Everybody feels pressures to conform to certain expectations placed upon them. It could be the pressure to find someone to love and settle down with if you’re single, the pressure to find a career you enjoy, to get good grades at school if your a child, to have children, or to be the perfect mother or to keep up with the Joneses. Whatever it is, we all have something that we feel we have to do and that we feel the outside world is judging us on even if in reality that pressure is mostly coming from within, and our own perception and expectations of what our lives should be like.
For many men, the author included, there is a great deal of pressure to provide for our families. A lot of that pressure is internal. We want to provide for our families, we want to have nice things, creature comforts that make our lives easier. We want to put smiles on our loved ones faces and we want to be comfortable enough to be able to deal with life’s ups and downs.
Pressure isn’t a bad thing if it incentivises us to do things that are good for us long term but when it becomes all consuming and a cause of stress and anxiety, it can become a problem. When that happens it’s important to have an outlet to be able to talk about it, but it’s also important that you have somebody that is prepared to listen and empathise with you. A problem shared is a problem halved, as they say.
Sometimes when I have opened up in the past and talked about the pressure to provide the reaction has been quite dismissive. Not by everybody, but there is sometimes a defensive reaction as if I am blaming other people for the pressure I feel when in reality I’ve just tried to express what it feels like to walk in my shoes. It actually took a lot of courage to admit to feeling vulnerable, that’s a very uncomfortable feeling for me.
For me personally, some of the pressure comes from the fact that I have had excellent support from a loving wife that allowed me to focus on studying and changing careers whilst she provided the lion’s share of income for both of us. I’m very grateful to my wife for that support and I feel a responsibility to stick to a career that I wanted to work towards, a career that comes with more challenge and more responsibility than that which I had in the past. For the most part it has been an enjoyable journey, but what do you do when covid happens and overnight your job switches from being very much a collaborative experience, working closely with other people, to one where you find yourself working from home in isolation all the time?
In honesty, at times I’ve felt completely lost. This wasn’t the career I signed up for. I’ve discovered that actually, I need social contact far more than I previously knew and now my whole industry has changed, and regular office hours are a thing of the past. For most people this is a good thing, who doesn’t want freedom and flexibility? Well, apparently, me.
I’ve gone from being somebody that loved to go to work, someone that was always participating in meeting, organising social events, mentoring junior colleagues, and putting in extra hours to get stuff done to someone that feels like an imposter, an outsider.
At the same time, the financial pressures have gradually increased. I’m in a position where we are reliant on the level of income that comes with the territory. Taking a job at a smaller company, where the pay is less competitive, but the working methodology is more in sync with my strengths is not an option, or at least not without causing financial insecurity at a time when interest rates are high and all our bills are going up.
Clever financial manipulation, finding the best deals and astute financial decisions has always been one of my fortes. I’m the sort of person that loves a good spreadsheet, but it does come to a point where the numbers don’t add up anymore, all the slack you used to have is gone, and I’m a very independent person. I’m the person other people turn to for help. I’m not the sort of person that finds it easy to ask for help when I need to. It’s a lot of pressure to carry and I’m just about treading water, although I’m swallowing a lot more water than I should be.
I don’t expect sympathy. The economic climate is very difficult for everyone right now and there certainly are a lot of people in far worse situations than me. These are tough times and everyone is doing their best to just muddle through and survive.
Although a lot of the pressure in my case is internal, and I think the desire to provide for a lot of men is just as instinctive as the desire to nurture is for a lot of women, I do think that we need to address the fact that a lot of the reason why men feel the need to provide is because that is what a lot of women demand and expect of men.
People say things like “this isn’t the 1950s, men aren’t trapped in that strict gender role now”. Actually, I think they are wrong. For a start, the 1950s was not as austere and restrictive as people claim, that’s an illusion of looking backwards rather than looking forwards. When your point of reference is the freedom people have today, that period may look more restrictive, but if you look through the eyes of the people at the time, their recent experiences were of two world wars. I wrote a whole article about this illusion here.
Secondly, although women have been liberated to enjoy much more choice in terms of what they do with their lives as a result of modern technology, actually for most men the choice is an easy one. You either work. Or you work. Or you work. Yes, there are stay at home fathers but they still feel the same pressure to provide. It’s much more comfortable for women to ask for help than it is for a man and that’s not to say that it’s easy for a woman either.
Women still turn to men to solve problems. A man that can’t solve problems is no good to a woman. Love is not unconditional, it comes with expectations. In all honesty, from what I’ve seen and heard by talking to lots of other men, things don’t end well when men open up and expose their vulnerabilities to their partners. It’s a fast track to divorce in a lot of cases.
When women say they want men that open up about their feelings, what they really mean is they want men that express positive feelings about them and that they want men that are willing to listen to how they are feeling. They don’t want to see men crying, feeling anxious or vulnerable. That makes women feel unsafe.
If you look at the data from dating apps, women still prefer to have a partner that earns more than they do. Yes, there are lots of exceptions, but the pattern is clear. As women earn more, this means a shrinking number of men fit that criteria. If you happen to be a man over 6 foot tall, with a 6 figure salary then your experience of “the dating market” is very different from the vast majority of men. Women are still very much the gatekeepers of both starting and ending relationships.
See also:
Women Are Much More Selective And Find 80% Of Men Unattractive On Dating Apps, Per Recent Research
Tinder and Hypergamy: The Truth about Modern Dating
Many women still feel men should pay for dates and woo them and asking a man not to want to do those things is like asking a cat not to bring you half a mouse as a present. Pairing up is a dance as old as time and although technology may have changed the modern world, it has not changed our mammalian limbic system that orchestrates that dance.
I think we should acknowledge that women’s mating preferences have an influence on the pressures men feel, or at least with heterosexual men. In just the same way, men’s preferences for youth and beauty have a big influence on the pressures women feel too, why do you think that women’s fashion and beauty is such a big industry in comparison to the equivalent male market?
I don’t think it’s fair to tell men that they shouldn’t feel a pressure to provide when actually the expectations on them are not just the same as they were in the 1950s but are actually even more restrictive. A common cause of complaint from women who divorce their husbands is that their husbands were not emotionally available to them but that’s often the result of having to work incredibly long hours to make sure that expensive mortgage gets paid and the kids have all the latest gadgets that they crave. Perhaps we should lower our expectations and put a little bit less pressure on each other?
You can’t have it all. Life is about making trade off choices and I think a lot of the dissatisfaction with modern life, despite our relative ease and comfort, comes from these silly expectations of perfection that come from social media and seeing the mask everyone puts on to make our lives look perfect when, in fact, reality is very different.
The rat race is insatiable, we need to learn to be content with the important things, not the material things. At the end of the day, when we look back at our lives it’s the people we love and the memories we’ve shared that are important, not the fresh flowers, latest phones and expensive handbags.
Rant Over 