulthood unable to regulate their inner lives, passive, uninvested in their futures. Those who don’t end up perpetually stoned in front of a screen, end up pursuing consumerist careerism with few plans for wife and family and home. Either way, many men end up disconnected from their interior lives, distracted, self-involved and unable to connect.

No, the plague of emotional immaturity doesn’t discriminate on the basis of sex. Both men and women fall victim to it. In fact, the condition is so common that its symptoms: self-centeredness, superficiality, reactivity and cynicism are taken as normal rather than indicators that something is wrong. But, something is wrong, really wrong.

The difference is that men are told to grow up frequently and loudly. I’m not sure that’s the case with women. The default assumption seems to be that maturity is women’s native land, somewhere they dwell simply by virtue of being female. Men’s immaturity is often louder and more obvious, expressing itself in explosive and dangerous ways. Society therefore clamps down on it when it reaches threatening levels. Women’s immaturity tends to be more covert and indirect, and therefore more socially tolerated, but that doesn’t make it less relationally corrosive.

Maturity requires accepting that other people are real, complex, vulnerable beings with needs and agendas. Most of us have a tough time with this, and it isn’t even necessarily our fault. It is a consequence of coming of age in a culture that does not value coming of age, that encourages everyone to mature slightly beyond childhood and then says, “alright, that’s plenty.”

It never fully explains what we need to know. Never mentions that mature people give up trying to force others to be the embodiments of their fantasies. Never says men must give up expecting women to be always nurturing, always pure, ever sexually available and playful. Neglects to mention that women must give up the fantasy of expecting men to be always competent, always unaffected, forever stoic. Just like no man finds a manic pixie dream girl in real life, so no woman ever bumps into a King Leonidas in freshman comp. Everyone’s lot in life is to only and forever meet other real, flawed human beings.

Men need to hear the truth. Men have to accept the facts about women. We’re can’t to expect her to behave like a porn star, must accept to understand that stress and time and age will eventually wear away her youthful beauty. We must be encouraged to love something in her that is deeper than these superficial, if attractive, qualities.

And yet, Lyddon’s tweet suggests many women need similar messages, but receive them even more rarely than men. Something in the cultural and emotional upbringing of these women prevents them from suffering the disillusionment that real love requires, and so they approach prime marriage years frustrated by being unable to find a man emotionally repressed enough to fulfill their fantasies. They keep running into guys who eventually want to talk about their feeling, even though they’ve been conditioned to expect Christian Gray.

The only way out of this trap is for all of us, even women, to grow up. It’s something we all have to do. Becoming adult hurts, I won’t deny it, but it is the only path to the kind of fulfillment these women (and men) are longing for. And the first step is understanding that, sometimes, when a partner gives you the ick by talking too much about his feelings or failing in some other way, he or she is only offering you an invitation to mature into a version of yourself no one has offered you before.

P.S.

I understand that this essay leaves unaddressed the question of how much emotion a man should show in a relationship with a woman and how that dynamic should be navigated. I addressed that issue in this post and will address further in the future.

Anyone who meets me finds out quick that I’m a Dylan fan. I checked his records out of the library when I was a kid, bought his CDs through the ’90s, and have him marked as a favorite artist now on Spotify. I’m going to see him perform in March.

I’m the guy they thought would enjoy A Complete Unknown, the 2024 biopic about Dylan’s early years.

They were wrong.

I just got around to seeing it.

Didn’t care for it.

The whole thing felt a little like a superhero movie, but here the hero is a scrawny Jewish boy from Minnesota with half a pack of cigarettes and an unshakeable sense of his own greatness. Just like, say, Antman, Dylan here, the great genius of American song, is presented in comic book style: flat, shallow, and petulant. But who knows? Maybe that’s accurate. It’s not like a self-centered twenty-something man is an unheard-of phenomenon.

But that’s not all. As much as he is portrayed as selfish and emotionally stunted, he is also portrayed as an oracle who can barely disguise his disdain for ordinary people: for the fans who hound him, buy his records and finance his stardom. As self-involved, insensitive, and peevish as the Hollywood Dylan is, he’s still too good for us.

Another mediocre Hollywood offering, this film will be forgotten in a few years. But while it’s fresh on my mind, I want to make a point about the way movies shape social reality. This movie, like so many others in past decades, is an example of what I call “the Boomer Frame.” The Boomer Frame is the default template for narrativizing history in movies, something writers resort to without even noticing it. That’s perhaps even more to be expected in a movie about a Boomer icon like Dylan.

