Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity

by Justin Baldoni

You’ll find that at many points in the remodel process, your marriage will start to resemble your home. But if you hang in there, the result, just like the house, will be beautiful. That’s also where the work begins. You never stop working on your home, and you never stop working on your marriage.

When we can get beyond our conditioning, our egos, our learned behaviors that cause us to react from a place of wounding, what we had and have is really fucking beautiful.

Sure, it may not have been all fireworks and fairy tales all the time, but what marriage is? Our marriage continues to be grounding, conn...

Our dating life gave us so many opportunities to practice choosing our core selves over our conditioned selves, and even when we failed, there was room to come back to that choice. And by exercising that muscle of choice—by realizing that we had the power to choose love and no...

We definitely haven’t arrived; we aren’t perfect, and our way is just one way. Love and marriage are infinitely deep, as unique as the two souls who are in it together, and impossible to fathom, but little by little and day by day, we work on it knowing that it’s truly about the journey, not the destination.

Fuck the Fairy Tale

Don’t get me wrong. I love a good...

There is also a conditioned place in me that knows I’m really good at creating magical experiences for people and that I have to be careful not to use it to my advantage or rely on it when I’m feeling insecure and need a win.

When you’re living for happily ever after, there is no room for you to be human, let alone for your partner to be human. It’s this very conflict that led me to propose to Emily in the way that I did. (I realize how unromantic it sounds to use a conflict as an inspiration for a proposal, but bear with me.)

weddings in reality are never for the couple; they are a show for the people who come and attend. Many people have said they barely even remember their weddings because there is so much pressure leading up to creating the perfect day, that they forget to actually enjoy it.

Hot take, pure and simple: love doesn’t need a show.

It doesn’t need two hundred people in an audience. It doesn’t need catered food or the perfect backdrop for pictures, and it doesn’t need the stress of a wedding planner yelling at everyone to make su...

I actually believe that future generations are going to look at our current cultural wedding traditions and find it kind of ridiculous. I don’t think our kids will need a day that costs tens (and in some cases, hundreds) of thousands of dollars to start their lives together.

Instead, they will use that money to actually start their lives together and just celebrate with their friends and family in a way that feels true to them and their unique love story.

It’s that need, or lack of it, to “show” or not show our love that is one of the reasons I am, to this day, madly in love with my wife.

Emily has never needed public declarations of love.

She is the kind of person who would have been okay eloping or being proposed to in private with no cameras and no one knowing about it ...

That I would honor him and her by not repeating the patterns and the suffering he experienced that caused her so much pain growing up. I also wish I could have thanked him in person, because despite the pain he may have caused as he navigated his own unhealed trauma, he also did so much good.

The strong, creative, powerful, sensitive, and healing woman I love is a by-product of all of his light and darkness. As a man and as a father, while he struggled with his own version of masculinity, he loved her deeply until the day he passed away.

I think it summarizes the best of what I learned dating Emily: know yourself, know your love language, but don’t love your partner the way you want to be loved; love them the way they want to be loved.

Wedded bliss leaves out the fact that life gets really hard, marriage gets hard, having children gets hard, parenting children gets harder, and if we never see the real stuff get played out, then we bail as soon as we lose the proverbial butterflies.

Of course, there are still moments when Emily takes my breath away and I can barely speak, but they aren’t the moments I expected them to be.

No, it’s when she lets her guard down, lays her heart and her wounds open before me, allowing me to see them—to see her—and know her more. It’s when she has a breakthrough in therapy and comes out of the bedroom with tears in her eyes, feeling like she is carrying a thousand pounds on her shoulders yet still finds the energy and will to play some silly game with our children.

It’s when she wakes up in the morning and slurs her words because she has her Invisalign in.

It’s when she’s frustrated with all the technology in our house because nothing works for her and she starts to swear, which always makes me laugh becaus...

It’s when she’s mothering and gives herself a time-out when she temporarily dislikes our children. And it’s when she comes back from that time-out with apologies and more grace and patience than I could ever have.

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.

It goes both ways, and like all seasons in life, it is cyclical in nature. It’s not some mix of chemicals or pheromones. It’s not sex. It’s not even connection. It’s the choice, and in that choice lies the work.

She is looking in the mirror that I hold up to her, and she’s also doing the hard work of self-work, which is honestly one of the sexiest things ever. Screw just having a hot wife who takes care of her body; abs will last only so long. Nothing is sexier than the emotional maturity to know that your heart and mind need the same attention as—if not more than—your body.

