Older Men Are Not Allowed To Wake Up
This may not fit the popular narrative, but older men are some of the most dramatically underserved parts of our population.
I see this pattern often where a man has been very successful in his career.
And then he reaches a point where he realizes there must be something more.
He realizes he actually isn’t that happy in his marriage/dating life. That his work was distracting him from built up emotions from his childhood.
He reaches a point where he learns that he has never been allowed to feel.
And that those stories he was telling himself, about not being that emotional — they are maybe not true after all.
And he realizes he is running out of time and he has never really felt the beauty of life.
Never opened to it fully.
So sometimes what he does is he goes to therapy.
The therapist often puts him on antidepressants.
Do you understand how much of a tragedy this is?
The easiest person in the world to convince to go on antidepressants is an older man who has been told his entire life that feeling is wrong.
I will tell you the truth: most therapists haven’t done a deep amount of their own work.
I don’t care how many years of experience they have.
They don’t embody it. They get into the profession because they’re fucked up and then they feel better because they try to fix everyone else’s problems.
I think that is a phase of the work and you have to move out of it. Most therapists don’t.
So this man goes to a therapist and they put him on antidepressants and spend a lot of time trying to dissect what is wrong with him because he feels dissatisfied with his life.
These men often attract women who seem like they have it all together. Who seem like they have done way more work on themselves.
This woman is often quite domineering and likes to pick apart what is wrong with the man.
She fools him because she seems to be so much more in touch with her emotions than he is. So full of life.
But really she is mimicking the feminine. She does not feel it either.
She is terrified of being in touch with her body.
She likes feeling like she has the one-up on him.
One time I had a client who went to his therapist and brought his partner along and the two of these women spent the entire session making a list of the things that were wrong with him.
He brought this list to me as things he needed to fix.
As you might imagine older men are not a huge part of my regular client demographic. (They used to be more — I originally began my business as a sex coach for men).
But I still see them occasionally and in other areas of my life and when I see this pattern it really breaks my heart.
Because what I see is a man who is deeply desiring to be in touch with himself and with life.
He is sweet and really receptive.
And that receptivity is taken advantage of by a culture that doesn’t know what to do with it.
Older men aren’t supposed to be unhappy.
They have spent their entire lives working toward success.
They have done all the things society told them to do.
They have supported their families and tried to make their wives happy.
They have had sex taken away from them and are told they shouldn’t want it so much.
They have so much “privilege.”
They are the most privileged group that there is.
And they often end up committing suicide when the whole anti-depressant/therapy/self-blame/criticism dance doesn’t work.
Over and over again I hear from women how awful their partners are.
And then I meet their partners.
And I watch them interact and I watch how she picks at him. How she emasculates him. How she dumps her emotions onto him and blames them on him.
Older men are not understood in this society.
They are not supported. They are not seen.
They are told they should not feel and they should not want sex so much and they should be happy because they have all the things there are to want in life.
And it is a lie.
Witnessing a man express his emotions for the first time in his adult life is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
And this makes our society panic.
Because if the older men are unhappy then really what are we doing? Is anything successful, about the way we live?
When men begin to wake up they have an entire culture ready to completely shut it down. An entire culture that doesn’t even know where to begin, to navigate it.
And this, truly, is a tragedy.