Here is how the Boomer Frame works. First, assume that history moves in a straight line from times of restrictive oppression and indifference to times of liberation and joy. We are always moving toward something better in the Boomer Frame. Second, the hinge between the dark times, when people lived under the heavy thumb of tyranny, and the light times, when people are really free to be themselves, is the 1960s generation. It is key to the Boomer Frame that it reiterate endlessly the idea that the Boomers are the most important generation to ever live. Third, no matter how complicated the reality of history and the personalities that inhabit it, they must always be simplified to fit the frame. History must divide into a right side and a wrong side, a powerful force of darkness vs. our hero of liberation. Finally, that hero must, in the end, overthrow the forces of repression by some act of really “being himself.” When our hero finds the strength to “be himself” in the face of an angry and totally unhip status quo, he triumphs.

A Complete Unknown is the story of Bob Dylan smooshed into the Boomer Frame. The hero, of course, is Dylan. His quest here is to overthrow the forces of repressive darkness represented by…..traditional folk music! Yes, here film Dylan alone stands up against the likes of music researcher and documentarian Alan Lomax and longtime champion of Leftist causes Pete Seeger to assert his right to rock. His final moment of victory comes when, in spite of the crowd’s disapproval, he plays “Like a Rolling Stone” on an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 before riding off into the sunset on his motorcycle.

He also rides out of town with impunity never acknowledging the great suffering and turmoil he has brought into the lives of the women who loved him. Both Sylvie Russo and Joan Baez experience miserable interactions with him. He is rude, uncaring, exploitative, and untrustworthy with both. Intense emotional pain, the movie seems to say, is just the price women are expected to pay for the privilege of being close to one of the champions of their liberation. That sentiment somehow makes sense within the Boomer Frame.

My intent here is to do more than complain about the Boomers. I want you to see how consuming hundreds of movies and television shows subtly built around this frame affects us all. The Boomer Frame isn’t just a narrative contrivance; it is a guide to history, a rubric for personal relations, a guide to who does and does not deserve love.

Tragically, almost everyone now (myself included) has unconsciously adopted the Boomer Frame. The average person assumes the past was oppressive and the present less so. He assumes this not because he has thought about it, not because of deep study of history, not because of careful reflection on the relationship between human nature, liberty, and the Good. No, he assumes it because the movies told him so.

When movies give us a simplistic view of history, they also give us a simplistic view of people. When all of history divides cleanly between good people and bad, between holy causes and malevolent ones, then it must also be the case that people are just as simply good or bad. This view is manifest everywhere in our increasingly contentious time. Think of the simplistic arguments one hears daily on Fox News or MSNBC, arguments that depend on the assumption that the other side is made up of irredeemable simpletons.

The Boomer Frame also strikes closer to home. In recent years, we’ve heard no shortage of horror stories of people destroying family and social relationships because they don’t like Uncle Hershel’s politics. Nothing matters more in the Boomer Frame than being the cool guy on the right side of history, not even loving Grandma once she’s popped a Trump sign in the yard.

Such destructiveness is the Boomer Frame in action.

The Boomer Frame is now too deeply embedded in the American mind to excise. The best we can do is resist it where possible. Becoming aware helps us understand why those we’ve loved might suddenly recast us. Where once we were a family member’s fun uncle or a doting aunt, we are now their personal Pete Seeger, a figure representing all the regressive forces of the past who must be cast aside in search of a new moral purity that only the pursuit of heroism, as defined by the Boomer Frame, can bring about.

More importantly, understanding the Boomer Frame helps temper our own temptations to cast others aside. Choosing to view our neighbors through a more nuanced and realistic lens allows us to build and maintain relationships across divisions and to tolerate the kinds of conversations that are the only means for reducing the distance between us.

Becoming conscious of the Boomer Frame is the first step out of it. This is long, slow work, first for ourselves and then to help free our neighbors. But if we desire to tell new, more unifying stories, to reestablish a mythos that might unite us and forestall the horrors that at this moment look inevitable, it is necessary work. It is work for a new generation capable of building something outside what has been handed down, a generation that will, paradoxically, have to produce a whole new breed of cultural rebel, one ready to reject the Boomer Frame and establish a more just and life-giving view, one that makes a way to keep on loving Grandma no matter how she votes.

