In Daring Greatly Brené Brown discusses her research about how men feel about shame and sexuality. The horror of reading this chapter is discovering that it is often women have seriously harmed our men with covert messages. We say words to encourage our men to be vulnerable and emotional, but men also hear another message loud and clear. They hear an unspoken message that we want them to be strong and protective, but never fragile. We don’t want them to be emotional and vulnerable about weakness; only their strengths. Women love it when men are emotional about their feelings of love and gratitude and generosity and puppies and babies. But how do women react when our men share a brokenness? A fault? An uncertainty or unconfidence? A failure? Or what about a really really big failure?

Wives: are you a safe place for your husband to admit his failures? How does he feel confiding in you that he isn’t sure he’s going to get the promotion? That he doesn’t know if his work matters? That he looked at pornography? That he cheated on the basketball court? That he lied to a friend, or resisted the urge to be generous to a person in need? That he worked all weekend to fix the car, but ultimately failed and now the repair will cost twice as much? Do you really want to hear about it? Can you receive his truth, and simultaneously validate his worth and competence, as well as your love for him?

Here is a quote from a man, quoted in chapter 3 of Daring Greatly, by Brené Brown.

My wife and daughters… they’d rather see me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall off. You say you want us to be vulnerable and real, but c’mon. You can’t stand it. It makes you sick to see us like that.

Later in the chapter, Brené writes:

We ask them [men] to be vulnerable, we beg them to let us in, and we plead with them to tell us when they’re afraid, but the truth is that most women can’t stomach it. In those moments when real vulnerability happens in men, most of us recoil with fear and that fear manifests as everything from disappointment to disgust. And men are very smart. They know the risks, and they see the look in our eyes when we’re thinking, C’mon! Pull it together. Man up. As Joe Reynolds, one of my mentors and the dean at our church, once told me during a conversation about men, shame, and vulnerability, “Men know what women really want. They want us to pretend to be vulnerable. We get really good at pretending.”

Ladies, this is so tough. It’s awful to be shown a reflection of ourselves and be disgusted by it. But we know it’s true. We need to offer our men a more unconditional love. They need our love and acceptance when they are weak and when they fail, not just when they are doing great things. Because who needs a conditional love? To love men well, we need to be the ones cheering for their inner worth and strength and dignity, even when their actions are failures or weaknesses. We are the ones who shout I see the real you. You are strong and worthy and loved. You are worthy of my love, not because of what you do but because of who you are. 

**Caveat: This doesn’t apply to abusive men. We don’t offer unconditional acceptance to abusive people.