You Stole Her Vote

And convinced yourself it was love

NOTE: This is how men tend to deal with any significant loss. This article happens to focus on the loss of a child.

I talked to a grieving father a few weeks ago and it was like talking to myself thirteen years ago.

He lost a child, which means his wife has lost one too. They’re both in hell, and they can’t reach each other at all. She’s trying, but he won’t let her. He can’t. The risk is too high.

“I can’t put this on her. She’s got enough to deal with without having to deal with my shit.” I’ve heard some version of that sentence from myself, and from too many other grieving men over the years.

The Decision You Already Made

Here’s what that sentence actually means, even if it doesn’t feel this way when you say it.

It means you’ve already decided how your wife is doing and what she can handle. You concluded that what you’re going through doesn’t make the cut. You have no right to dump your weakness on her because you should be able to handle it yourself. So you clammed up, shut down and locked her out.

You did all of that without asking her. And now you’re stiff-arming her when she tries to get close and calling it love.

Not only did she not get a vote, she doesn’t even know you voted. Every time she reaches out she runs into a close door. She doesn’t know why you won’t open it and she’s started to wonder if it’s her. She’s grieving your child and losing you at the same time, and she has no idea what she’s done to deserve both.

You think you’re carrying the burden so she doesn’t have to. What you’re actually doing is adding to hers while avoiding your own.

The Rock Doesn’t Talk

The guy I spoke to wasn’t cold, indifferent or checked out. His love for his wife was obvious in how he spoke about her.

Like many of us, he’d grown up with a clear picture of what a man does when things get hard. You knuckle down, don’t complain, and get to work. You don’t fall apart in front of the people who depend on you, because the moment you do, you’ve failed them. You’ve added to their pain instead of protecting them from it. That’s a failure so intolerable it must be avoided at all costs.

So he went back to work and worked longer and harder than he had before. He handled logistics, fixed what could be fixed and tried too damn hard to fix what couldn’t. If he didn’t look too hard, he could pretend he was managing.

His wife saw something very different. She saw a guy who answered every question with “I’m fine.” A guy who’d barely shed a tear since their child died. And a guy who left the room whenever the conversation got anywhere near anything real.

She’d started to tell herself he didn’t care. They’d lost their kid and it didn’t seem to faze him at all. What the hell is wrong with him? This is the guy I married? Even when he’s physically present he’s completely gone.

She wasn’t trying to lean on him. She was trying to grieve with him. Those are different things, and he was too stuck in a broken version of masculinity to see the difference.

What You’re Actually Protecting

When you tell yourself you’re keeping your pain from her to protect her, you’re telling yourself a story. It’s time you took a hard look at it.

She doesn’t need you to protect her right now. She needs you to love her, and here’s what that requires. It requires learning what she needs, which means asking her. It requires letting her tell you that she doesn’t need you to be a rock, she needs you to be a person, and then sitting with that idea instead of filing it away and sprinting back to what feels familiar.

Instead, you’re taking the path of least resistance. You’ve decided what she needs and decided you can’t provide it. You’ve slammed the door and built a reason it has to stay shut. It’s a reason that sounds selfless, which is why it works so well and is so hard to change. When you believe the story you can tell yourself you’re doing the right thing.

But the door isn’t protecting her. The door is protecting you.

You don’t have to feel what you’d feel if you opened it. You don’t have to stand there while she cries with no way to fix it. You don’t have to be a man who lost a child and doesn’t know how to handle the pain. You don’t have to risk her seeing that you’re wrecked. Of course you keep her locked out. And you get to tell yourself you’re doing it all for her sake.

That’s the story. And it’s costing her more than your grief ever would.

What I Told Him

His wife wasn’t asking him to fix something they both knew couldn’t be fixed. She wasn’t looking for answers or his version of strength. She was looking for the man she married to be honest that he was feeling some version of what she was feeling. That’s it. She wanted to know she didn’t have to get through the loss of their child on her own.

He was so busy protecting her from his pain that he’d left her completely alone in hers.

He hadn’t thought of it that way. Neither did I, for a long time.

Grief doesn’t make men this way. We already know how to lock down when what we’re feeling gets too uncomfortable, too unpredictable, too likely to get in the way. Loss just gives us a very good reason to throw away the key.

It’s Going to Feel Terrible

People have been telling men that we should “let people in” forever. You’ve heard it yourself. Here’s the part no one tells you.

It’s going to feel terrible. Not just uncomfortable, actually terrible. You’re going to sit down with her and try to say something real and every instinct you have is going to tell you to stop, that she can’t handle this, that you’re making it worse.

You might start bawling and the voice in your head is going to be screaming at you that you’re weak and pathetic. It’ll convince a part of you that the man you were raised to be would never do this.

It might be one of the most terrifying things you ever done. Do it anyway. The man you were raised to be wouldn’t cower in the face of fear. He’d square his shoulders, stiffen his spine and walk toward it. That’s what courage looks like and courage is exactly what this is going to take.

These are the moments that make men, and save relationships.

Your wife isn’t asking you to have it together. She's asking you to stop pretending that you do.

I don't know if the guy I talked to will find his way back to his wife. I hope he does. She deserves a vote on how this goes. So does yours