P.S.
If you are interested in cinematic meditations on Dylan and his cultural significance, both the 2007 film I’m Not There and the Scorsese-directed docuseries No Direction Home do a far better job than the movie discussed above.

Because I run a men’s mastermind group, coach a lot of men, and write often about men’s issues, people ask for my take on things. A Twitter friend sent along the video above asking me what I think of it. This post is my way of saying, “Twitter friend, overall, I think it’s pretty good.”

Hawkins is right that there are a lot of what he calls “emotionally immature men” out there. He’s also right to say their immaturity compromises their success, especially in marriage. Hawkins grasps the problem: our culture is developing waves and waves of men who lack the emotional maturity to own their lives and to relate to others in ways that lead to warmth and intimacy.

This fact isn’t hidden. Anyone who’s been around a little has seen it confirmed. Certainly, this corner of the internet has discussed the problem extensively. And yet, Hawkins, and a lot of women, still end up getting something wrong about the issue.

WOMEN’S UNDERSTANDABLE MISTAKE

About 25 minutes in, Hawkins is discussing the problem of the overfunctioning woman who manages every aspect of the household and the lives of the people in it, and the underfunctioning husband who is lost in his own pursuits: work, hobbies, sports, etc. This dynamic, Hawkins says, often brings a woman to the breaking point where she finally says to the man some version of “You are a child!”

Hawkins here fails to say something important, and it needs to be said because it exposes an assumption most women make about emotionally immature men.

Most women assume that telling a man he is a child will cause him to self-reflect and come to a deeper level of understanding. It won’t. Typically, he’ll have no clue what she is talking about. His first reaction will be to produce examples of all the ways in which he is not a child. He will be insulted and frustrated and, not infrequently, assume she is crazy.

Telling an emotionally immature man that he is a child doesn’t work, because he cannot see that part of reality. His vision is limited, and no other way of being has ever even entered his consciousness. What women get wrong about immature men is that their immaturity is not intentional or even conscious, and therefore confronting him about it directly will go nowhere. His soul has been formed into these patterns by a powerful and unseen set of cultural forces.

WHAT’S CAUSING THE PROBLEM

No man starts out to be emotionally immature, insensitive, or disconnected. No boy hopes for a mediocre marriage with a constant, unacknowledged substrate of resentment. Instead, a cultural process forms men into a way of being that simply seems normal to him. This happens in at least three main ways.

First, our culture has dismantled the only processes by which men ever even had a chance to reach full emotional development. Robert Bly spoke a lot about the necessity of boys working alongside their fathers, something that hasn’t been possible since before the Industrial Revolution. When the mechanisms for producing whole, well-balanced, mature men have been disabled, we ought not be shocked that those sorts of men stop showing up in our culture.

No individual man is responsible for this massive historical shift, blaming him and telling him he is a child only baffles him and leaves the problem untouched.

Second, whole, emotionally mature men are not held up as a cultural ideal. Survey any pop culture venue, and you will be hard-pressed to discover images of the kind of men the women in Dr. Hawkins’ practice say they want. Instead, we routinely see men portrayed as hapless losers or violent criminals, either Ned Flanders or Ice-T.

The kind of maturity we once saw in popular culture in characters like Ward Cleaver is not incentivized now. Such maturity is, in fact, punished, especially in young men, because it disrupts the “normal” pattern of partying and hedonism our culture pushes. A culture that pushes both men and women into hedonism and immaturity in their 20s is not going to suddenly produce a bunch of mature 40-year-old guys.

Finally, much of what our culture thinks will “toughen men up” is actually experienced by many men as traumatic. These experiences, whether it is just rough treatment from teachers and coaches or hazing in sports and social groups shape many men, filling them with unspoken rage and shame. A culture that teaches men to suppress the pain of these experiences and never to open up about them is likewise unlikely to produce mature middle-aged men ready for intimate connection.

In short, our cultural system is designed to produce men who are:

• disconnected from relationships, alienated from other men and from work;

• devoted to a selfish, hedonistic, consumer lifestyle that has been normalized to them from youth;

• full of painful, conflicting feelings they have no idea how to sort out.

SHORT-TERM SOLUTIONS

When this process fails to produce the kind of man who can sustain a mature, connected marriage, we don’t blame the system; we blame him. So, it’s understandable that women should get this part of the picture wrong. Just telling men they are children goes nowhere. If we want things to get better, we have to look at the bigger picture. If we don’t like the product, we have to look at the factory that made it.

