Strength Earned Respect
Vulnerability in men wasn’t something people talked about much where I came from.
I grew up around a lot of toughness.
Not fake internet toughness either. The real kind. The kind where men didn’t talk much about feelings, where pride mattered, and where you learned pretty quickly that showing too much emotion could make life harder on you.
My dad was a tough man. Especially inside the house. When he was in a bad mood, everybody knew it. Me and my mom mostly walked on eggshells around him trying not to set anything off.
When I was little and started crying after getting hurt, I still remember hearing:
“Quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
Which always felt confusing to me because it was like… you already did.
But life is complicated, because even though some of that toughness hurt me, part of me also understands how much it shaped me too.
I was never a very big kid growing up. I moved around a lot and ended up being the new kid more than once. But because of how I was raised, I was never really afraid of other kids the way some people probably expected me to be. Somewhere along the line, toughness became tied to survival, respect, and identity.
I remember one time in middle school a bigger kid from Brooklyn came to our school acting tough, and something inside me immediately felt challenged by it. Looking back now, I don’t even think it was really about him. I think it was about proving something to myself and everybody around me.
That was the environment. You earned respect by proving you weren’t weak.
And nowhere did I feel that more than football.
Football became everything to me at a young age. Not just because I loved the sport, but because for the first time in my life I felt genuinely valued. When I played well, people looked at me differently. Other kids respected me. Parents complimented me after games. Even my dad seemed lighter for a while.
Like somehow I had finally become enough.
I played quarterback, and for whatever reason the game just made sense to me. School got harder for me after my parents divorced, but football felt different. I could see things on the field before they happened. I knew everybody’s job on every play without even studying much. Like I had some weird football version of A Beautiful Mind or something.
But deeper than all of that, I think football gave me something I was chasing without realizing it:
approval.
And once you learn that toughness, performance, and emotional control earn you praise, it becomes really hard not to build your identity around those things.
Sensitive in a World That Respected Toughness
The weird part is, even growing up around all that macho behavior, I don’t think I was ever emotionally numb like a lot of the men around me seemed to be.
Honestly, I think I was the opposite.
Deep down, I was probably more emotional than most people knew.
Maybe it came from childhood. Maybe I was just born with a huge heart and a smaller brain. I honestly don’t know. But it always felt like I not only carried my own emotions, but everybody else’s too.
Even little things affected me harder than they seemed to affect other people. Sad stories on the news. Kids getting hurt. Families losing people. Eventually I stopped watching the news as much because I couldn’t keep hearing about tragedies involving children and just move on with my day like nothing happened.
And despite all the fighting and toughness around me, most of the fights I got into later in life came from protectiveness more than aggression. At least in my mind at the time, I always felt like I was protecting people I loved. Whether I was always right or not is another conversation entirely, but that’s honestly how it felt.
I’ve written before about how empathy and emotional awareness probably saved my life in a lot of ways, even when I didn’t fully understand that at the time.
At the same time, humor slowly became its own kind of armor.
Before my parents divorced, I was actually a pretty quiet kid. Honor roll, shy, mostly stayed to myself.
After the divorce, something changed.
Instead of sitting back quietly observing everything, I became funny.
Or at least I tried to be.
Making people laugh filled some emptiness in me the same way football once had. The laughs became addictive. If people were laughing, they liked me. If they liked me, maybe I belonged somewhere.
And honestly, being funny helped you survive socially too. Especially as the new kid.
New kids usually had two choices:
become an outcast or find a way into a group.
Humor was my way in.
Because everybody wants to be around funny people. It makes the world feel a little less hard for a while.
Humor Became My Shield
As I got older and started dating, I realized humor had become my survival instinct.
The second things got tense, I’d start joking around. Sarcasm was my shield, and I used that bad boy more than Captain America used his. It was automatic.
Looking back now, it probably caused more misunderstandings than I realized at the time. Especially once texting became a thing and people couldn’t hear tone anymore. Back then I honestly thought typing “lol” too much was something only women did. Now I probably use “lol” and emojis more than anybody just to make sure people know I’m not being serious or trying to hurt their feelings.
Maybe that’s part of why my wife and I have lasted so long.
She’s one of the first people who really taught me it was okay to let someone into certain parts of my past without feeling weak for it.
For a long time, I think I associated vulnerability with being pitied. Or looked down on. Like if people saw the broken parts of you too clearly, they’d quietly lose respect for you.
Plus, I always figured everybody already had their own problems. Their own childhood stories. Their own stress. So why dump yours onto somebody else?
Even with friends, I noticed myself pulling back sometimes in conversations. I’d start opening up, then immediately feel like I sounded “too emotional” and start editing myself in real time. Most people probably never even noticed I was doing it, but I noticed.
I think I became really good at reading emotional shifts in people at a young age. Sometimes maybe too good.
