The rulebook nobody gave you…
Be strong, but emotionally available. Be ambitious, but always present. Be the provider, the protector, the perfect dad, the perfect gay man. Or be the sensitive one, the creative one, the one who’s done the work. Be masculine enough, but not too tough. Be yourself, as long as it’s a version everyone approves of.
That’s a lot of hats for one head, and everyone has a view on how you should wear them.
The rules are rarely written down. Men learn them through what gets encouraged, rewarded, criticised or left unspoken, until they feel natural, not like something we’ve collectively built. Worth gets tied to output: provide, fix, win, don’t need anything. Strength, resilience and pride become the currencies, and self-reliance gets welded to identity. There’s a difference between wanting to succeed and feeling you must succeed to be worthy. It’s worth asking: success as defined by whom? If value is earned, it can be lost, and that’s an incredibly vulnerable position to put yourself in.
Many men learn early that approval is conditional. So worth becomes something you earn, not something you have; if it’s earned, it can be lost, which is where the constant vigilance, overstretching and performing come from. When the gap between how you’re seen and how you feel on the inside gets too wide, that’s often when our mental health struggles most. The man everyone sees is capable and fine, but the man underneath is exhausted, struggling, feeling! The numbers sit at the end of this. Only one in three of those who come to therapy are men, yet three in four suicides are among men. Terrifying stats.
These unspoken rules around masculinity are handed down by families, schools, sport, media and workplaces that reward certainty and quietly punish struggle. Women and mums play a part too. How we, as whole people – vulnerable, struggling and unsure – are received early in life shapes us. Men are far more likely to talk to the women in their lives than to other men, so this isn’t only “a man thing”. These expectations also don’t land equally; race, sexuality, disability and class all shape which ways of being are rewarded and which are punished.
The expectations are often contradictory and confusing too. Be strong and self-sufficient, but also vulnerable and emotionally available. Those aren’t incompatible, but together they can become a standard nobody could meet all of the time. We take falling short as our own inadequacy, then look to the same cultural messages to fix it.
The newer rulebook champions the man who has “done the work”, and while this is a small step forward, more men can talk about their emotional lives, and of course that matters. But knowing your attachment style isn’t the same as sitting with an uncomfortable feeling or really accepting yourself within the attachment. If “doing the work” becomes another thing to be good at, it’s just a new performance with a different mask and another target we can fall short on. Self-work is a constant life choice, and it means being safe enough in yourself and willing to loosen the world’s expectations enough to find out who you really are underneath. And that will often look nothing like what’s expected: messy, complicated, guided by feeling rather than performance. Finding the confidence to carry that can sometimes feel insurmountable under society’s gaze.
The idealised version of what it means to be a man, a partner, a husband or a father is less fixed than it used to be. The provider role, once the clearest job description going, has changed a great deal. Yet the frameworks society holds onto haven’t caught up, so many men are still measured against the old rulebook in a world that no longer runs on it.
If your worth was tied to a role and the role is changing, the question “what am I for?” gets very loud. Uncertainty is hard for anyone, but if you’ve been taught your value comes from being capable and sure, not knowing can feel like failing. Some men look for certainty and find it in more rigid, even aggressive versions of masculinity, where the rules are clear and so is who belongs. It’s often less about ideology than about fear of losing your place. The more fluid ideas of what it means to be a man can feel threatening for the same reason. For some men, they’re freeing, but for others, they land as a loss.
What it costs
In relationships. Independence and emotional restraint can keep you safe for years, then get in the way when intimacy asks for vulnerability. It often becomes a dance: one partner steps forward, the other steps back, and both end up feeling not enough. There are always two people’s histories in the room.
In grief. Grief isn’t only bereavement. It’s job loss, a relationship ending, a parent’s decline, ill health, an imagined future, the person you thought you’d become. For a man whose identity rests on providing, losing his job can feel far more personal than losing a job. These losses don’t come with a ritual or permission to fall apart, so they tend to turn up as irritability, numbness or overwork.
In how we cope. Alcohol, drugs and other habits do different jobs for different people: relief, a way into social situations, a way to manage what feels unmanageable. Anger can be a legitimate response to hurt, but for some men, it’s the only feeling that feels allowed. Loneliness, money worries, trauma and not knowing where to get support all play a part, too.
In therapy, we get curious… Whose expectations am I carrying? Where did I learn them? How have they helped me? What have they cost me? Do they still reflect the person I want to be?
Often, a man realises he’s been loyal to a rule nobody ever asked him to keep. Picture someone who has never asked for help, insisting he’s fine, until he traces “I handle it myself” back to watching his dad do the same. Or a man who’s been made redundant and finds he isn’t only grieving the job but the identity of being the provider. Naming it lets him stop performing “fine” at home.
This isn’t about rejecting being a provider, a protector, a dad or an ambitious professional. Plenty of men genuinely value those things. The question is whether they reflect your values and choices, or whether they have become obligations your worth is constantly measured against. When the question shifts from “what should I be?” to “what do I actually care about?” and “how do I actually feel?”, the energy changes.
Tired of shouldering it, or noticing signs that you might be? Look out for exhaustion, irritability, feeling disconnected, drinking more, an important relationship going quiet, or feelings of “is this it?”. Ways of coping that once worked can stop working, and it’s better to notice these before a crisis and not shame yourself for them. It’s also why more men are coming back to therapy for a second, third or ongoing period, and why that isn’t a sign they failed to “do the work” but a sign they really are. Life changes, relationships evolve and needs shift. The first time gets you in the room; the rest is often where you ask what a life lived on your own terms looks like.
Our MOT Check In gives you 50 minutes, one-to-one, with a therapist. It’s a chance to reconnect with your values and purpose, take stock of where you are, and ask whether the life you’re living lines up with the man YOU want to be. What’s moving you towards that life, and what might be holding you back? Put down the obligations and projections, and ask who’s left underneath. Real men are messy, complicated, feeling beings, and they deserve tenderness without fear of judgement from themselves and the rest of us.
Mate, you’ve spent years manning up. This November, man down. You’ve got nothing to prove here.
