Your bag is empty.
I met Stephanie in 2018 at the Los Angeles coffee shop where she was the chef and co-owner. We flirted, I slipped her my phone number, and three months later, we were living together in her Highland Park craftsman.
On paper, our romance looked like a rom com meet-cute turned overnight relationship success. Stephanie was beautiful, smart and ambitious and I was as excited about her as I’d been about any woman. But I was also wary of the pace at which we were moving. This was a pattern for me: Get juiced up over a girl, move fast, get high on the intensity, and then wait for the inevitable crash.
With Stephanie, the crash happened fast. And when it did, I blamed her: It was her fault that I was overwhelmed. Her fault that I didn’t know how to communicate my needs. Her fault that I couldn’t even make prolonged eye contact with a sexy woman (much less live with one) without regularly going into some kind of internal tailspin. It was easier for me to shut down and push Stephanie away than actually face the insecurities and underlying issues that were driving my instability. But I couldn’t see that then. Ashamed and angry, I packed up the same boxes I’d unpacked just a few months earlier, and left.
Convinced I needed a reset, and to get away from Los Angeles for a while, I signed up for a two week program in the Sierra Mountains with a rites of passage organization called The School of Lost Borders. The SOLB was founded in the Flower Power 1970s, and its ethos was to bring powerful, indigenous practices to modern life — the most potent being the Vision Fast: a four day, solo fasting excursion in the desert with nothing but a sleeping bag and four jugs of water that brought the initiate face to face with themselves, the land, and perhaps most jarring: total, and absolute stillness.
As someone who tended to attract chaos — both in my relationships and my life — this idea of being totally still and starving in the mountains was both intriguing and terrifying. And while it was one thing to imagine the level of discomfort I might experience stripped of my comforts and my distractions, it was totally another to live it. What I can still remember 7 years later is the silence. On the first afternoon of the fast, I remember walking over a large hill, and staring out into a gray valley. The day was overcast and hollow and every hour seemed about two weeks long. I squirmed in my skin, bemoaning my misery, dreaming of cheeseburgers, watching a lone beetle at my feet making his way along his seemingly endless road.
Naturally, I started thinking about Stephanie. I missed her terribly. Felt her absence like a dull ache in my stomach and my chest. I remembered the excitement of our early days together. Her smile. The curves of her body. The high of love feeling new. Suddenly a memory came to me: I was 12 years old, lying on my stomach leafing through my mother’s Victoria’s Secret catalog in my room after school. (I wish it’d been a Playboy.) In those afternoons, like here, on the vision fast, fantasizing about the lingerie clad women in those pages had taken the edge off my discomfort, had offered hope of a way out of boredom and loneliness. It hit me, quite uncomfortably, that I’d always done that: used women as a distraction from my own pain.
Those four days in the mountains was my first real introduction to what would become the process of initiation I outline for men in my book Hating Women (now available). An initiation that involves weaning ourselves off seeking comfort, relief, and validation from women long enough to find out who we truly are at baseline. This sort of individuation process used to happen in ancient cultures through a formal initiation, which would teach a young man to find nourishment in other men and in his own masculinity, breaking his anxious attachment to female support and validation, and allowing him to become a man mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
Since we’re lacking these sorts of initiations in modern day life, men tend to stay too long at the proverbial teet: We learn our survival depends on approval from our mothers and other women, get hooked on porn early, and use our spouses as emotional supports, especially as we get older and male friendships fade. Often, we’re sourcing a lot from the women we’re partnered with. And often, we’re unconsciously using them to take away from our pain.
I believe it’s this dependency — and our lack of ability to admit and own it — that causes so much frustration and discord in our relationships (as well as a lot of the ugly behaviors we see in the news cycles these days). Men feel powerless over the dependency we have on women, and yet admitting that powerlessness seems like just about the most unmanly thing to do. So we hide it, suppress it, cover it up with hyper-macho “Manosphere” BS. And all of these just drive us further away from the healthy relationships we could be having if we were willing to face ourselves head-on.
Put a man in the wilderness without food, without work, without distractions, and you’ll get his baseline. Absolutely. But it needn’t be that extreme. Beginning to cut the cord from our dependency on women as relief can be as simple as taking a break from watching porn. Or having an honest conversation with our partner about where our relationship is and where we’re headed. Or sitting in silence for ten minutes a day and seeing what sensations we notice in our bodies. The key is the discomfort: we must be outside our comfort zone to see real change.
I was uncomfortable as hell on that vision fast all those years ago. But as time went on, something miraculous happened; I began to see that no matter how uncomfortable I was, or how big my feelings of rage, helplessness, or longing got, I could survive them. I could stay with myself. I could make it through the hunger, the ache for Stephanie, the long days without food where the sun seemed to stay in the center of the big sky forever. And every moment I stayed with myself, I felt a little more stable. A little more solid. A little more capable of facing the inevitable challenges of my life with care and calm.
That’s the prize of a man willing to sit with himself. A new level of sturdiness. A new baseline of trust. A knowing in the very root of himself that he has his own back no matter what is happening inside or outside his body. I believe that’s the kind of integrated masculinity most of us haven’t experienced in modern life, and that we so desperately crave. A sturdy man is a trustworthy man. And trustworthy men can shift things — in a room, in a relationship, or drooling over a cheeseburger on a rites of passage ceremony.
All can make a difference.