Growing up around strong personalities, moods, tension, and unpredictability teaches you to pay attention fast. You learn to scan conversations, facial expressions, body language, energy shifts. You start trying to feel where you stand with people before they ever say it out loud.
The problem is, when you spend too many years doing that, eventually you can start pulling away from people before they even get the chance to hurt you.
Sometimes I still do that now.
I’ll convince myself something feels “off,” disappear into work, family responsibilities, or life for a while, and tell myself I’m just busy. Maybe sometimes I’m right. Maybe sometimes I completely misread it.
Honestly, probably both.
Trying to Raise Strong Boys Without Hardening Them
Having sons of my own has made me question almost everything.
If there were a masterclass for trying to fix yourself for your kids, I probably would’ve graduated years ago.
But even while writing an article like this, I still catch my old-school way of thinking creeping back in while raising my boys.
A lot of this probably comes from trying to break cycles I grew up around.
I absolutely teach them to stand up for themselves. Not to take shit from people (like their mother). And I still think about teaching them how to act in ways that keep other boys from making fun of them for being too sensitive (like their father).
That’s the weird balancing act of raising boys now.
Because at the same time, I’ve spent years reading and learning how important emotional connection is for kids, especially boys. So I make sure I hug my sons every day. I tell them I love them. I tell them they’re handsome.
Partly because they are.
But also because I remember what it felt like growing up and never really feeling attractive or confident myself. I remember seeing other people get attention and wondering what was wrong with me.
And when I’d say something about it, sometimes it just got turned into another joke later.
“Hey ugly.”
Which is funny until you realize some part of you quietly carried those words for years.
I think that’s the strange balance a lot of men struggle with now.
We want to raise strong boys because we understand how hard the world can be.
But we also don’t want them growing up emotionally alone inside themselves.
Why Vulnerability in Men Still Feels Risky
If I’m being honest, publicly opening up still feels uncomfortable sometimes.
Even after writing all this stuff, I still don’t really know how to take compliments well. When people say nice things about my writing or my book, part of me appreciates it deeply, and another part of me immediately gets awkward and wants to change the subject.
I think some part of me still associates emotional openness with embarrassment.
And even now, while writing articles like this, I can still picture some of the toughest guys I grew up around reading it and making fun of me for being “soft.”
Which is probably ridiculous because most of those Neanderthals can’t read anyway, and probably aren’t sitting around diving into emotional blog articles written by a former quarterback from Ohio.
But still… the thought crosses my mind.
Because those old rules don’t fully disappear just because you get older.
I think a lot of men carry that same fear around whether they admit it or not:
that if people see too much of the real you, they might quietly lose respect for you.
But the older I get, the more I realize vulnerability isn’t really weakness at all.
Honestly, hiding everything probably took more energy.
Emotional Intelligence Might Be Its Own Kind of Strength
The older I get, the more I realize emotional intelligence might actually be one of the hardest forms of strength there is.
A lot of men, myself included, were raised to value toughness, pride, emotional control, and acting like nothing bothers us.
But running a healthy home, marriage, family, or relationship usually requires patience, communication, emotional awareness, humility, and consistency way more often than aggression ever does.
I know for a fact my wife handles certain parts of life better than I do.
I’m man enough to admit that.
Honestly, I think some men are so focused on appearing strong all the time that they automatically dismiss emotional awareness as weakness instead of recognizing it as another form of strength entirely.
And maybe that’s part of why some men struggle so much emotionally now.
Because somewhere along the line, vulnerability became embarrassing, emotional honesty became uncomfortable, and admitting someone else might handle certain things better than you somehow became threatening to your identity.
The truth is, I don’t think toughness and emotional intelligence have to compete with each other.
I think the strongest people probably need both.
Maybe Strength Was Never the Problem
I still want my boys to grow up tough.
I want them to stand up for themselves. I want them to protect the people they love. Because no matter how inclusive or emotionally aware the world becomes, I know for a fact there will always be assholes who want to hurt people, take advantage of kindness, or mistake softness for weakness.
And someday, honestly, I might need my boys to protect me too.
Preferably before I have to start stretching just to get off the couch. Which may or may not have already taken place.
Because I’m not going to be one of the baddest men forever.
Lol.
But at the same time, I hope my boys grow up feeling safe enough to say what’s actually on their minds.
If they’re struggling, I want them to feel like they can come to me or their mom and say anything without shame.
I’ve lost people I cared about deeply who probably had things eating away at them inside and either didn’t know how to talk about it or were too afraid to.
And honestly, I never want my kids growing up believing they have to silently carry pain just to prove they’re men.
The older I get, the more I think vulnerability probably takes more courage than pretending everything’s fine.
Maybe strength was never really the problem.
Maybe the problem was teaching men they had to hide half of themselves in order to be respected.
And as much as I still joke around, deflect serious conversations, and probably use sarcasm more than I should, I’m trying to get better at that too.
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