In the short term, to try to help with this problem, I continue to offer my men’s mastermind group as a place for men to work on everything from deepening emotional awareness and healing old wounds to improving relationships, leadership, and life direction.

The group is starting up again in a few days, and a couple spots remain. To learn more, click here. Make sure to enter the code “DEAN50” at checkout for 50% off the standard price.

The funny thing about relationships is that they’re hard to see when you’re in them. You can live in one for decades only to wake up one day to find that all this time the landscape of reality has been nothing like the map you’ve been using to navigate.

The maps we carry in our head are detailed. They tell us where we stand, where the other person stands, and what the terrain between the two looks like. Sometimes, the key is skewed, so we estimate the distance between the two incorrectly. These maps even come with little pictures in the margins showing each of us what the other looks like.

These can be way off. Inaccurate, sure, but convincing. So convincing, in fact, that we often cling to our mental images of our partners even as the evidence piles up that our cherished pictures are dangerously wrong.

The guy in the story above is a pitiful example of this. He rolled along oblivious to his wife’s real nature until disaster set in. Then, in a moment of crisis, something catastrophic happened, and his map proved useless to help him navigate. His wife revealed her true character in a way he could not deny, declaring that so long as he was unemployed, she’d be out on the streets with other men.

This was not a snap decision. No devoted, faithful spouse suddenly decides to “open” her marriage immediately after hearing of her husband’s job loss. She’d been planning to drop that bomb for a while. If the speed of her decision isn’t enough to convince us of her premeditation, the fact that she already had dudes lined up ready to roll the moment her husband broke the news certainly does.

The reality everyone but the author of the story above can see is that his wife hates him, wishes him ill, and is a person whose lack of character makes her unworthy of his devotion.

We look at this poor guy in astonishment. We cannot believe anyone could be so naive, so blind to the situation around him. And yet, he was, and so have many of us been.

Our situations might not have involved such glaring betrayal, but most of us have had the experience of waking up during—or, more likely, after—a relationship to see the landscape was rockier and more arid than we had perceived. We find ourselves disoriented, looking for direction.

The worst part is when we realize that what we had thought was a pretty decent relationship was, in fact, characterized by subtle negativity, destructiveness, or even abuse. We lose faith in our maps. We don’t know who we or our partner really is. What once felt like union is revealed as illusion.

The answer to the question of how this happened is complicated.

Our inner maps come from what our parents modeled, our early experiences of attachment, the longings and fantasies we project. It’s a long, subtle story of how we grew estranged from reality.

However we formed our maps, we become profoundly dependent on them. Even when something happens to throw us off course, we might try to find our way back to the path by relying on the only thing we have: our old maps. You can see this implied in the brief story above. The last lines contain a plaintive note of the author’s longing for repair, for a means to make this alright. He’s trying to figure out how to use the old map to find his way through this new, hellish situation.

This is common behavior. So many of us cling to relationships even when it’s undeniable that repair is impossible, as it is in the relationship above. Our maps contain roads with no off ramps. We just keep going toward the inevitable crash.

So, what do we do?

We have to continually update our maps. We have to be aware that we’re even looking at a map, and not directly at reality. And then, be willing to examine the observed data about our partners from multiple angles to make sure we’re seeing it correctly. We need to ask for input from others whose maps are different and, potentially, more accurate. We have to have the courage to revise our own maps even when that process proves difficult.

The hope is that, over time, if we keep updating our maps, they will at last guide us to someone whose map is equally well tuned and then, in turn, lead the two of us home.

Erika Kirk, in her now famous eulogy for her husband, declared that Charlie wanted to save the lost boys of the West. We should all volunteer for that mission. If we don’t we will later be conscripted into it by dire circumstance.

The stats are familiar by now:

• 60 percent of men under 30 are single

• 25% of U.S. men ages 15-34 feel lonely “a lot”

• 15% of men have no close friends

• The suicide rate for men is four time higher than it is for women

• 47% of women 25-34 now have a bachelor’s degree vs. only 37% men

On and on.

I was recently invited onto Leslie Boyce’s “Radical Center” podcast to discuss how some of these issues might be addressed. I was asked to be a guest, in part, because I have so much experience being the target of these boy’s vitriol.

