What Women Get Wrong About Immature Men
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.