(See the bottom of this post for the Video version of Chapter 11)
I’ll be honest: I don’t fully know what the f*** these words mean.
Masculine. Feminine. Polarity.
People throw them around like they’re obvious, like we all agreed on the definitions. But I’m still wrestling with them. I’m still feeling around in the dark. I’ve had moments where I could feel polarity in the room, clear as day, but if you asked me to define it in a neat little sentence, I’d struggle.
So this chapter isn’t me pretending to be the expert.
This is me wandering through the mystery out loud.
I grew up Catholic. Forced church. Catholic school. Male priests. Altar boys, not altar girls. At home, my brother and I did the outside work—mowing, digging post holes, lifting heavy sh*t. My sister worked inside. At the family business, I was doing hard physical labor, hauling sides of beef, making deliveries, doing the rough stuff.
So from early on, I got the message:
Men do this.
Women do that.
Then I went to Fiji and saw a similar thing in a traditional village. Women cooking. Men fishing, building, working outside. Clear roles. Clear structure.
And I started wondering: did that clarity help?
In traditional cultures, marriage wasn’t this fragile little thing where people were constantly threatening to leave. You got married, and that was your life. So I wonder: did the roles help keep the ship steady?
Because in our modern culture, what the f*** is a man even supposed to do?
Make money?
Is that it?
Is masculinity now just “go make a bunch of money, even if the job destroys your soul”?
That’s where I get stuck.
Because I can feel this ancient part of me that would know exactly what to do in a village. Drop me into a tribe, tell me to hunt, build, protect, provide, help the people, and I’m good. I know how to do that.
But modern life?
Go sell poison. Go push propaganda. Go sit in unnatural lights doing sh*t I hate so I can make enough money to be considered attractive?
That doesn’t feel like manhood to me.
That feels like selling my soul...
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It’s a vessel my partner and I get into together, with the intention of traveling through life in it. But the ship is given to us empty. The only things inside it are what we put there.
So I can’t expect to take from the relationship what I haven’t put into it.
In my first marriage, we got into that ship with no manual. No sailing instructions. No maintenance guide. No tools. No skills. No lighthouse. No foghorn. Nothing.
Just two young people sent out into the ocean with fifty-foot seas and told, “Good luck.”
Of course we crashed.
How could we not?
That’s why relationship skills matter.
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Chapter 14 — Getting Back Out There