Anyone who has ever addressed gender matters on Twitter has probably shared the experience. Swarms of anonymous young men flow into the comment thread leaving the vilest words behind. The spirit is venomous, often disgusting. Nothing is off limits, no name that can’t be called, no attack on one’s appearance too personal. Little is as repugnant as a storm of these guys.

And yet, I understand where they’re coming from.

One of the points I made on the podcast is that the viciousness of their behavior arises from frustration at not being able to have their legitimate concerns heard by anyone outside of their tribe.

This is easily observed online. Many women easily turn to their social media audiences for reassurance and support. A woman can post about a personal struggle or social concern and, though she may experience some push-back, there will also inevitably be a flow of supportive comments from men seeking her approval and from commiserating women.

The same dynamic applies in real life settings. Many schools and other public institutions are particularly sensitive to the concerns of women and devote significant resources to addressing them. All this contributes to women’s now outstripping men in both educational and professional contexts.

Now, consider what happens when men voice a concern online. In many threads on Twitter, for example, men can share their loneliness, their pain, their sense of powerlessness only to be greeted by multiple comments from women telling them they deserve to suffer, and from men telling them to buck up.

This isn’t going to work much longer. If we, as a society, want to make progress toward a less strained and divided future, we are going to have to hear young men out. Let them vent about every perceived injustice. But, and this is the hard part, we will have to enact changes based on what we hear.

That’s going to rub against the widespread conviction that men are all privileged oppressors who are already unduly privileged, an assumption that has largely led to the current situation.

We don’t have to change, but the consequences of not changing—an ever-growing underclass of frustrated, hate-filled, resentful young men increasingly opposed to the core convictions of our culture and eager to challenge them in increasingly violent and explosive ways—are worrying.

This is just one of the points addressed in the podcast above. I invite you to listen in and respond to this nuanced discussion by commenting here.

P.S.

To learn more about my coaching services, click here.

Men today are lost.

They don’t know who they are or where they are going, and many of their other problems are downstream from this simple fact. Over and over in my coaching work with men, I will hear a guy relay what he’s dealing with.

His finances are a mess, he has a girlfriend but they fight all the time, his health isn’t great, and professionally he’s going nowhere. He lacks “motivation.”

When I get around to asking him what he actually wants, or what his goals are, he looks at me blankly. Sometimes, he’ll blink. What seems like a simple question often takes him back.

Many guys, it turns out, have never really considered what their soul desires, what longings burn in their core.Going through life with no clear picture of where their souls long to go or of the work it would do, leaves guys in survival mode.

A crystal-clear vision for a man’s life pulls him forward, motivates him to persevere when things are against him. Without it, he stays stuck in survival mode, just trying to pay the next bill, putting out the next fire, or he sinks into a gray materialism or hedonism, chasing bigger and bigger external rewards and pleasures that, in the end, leave him spent and sad.

This situation isn’t surprising. Forces today are aligned against men having any awareness at all of our inner lives. Our culture rewards production, and men, especially, are told their worth to others depends entirely on what they produce.

The kind of introspection and contemplation necessary to really know himself is deemed wasteful, frivolous, and, in some cases, effeminate. The powers that be do not want a population of men connected to their hearts and to what matters most to them. Those kinds of men tend to make trouble.

Most guys are simply never asked what they want. They’re told.

Just as our society demands men produce, it also demands they consume. Everyone knows men’s attention in our media-saturated culture is constantly directed outward, away from the heart.

Whether by endless distraction on social media, the relentless crush of advertising, or by free and easy pornography, men in the modern West are trained to keep their eyes trained outwardly, looking for the next thing to consume. The message is to buy, buy, buy and never to reflect on whether he really wants any of this stuff or not.

All this keeps men preoccupied with things that don’t matter. Eventually, he finds himself burned out, ashamed, lonely, and defeated. Most guys simply try to push on bravely, though there is a better way.

When encouraged to talk about and explore their real desires, most men connect with them quickly. Usually, they find it helpful for someone else to ask questions and to encourage them to go beyond what seems safe and “possible,” but to be really honest about what they want.

Once they’re willing to be honest, the future almost invariably looks brighter as now they have something to build toward, a goal that until this point had been absent.

The last time I wrote to you, I was on the brink of launching my first-ever mastermind group for men. In the intervening month or so, we have met and seen a lot of success. This very issue has raised its head in the group. Members have all been very helpful to one another in encouraging men to be honest about what they want out of life, to believe they deserve to move toward those things, and to start seeing results.

