These days men are encouraged to be emotional and vulnerable and to constantly share their worries with those around them. But a masculine man, especially when he becomes a husband and father, should not always be venting his anxieties. He should have quiet strength. He should be willing to carry his cross, and sacrifice for his family, without whining. This is what we used to call "dignity."
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So I saw someone shared on Facebook an article, I don't remember where it was from, another article about millennial men.
And it was talking about the ways that millennial men have reinvented or reshaped masculinity.
And one of those ways is that we are apparently more emotionally vulnerable and more open about our feelings.
And you hear this a lot nowadays, that this is an improvement.
An improvement on the male gender is that now, as we are more enlightened and more progressive, younger men tend to be more open, eager to share our feelings and to talk about our feelings.
And I think that's generally true, that a lot of men these days do seem very open about talking about their feelings, men and women, but it's always been the case for women.
Women probably even more so now.
We're all kind of trending in this direction of sharing and oversharing and constantly.
And we love, you know, the thing we love to talk about, men and women, is we love talking about our strengths.
Stress. How stressed we are.
Our anxiety. Oh my gosh, I have so much anxiety.
I'm so stressed. So much anxiety.
I'm stressed. I'm busy.
Listen to me. I'm so busy, everyone.
You want to hear about how busy I am?
That's the thing I've noticed.
People love talking about how busy they are, how little sleep they got the night before, how stressed they are, and about their anxiety.
That's just, we love talking about it.
And I think it's kind of a status symbol because if, well, I didn't get a lot of sleep and I'm busy, It means I'm obviously an important person, so I get the admiration of being an important person, but I also get a little bit of pity, too.
So it's a nice little... It's admiration with this nice, thick coating, this icing of pity on top of it, and it just makes for one sweet cupcake, I guess, as far as we're concerned.
I'm going to differ a little bit with...
With some people, though, because although I recognize that men are more emotional these days and more willing and anxious and eager to talk about their feelings, I don't see it necessarily as an improvement.
I think we're losing something of what a man is supposed to be, especially in the home and in the context of a marriage or as both a husband and a father.
As I've been thinking about this, my mind went back to a story that I read in a book called The Gulag Archipelago, which is actually a three-volume work written by Solzhenitsyn.
And it's a great classic series of books.
Not exactly pick-me-uppers.
It's a history of the Soviet labor camp system.
So if I'm looking for lessons about marriage, obviously the first place I look, if I'm looking for insights into marriage, I'm going to look at a book about the Soviet labor camp system.
That's because, you know, that's where...
No, I just...
I think it was in the second volume.
There's this quick anecdote that Solzhenitsyn relays.
He gives a general history of the labor can system.
He also talks about his own experiences.
He spent several years in the Gulag himself, and he kind of intersperses his own experiences within the larger tale of the history of Soviet Russia, which Not to spoil it for you, but if I had to summarize the two volumes that I've read, if I had to summarize 2,000 pages, I would say it all boils down to this.
Soviet Russia, not a fun place, it turns out.
Actually. Not a great place.
If you ever get in a time machine or trying to decide where to go, don't go to Soviet Russia because you will end up at a gulag and you're not going to enjoy it.
I know it's kind of a shocker.
So he... He recounts one scene in the book that I thought was the most powerful illustration of married love, of at least the most powerful illustration of a husband's love that I've read anywhere outside of the Bible.
And it stands in direct contrast to this idea of the overly emotional, open, constantly sharing and oversharing man.
So this is the story. It takes place in a prison camp sometime in the 1920s, I believe.
A man named Osorgin, who's been arrested on some trumped-up charge, as was common in Soviet Russia, and he was scheduled to be executed by firing squad.
And on the day that he was scheduled to be executed, and he was told he was going to be executed, it just so happened that his wife had already boarded a boat and was on her way to come visit him.
Of course, not knowing about any of this.
He wanted to see his wife one more time, and he certainly didn't want her to come all that way and then discover that he'd just been killed.
And I'm sure he was also worried that if she showed up and he'd just been executed or he was being executed, that they may arrest her for knowing about it, because that's the way things worked in Soviet Russia, is that if your family member was arrested, whatever happened to them, whatever their fate was, wherever they ended up, whether it was in a camp in Siberia or...
Six feet underground, you weren't allowed to know.
And so if she did find out, that may put her in jeopardy.
So he pleaded with the guards and asked them to allow him to see his wife one last time when she comes.
And Just to spend some time with her, and he assured the guards that once she leaves, he will offer himself up to be executed.
And the guards agreed. But of course, the condition is, you can't tell your wife.
You can't even hint at it.
She cannot come to find out or suspect that there's something bad about to happen to you.
So he couldn't even let a facial expression cross his face that may tip her off.
We spent two or three days with her.
They were together the whole time.
And he never hinted.
He never let on, except for one brief moment when they were taking a walk by a lake.
And his wife looked over and caught him for a moment, clutching his head in torment and agony, thinking about what he was about to face.
And she asked him what was wrong, and he quickly said nothing.
And then finally, when her visit was over, she got on the boat.
The boat was pulling away. And as the boat was pulling away, he was already undressing himself.
I find this so powerful because it's an example, the most extreme example I've encountered, of a man shouldering a burden, carrying a cross for his family, being in emotional anguish, and not sharing it, not talking about it, keeping it to himself, carrying the load by himself.
And this is what men Not quite to this extent, but hopefully most of us, but this is basically what we are meant to do for our families.
We are meant to shoulder burdens, to carry a cross.
We're told to love our wives like Christ loved the church, and we know that Christ died for the church.
He suffered and sacrificed, and He also didn't complain either.