As a result, together we plan on continually building and rebuilding our fortress to protect us, not just from the outside world, but also from ourselves. And thanks to those shiny mirrors we reflect on each other, we are both committed to growing and weathering the tests, trials, and storms that life will undoubtedly bring us.

all of a sudden, the time had come, and I was completely frozen by the fact that I was not ready. How the hell was I supposed to parent a child and not mess them up when I still felt so messed up? How the hell was I supposed to parent a child when, in so many ways, I still felt like a child myself? How the hell could I ever be enough of a dad when I didn’t even feel like I was enough of a man?

Many of the ways my dad was parenting me were the exact opposites of the way he was parented. On one hand, this is awesome. It’s how every generation gets better and improves on itself. It’s how cycles of abuse and traumas are stopped and how we make progress as a collective species.

But I believe that true healing has to occur first, otherwise even though we are making different choices than our parents did, our childhood wounds find their way in through cracks we can’t see or that we didn’t know were there in the first place.

As an example, my grandpa didn’t tell my dad he loved him, so my dad told me every day. His dad didn’t go to his sports events, so my dad came to every single one of mine. As awesome as it was to know that I could always look to the sidelines and see my dad, underneath it all, I feel like my dad was trying to heal a wound from his childhood by overcompensating in mine. He was trying to heal a sadness he felt as a child by overextending himself to ensure I never felt the same sadness. Otherwise he wouldn’t have put so much damn pressure on himself to show up at literally everything. If he missed something, he would feel terrible and beat himself up, and that’s a pressure that, as an adult now, I wish I could have relieved him of...

“If you build it, they will come” has become one of the more well-known lines in movie history.

It’s basically about generational trauma and a son finally getting a second chance to heal while simultaneously healing his dad. The whole thing culminates in a gorgeous scene where almost nothing is said, and you just see these two men playing catch together as the sun sets.

As a child and teenager, I knew that things were hard. I often intuitively felt like something was a little off, but it was never talked about. My dad was a hero, and every hero has certain things they just don’t talk about.

Looking back, it was almost textbook: he had to protect the image that everything was okay and that he was the father who took care of everyone and made sure everyone felt good and was happy. From an early age I subconsciously could sense the conflict between the image our family projected and the reality of what our family was going through.

come hell or high water, he would be there, and I think it’s because he had put this pressure on himself, this otherworldly pressure on himself to show up every time because his father didn’t.

So much of who my dad is and how he parented my sister and me was rooted in unconditional love and support, but I also think it’s important to look at how he was also parenting from a place of woundedness.

When I was getting ready for the birth of our firstborn, Maiya, my dad told me that the moment he watched me come into the world was one of the most profound and spiritual moments of his

Even though my mind wanted to react quickly and harshly to my wife’s idea about exploring home birth as an option, I knew way better than to say anything definitive, let alone a definitive no. At the end of the day, I think it’s important for men to recognize that while we are partners, spouses, coparents, whatever title you choose, a pregnancy involves 100 percent of her body and therefore it is 100 percent her choice.

For the sake of importance and clarity, let me say it again: it’s her body, therefore it’s her choice.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that we as partners don’t have a space for input and our opinion, but it does mean that it’s not up to us to deci...

In the end, our role should be to be of service, support, research, an...

The birthing process for a woman is more than likely the most intense thing they will ever go through, and they are the ones carrying the baby, not us—they are the first protector of our child, not us. We must learn to trust and honor their intuition and instincts by not i...

wanted science and facts, so of course I was calmly freaking out on the inside when we walked into our first interview with our prospective midwife. But those emotions went away within minutes as she told us that the first and most important rule of home birth was not to be attached to birthing the baby at home.

The top priorities of a home birth are always the safety of both Baby and Mama. Wow. She must have known how I was feeling, as I’m sure in her thirty years of midwifery she’s had plenty of nervous and skeptical dads like me walk into her office just waiting for her to say the “wrong” thing. To her credit she knew exactly what I needed: facts and science.

She explained the process, how crucial the weekly appointments were, how paramount physical and emotional preparation were for the both of us (but especially Emily), and how imp...

I felt included, I felt seen, and more than anything I felt that my wife and our baby would be safe. So with an open heart I dove in, as it was what my wife wanted, and the more I understood he...