Our group is too small to change the large-scale patterns that are severing men from their inner fire, but that doesn’t mean we must do nothing. If you are a man struggling with a lack of motivation, of direction, if you are facing a crisis or just feeling empty, I encourage you to consider joining us for a few meetings and letting us see what we can do.

If you’re interested, the link is below. You can get 50% off the normal price this month by entering the code “Dean50” at checkout. Leading this group and supporting men looking for a path forward is a great inspiration and joy to me. I am very grateful I get to see it so often. I’m hoping the next wins I get to celebrate are yours.

Click here to read more about The Compass mastermind group for men.

A few years ago, life fell apart for me. It was horrible, but now I’m starting something new.

I may tell the story of the collapse in detail someday, but for now, let it suffice to say that a life I spent decades building unraveled in just a couple of years. I lost everything I ever loved.

That kind of loss teaches you a lot.

I learned, for example, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life working with people to help them live deeper, richer lives. I wanted to see them grow spiritually, to develop good relationships, faith, and a profound sense of meaning.

That desire motivated me to build a successful and growing one-on-one coaching business where I dive deep with people into the patterns that hold them back. In these sessions we explore the unresolved emotional and spiritual questions that make clients unsure about moving forward. Seeing clients transform their souls and lives is a great joy.

The time has come to branch out, and I wanted to tell you about the next step for me.

On October 8, 2025 I will host the first meeting of a virtual mastermind group called The Compass serving men in crisis. These crises might be divorce, a bad breakup, custody issues, job loss, or just the slow crisis of living without meaning and connection. Unfortunately, I can only make space for 5 guys in a group, so they’ll probably fill quickly. Still, my goal is to serve those I can by creating the kind of resource I wish I’d had when things were disintegrating for me.

We’ll meet four times throughout the month of October. During the meetings, each man will have dedicated time to talk about his struggles, to receive feedback and direction from the other men, and to strategize about next steps. Between meetings, we’ll stay in touch through a private telegram channel where we can encourage and push one another forward.

This is a paid group. However, since you’ve supported me over the years by subscribing to this newsletter, I’d like to offer you something in return.

Any man reading this can enter the code COMPASS at checkout and get in for 50 percent of the regular price. Think of it as a thank you gift.

I really do believe this group will change men’s lives for the better, and I am certain the men meant to be there will find their way.

Click here to learn more and to register.

Hope to see you there.

About a year ago, I sat in a lonely shelter house in a neglected park as a thunderstorm rattled the branches of nearby trees and cracked open a book of blank pages.

That moment led me to cultivate a regular journaling practice. More than anything else, this habit has helped me dig deep into a process of personal and spiritual growth that has led to transformative results.

Every time I’ve posted about this experience, I’ve gotten lots of questions and comments indicating others are interested in learning how this works.

I wanted to drop you a line this morning to let you know of two opportunities along these lines.

First, beginning soon, I’ll be offering a mini-challenge around this topic. It’s a four-week, real-time group introduction to this kind of writing. I’ll be addressing techniques for using a journal to dig deep into your own belief system and ways to overcome the obstacles that keep lots of people from using this tool to its fullest.

Best of all, it’s just $12 at the moment. For a month of instruction and support as you build a life-changing habit, that’s a pretty good deal.

Sign up here.

I am also very happy to tell you about a product I have spent a year developing that is finally available to you.

One reason many people give up on developing a journaling practice is that they feel intimidated by the blank page. They sit down, stare at it, and feel overwhelmed by not knowing what to write.

I’ve created something to help.

I have just launched a guided journal that contains prompts asking the user questions he or she can answer at every journaling session.

Get it here.

This book isn’t just a set of random prompts, however. I’ve designed it to be a complete program aiming to help users take stock of their pasts, assess their presents, and plan their futures.

Feedback on it so far has been great. Lots of early reviews have said it’s been very helpful. I’m sure you’d find it helpful too.

That’s it for today, friends. I do hope that you will take advantage of these opportunities. I’m convinced both will do a lot of good for a lot of people in years to come.

No reason one of those people shouldn’t be you.

For a long time, my father fixed things. Like many men in our Indiana town, he was laid off from the local Chrysler plant in the late ’70s. To compensate, he opened a small business in our even smaller garage. There, he squeezed a TV repair shop in among the big wheels, scraps of old lumber, and about a million wiffle balls. He worked there most of my adolescence. He did a lot of soldering, as I recall.

