A slightly different version of this post first ran in June 2009.

I was talking to a friend of mine the other day; she and her boyfriend of several months are “taking a break” from their relationship. He’s in his early thirties, she’s in her late twenties; in different ways, each carries the “baggage” of family, faith, and previous lovers.

The fella — I’ll call him “Gordy” — is a bit overwhelmed by the gal, “Calliope.” Gordy, apparently, does something that I very much remember doing in relationships when I was younger: retreat in the face of intense emotion, particularly in the face of a woman’s anger. Many young — and not-so-young — men feel overwhelmed by what seem to be the superior verbal and emotional skills of female romantic partners. When a man has grown up learning not to display feelings, or to talk about them, he may end up feeling a bit as if he’s a first-year French student suddenly plunged into a conversation with fluent native speakers. He hasn’t got — or he feels he hasn’t got — the vocabulary with which to keep up. This isn’t because of testosterone, of course, or some inherent aspect of the human brain; it’s the hangover from growing up with the “guy code”. And the guy code, followed rigidly, leads to a kind of learned emotional helplessness.

I’ve been over this ground before in the three posts in the male transformation series. The three posts from the autumn of 2007 explain aspects of the problem — and the solution — in considerably more detail. But what I want to focus on today is Gordy’s need to “take a break” from the relationship, and the reasons that seem to undergird it. It’s entirely possible, of course, that “wanting a break” is code for “I really am tired of this relationship, and want to get out for good, but lack the courage to say so directly.” But from what I can tell, there’s something else at work. Gordy doesn’t want out; he has fallen in love with Calliope and wants to be with her. He also finds her — the complete package of Calliope-ness — to be more than a little overwhelming. He’s not calling an end so much as he seems to be calling for a time-out.

Let me say again (though my MRA critics don’t hear this) that I don’t think women are always blameless when heterosexual relationships go south. Women have their own lessons to learn — and in the case of sexist acculturation, it might be more apt to say that they have their own lessons to unlearn. But I write much more often about what men can and ought to do because, well, I’m a man. I’ve lived nearly 44 years in a male body, and while I don’t pretend to be a professional relationship expert, I’ve lived a bit — and thought a lot — about the ways in which culturally constructed masculinity undermines our collective happiness and our ability to function intimately with other human beings. And so I focus more on what men can do, respecting the reality that women have had plenty of experience being told how to behave by the males in their lives. Continue reading →