Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity

by Justin Baldoni

For example, if you are working in an office and looking at a possible promotion, you might hear that the job you want requires six things. In general, it’s been found that a woman will say, “Well, I have five of them, so I have to work on number six.” But men will say, “Hey, I have three of them, that’s enough,” and put themselves forward. Which is kind of another way of saying that women tend to play by the rules, and we men often believe that we can either bend the rules, they don’t really apply to us, or that they are meant to be broken. I’m guilty of behavior like this, and oftentimes I am rewarded for it without even realizing it.

Hot take: you can’t be self-confident if you don’t have a sense of self. Self-confidence without a sense of self, without self-awareness, is fake and performative.

Ijeoma Oluo describes microaggressions as bee stings, where “one random bee sting might not be a big deal, a few random bee stings every day of your life will have a definite impact on the quality of your life, and your overall relationship with bees.” It’s death by a thousand cuts.

There will always be someone to compare yourself to. And comparison always, always leads to suffering.

Some of the best advice my dad gave me when I was struggling in year two or three of marriage was to remind me that love is a verb. It’s a choice that one has to make every single day. He told me that there were times in his marriage to my mom where he had to literally choose to love her, especially when he didn’t feel like it. It was that choice, that act of watering their marriage, that has allowed them to stay married and in love.

Capitalism is an impossible system without women’s unpaid labor. While mothering doesn’t pay financially, it’s quite literally the job that keeps the world moving forward.