He did it with Patience and grace and love.
There was only, there was just the one moment, the one very human moment in the garden at Gethsemane where Jesus wanted some of the apostles there in this really vulnerable, painful moment for Christ.
But famously, they fell asleep on the job, and so they couldn't even give him that little bit of comfort the one time that he asked for it.
So that's what we're called to do.
To strive to carry the largest portion of the burden that we can, and to do it without complaining, without holding it against our wives or our children, without resentment, without demanding acknowledgement, without martyring ourselves, without feeling the need to constantly talk about it.
We're called, in other words, to be stressed and to have anxiety and to not constantly say, oh, I'm so stressed.
I'm so stressed out.
Everyone listen to me about my stress.
I have so much anxiety.
Listen. No, we're called to sometimes just shut up and deal with it and not force everyone around us, including our wives, to accompany us in our self-pity and misery all the time.
I think as modern men, we tend to make one of two mistakes when it comes to this.
Or perhaps we make both mistakes.
We could, number one, flat out refuse to carry the burden, or to carry any burden at all.
We may allow ourselves, and some husbands are happy to allow their wives to just carry the entire burden by themselves.
Some husbands are fine letting their wives do all the work, feel all the stress while they go out and they go downstairs and play video games or watch porn.
I think especially of the families where you see them at church and the mother is there with her kids and she's trying to keep them all in line in the pew.
The husband's nowhere to be seen because he's at home in his pajamas watching TV. The spiritual formation of a child is a very difficult thing, and keeping kids quiet in church is just the easiest aspect of it.
It can be a very painful, challenging thing to shoulder that burden, the burden of putting your children on the right path spiritually and guarding them against all the spiritual dangers that are out there.
And some men are perfectly fine allowing their wives to To take all of that on completely alone, and to call it shameful is a massive understatement.
The second mistake we may make is, well, okay, we may do our part to some extent, shoulder some of the burden at least, but we've listened too much to modern notions of manhood and We have listened too much to modern ideas about how the genders are supposed to interact.
We've become too anxious to take the culture up on its invitation for us to spill our guts constantly and to complain about our stress and to share every last anxiety that we have with the world and with our wives.
I think there are men who, you know, they'll tell their wives everything.
Every worry, every fear.
If they're in pain, emotional, physical, whatever, they'll make sure their wives know it.
They'll make sure everyone around them knows it.
Now, here's the thing. Of course, we should share quite a bit with our wives, and there was a time when men were obviously too closed up, too silent.
They were just a closed book, like robots in the home.
They had no emotion whatsoever, and that meant that they had really no bond.
There's It's hard to have intimacy.
It's hard to have bond with your wife when you're not letting her in at all.
But I think we've overcorrected now.
We've overcompensated, some of us.
And if we had to choose between the two extremes, I think we're better off on the strong, silent-type end of the spectrum than on this end of the spectrum, where we're so in touch with our emotions that we're just constantly eager to share them with everyone.
Not just our wives, but the other day I saw on my newsfeed, and this is not an uncommon sight, you see this all the time, I saw a guy, an adult male, probably about my age, unleash a whole torrent of personal complaints and anxieties right there on the internet for everybody to see, for public consumption. I don't know if this guy's married, but if he is, I can only imagine how often his wife must be forced to listen to him complain and moan about every worry and misfortune and heartache that he has.
I think a balance is needed here.
But the fact remains that sometimes, I believe, a man has to carry a fear, a worry, a concern, a pain, and to keep it to himself.
Carry it himself.
I think a man has to sometimes be willing to be stressed out and not show it, tired and not show it, fed up and not show it, exhausted, stressed out, anxious, whatever, and not show it.
To carry it with dignity.
Not to feel the need to vent.
I guess that's what we call it these days, is venting.
And I don't want to get off on a tangent here, but venting is generally an entirely selfish pursuit.
Usually, when we say we're venting to somebody, whether it's our spouse or anybody, When we say we're venting, what that means is we're just piling toxic fumes and negativity right on top of some unsuspecting, innocent person because it makes us feel better.
It's like just vomiting negativity right on top of someone's head and saying, oh, I just had to vent.
I hope you don't mind. And then the person, they have now, they're covered in your negativity, and they're like, okay, what am I supposed to do with this?
Thank you for unleashing all of that on me.
That's men and women.
I think all of us, all men and women, these days, we're all a little bit too eager to vent and to constantly complain all the time.
But a man especially, I think, has to be willing sometimes to come home from work Where he deals with not only the stress of earning a living, but also the underlying stress, the constant stress of being responsible for sustaining and feeding his family and the worries that come with that, the what ifs, the what thens, all the different things.
But he has to come home and be immediately thrust back into family life and the duties of family life.
With all of those concerns and stresses and responsibilities that come with that.
And he has to make that transition suddenly, like flipping a switch, just like that.
And without always letting on how exhausted, how burdened he feels.
Because not everything should be shared.
Sometimes a man should be willing to be a man and carry it himself.
That's not to say that he can never speak with his wife about anything.
Hopefully his wife will understand what her husband does for the family and what he goes through, and she'll try to give him a break even if he doesn't ask for one, and hopefully he'll try to give her breaks.
Hopefully they have a marriage like that.
But there should still be that quiet dignity, that quiet strength, which shoulders and carries and endures and does it in a way that isn't always noticed.
And isn't always begging for appreciation and for acknowledgement, but he just fulfills his duty in love and sacrifice.
I think that's what's missing.
Of course, not in every case, but that's what's missing generally from American manhood is quiet strength and dignity.
That is That's part of a man's role, I think.
Just a thought. Just a thought from a Soviet labor camp.