He had, not long before, become an expert at television repair by taking a correspondence course. He would receive packets of instructions in the mail, fiddle with the television that sat perpetually on our dining room table, its guts hanging out immodestly, and send the papers back.

Time passed, and he added stereos, cassette players, and, eventually, CD players to his repertoire. After several years, Chrysler called, and the repair business became part-time until he closed it down, now many years ago.

Like my father, my grandfather, too, made a big chunk of his living repairing things, cars mostly. On his farm, among the miles of wind-tossed corn, he’d built a garage. Many days, we would visit to find him and my uncles disappearing under assorted junkers, groaning as the creepers rolled them away.

Things have changed. Nobody repairs anything anymore. Most people repair their cars occasionally, though improved manufacturing processes have meant cars need much less maintenance than they once did. Televisions these days are so cheap it makes more sense to let the defunct ones leach their toxins into the landfill, and buy a new, even more toxic model.

Moving from a repair society to a disposal society has had effects few think about. One is that this shift has curtailed the prospects of men who fix things. Among the things we’ve tossed are the values and practices that once grounded the roles and hopes of this entire class.

When we began throwing out what we once would have repaired, many men lost not just their livelihoods, but an avenue of service that gave them a sense of value and identity. The fewer things that needed repair, naturally, the fewer repair men we needed. The fewer we needed, the fewer we got. Now, a whole segment of men who once would have derived satisfaction and a positive view of themselves from seeing their accomplishments maintain their community’s standard of living find themselves disconnected, unable to figure out how to make a positive contribution.

These men are adrift. The NEETs we hear about, living in their mothers’ basements playing video games all day, would once have been busy in small businesses making things work. Don’t forget that repairmen didn’t just work for themselves, but that the American manufacturing sector employed thousands of them to keep the great factories turning. Where should their energies go now?

Today, what is not disposable is too complicated to repair. The days when self-taught auto mechanics like my grandfather and uncles could hang up a shingle and expect to do reasonably well by changing fan belts, ignition coils, spark plugs, and motor oil for the neighbors are long gone. Modern cars are governed by complex electronic computer systems, which require much specialized training to fix. It’s not so easy anymore.

Recognize, too, that the “guys who keep things going” aren’t necessarily the same as the “guys who make new things.” Think of Elon Musk as a “guy who makes new things” in the extreme. Being that kind of man requires a different set of gifts, and not many “guys who keep things running” can easily make the shift into this totally different role and way of being.

Not only did the shift to replacement culture make things more difficult for men economically, it made things more confusing for them romantically. While our culture has made the learning of repair skills obsolete, rendering them the domain of professionals or home-improvement hobbyists, many women still find the possession of these skills desirable.

A 2023 study by Angi found about 85 percent of women said having repair skills was an attractive trait in men. This means many men now find themselves in the odd position of trying to attract women who expect them to have acquired skills the rest of the culture has disincentivized acquiring. Surely, this contributes to the frustrations we hear from both sides about the current dating market.

When men are consistently discouraged, many simply drop out, as we have seen young men doing for a while. The solution to this, if there is one, is complex. We may never shift fully back to a repair culture, but the remedy to this problem lies in that direction.

Only by reigning in the culture of cheap, replaceable junk and the global trade that makes it possible, will things improve. Only by reinvigorating a culture of thrift and restraint, values once at the heart of repair culture, can we hope to see the restoration of these men. If we are unable to do this, and current trends continue, soon we will face a crisis so great not even my dad could fix it.

You can listen here:

on the show’s Spotify page

on YouTube

or on all major podcast platforms.

You can listen here:

on the show’s Spotify page

on YouTube

or on all major podcast platforms.

You can listen here:

on the show’s Spotify page

on YouTube

or on all major podcast platforms.

You can listen here:

on the show’s Spotify page

on YouTube

or on all major podcast platforms.

You can listen here:

on the show’s Spotify page

on YouTube

or on all major podcast platforms.

We talk with about the nature of poetry, the poetic disposition and the human inclination to suppress The Mystical.

You can listen here:

on the show’s Spotify page

on Youtube

or on all major podcast platforms.

You can listen here:

on the show’s Spotify page

on Youtube

or on all major podcast platforms.

We talk about about the state of modern men and how to improve it.

You can listen here:

on the show’s Spotify page

on Youtube

or on all major podcast platforms.