The Weight of Being a Man

“masculinity built around emotional self-protection can ultimately create the very loneliness it is meant to prevent.” Author unknown

When my TV was “lost” in a move in 2019, I just never replaced it. I’ll admit I was a little smug about it for years. And even before that, in the early 2000s, I skipped cable entirely. Four channels on a good day, and I liked it fine.

Now that I’m past all that and actually enjoy being cozy in the den (with snacks, of course), I’ve been watching a few things I really enjoy. Last night I saw two shows about two very different men and how they each deal with success, loss, and loneliness. It offered some perspective on you beautiful creatures.

Namely, Bill Burr and Steve Martin on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. You couldn’t choose more different men, but there was an underlying theme running through both of them that I hadn’t quite put together before.

Burr was sharp, genuinely funny, and the most cynical. Not quite angry. Frustrated, maybe. Frustrated that everything he says now gets filtered through what’s offensive, what lands wrong, even though that’s what comics do. But then he said something that stuck: that a man has to be something valuable. That they become afraid to be vulnerable, even when no one is specifically asking them to be strong. It really boiled down to men being taught to suppress enormous amounts of emotion, and then wondering why they’re angry or disconnected. I still saw pieces of that in the interview itself, an emotion a lot of us feel when we’re good at something but can’t figure out how to get off the carousel.

Steve Martin built his career breaking joke structure. That wild and crazy guy, the new schtick. Except the new schtick eventually became its own structure. His success was pulling him further from himself, and he quit. Not because of failure, but because you can only be genuinely new once and he was doing it on repeat. He became, among other things, a writer.

Years ago I read a book he wrote called Shopgirl. Small and gently written. A young woman trying to learn to interact with the world falls for an older, sophisticated man. Mirabelle thinks they’re falling in love. Ray thinks they have a relationship with clearly understood limits. Neither is entirely dishonest. They just don’t experience the same relationship. Martin is extraordinarily interested in that gap between what one person thinks is happening and what the other thinks is happening. Characters trying to understand what they themselves don’t understand about themselves, or the people around them.

It’s in that gap, between Burr’s burden of being a man and not quite knowing how to get out from under it, and Martin’s willingness, his eagerness really, to find the humanity in all of it. Most men seem to be living somewhere in that space. Carrying something enormous and largely unnamed. But Martin got out from under it. Not dramatically, just quietly, over time. Which means it’s possible. And I suppose that’s the hopeful part of last night. That the gap isn’t permanent. That vulnerability isn’t the end of anything. It might actually be the beginning of something better.