Dear Men: You Become Whoever You Listen To

If you don’t want his marriage, his relationship with his kids, or his nervous system, he is not your teacher.

Author trying to make a YouTube video… something I can’t seem to get just right yet.

I had a cult-like experience in my younger years. I left it. I was glad to leave it. I did not want the heaven and hell, the fear of disappointing God, the pressure that ran underneath every choice — even who I would marry.

But the part that 25 years later is still sticky for me is that the people inside that small community had better relationships than the educated, progressive, free-thinking circles I moved into afterward.

Happier marriages.

Children who actually liked them.

Businesses that worked.

In our community we experienced real teaching about monogomous sex and commitment and what it takes to work through the regular arguments that happen in all relationships. Some of the women were equal. Some were not. I was certainly not. Yes there were systemic issues. No, I don’t think hell is the best motivator. That is not the point.

The point is I left and then started a long journey of absorbing advice from people whose lives I did not want.

That is what I want to talk to you about.

Look at who you take advice from. Look at the men and women whose podcasts you queue up, whose books sit open on your nightstand, whose courses you bought, whose lectures you sit in, whose offhand comments at the gym or on a walk you carry home and turn over in your head for a week.

Now look at their lives.

What does the man’s romantic relationship actually feel like when nobody is watching. How does his partner speak to him. How does she speak about him. What do his children ask him for. Do they depend on him for anything. What is his body doing at fifty. What is his nervous system doing at any age. Is he in his community or is he hiding from it. Does he have friends, or does he have followers.

If you do not want what he has, why is he your teacher?

We do this constantly. Someone gets popular and we hand them the keys. We absorb their frameworks. We adopt their language. We build our thinking around what we see online all the time. We try on all types of messaging with certainty. And then when the framework does not work for us, when it is in fact making the thing worse, we go deeper into the lineage. We work harder. We go to more therapy. We buy another book. We make a new list of red flags and standards. We tell ourselves we have not applied it correctly yet.

What if, you have applied it correctly? What if, it does not work because the person who built it does not have a life you want.

Whatever you believe about why you are here, whether you are an atheist or a believer or somewhere in the middle, the mechanics of working out humanity are the same. You need relationships.

Nothing actualizes alone. Money comes through other people. Power comes through other people. Love and touch and recognition and opportunity come through other people. Every single thing you say you want is delivered to you by another human being or it is not delivered at all.

Which means the only real failure in this lifetime is a failure of relationships.

Which means the only real success in this lifetime is some kind of family. The word family can look however you want.

And most men are failing there. Quietly. Some “married with good careers” but with wives who feel secondary to work and the woman in the red dress. With children who avoid them. They checked the external boxes but forgot to check the internal ones.

Failing in the only place that compounds.

When I coach someone whose life is not working, I think they’ll need about a year. A full year off the old way of relating. A full year off the frameworks that have not delivered. A full year of trying things that genuinely scare you, with people who are not in the script. A year of self-acceptance and a year of reckoning. Lots of cleaning up. I truly believe all of our suffering comes only from avoiding reality. Somatic work helps you process reality.

Most people cannot do it — be in reality.

They will rearrange their business, change their diet, get a new talk therapist, join a new religion, become a yogi, read forty more books before they will sit with the possibility that the people and the messages they have molded their interior life around are not people they want to become.

If something has been perpetually not working in your life, sit with this. You may be dragging something dead up a hill.

You are allowed to put it down, even if you worked a long time for it.

So the question is not what is the next framework.

The question is who. Whose marriage do you want. Whose body. Whose mornings. Whose friendship. Whose relationship with his daughter. Whose ease around money. Whose ease around silence. Whose is it that challenges you and calls you forward to a place of maturity and connection.

Find those people. Even one of them. Sit close to them. Listen.

Let the rest go.

I write primarily to support my small business. You can meet with me about 1–1 coaching or join my self study courses for men and women using these links.

*Christina Lane is a somatic coach, writer, and founder of Radiance and Embodied membership communities. She writes about the interior life of modern relating at christinalanecoaching.com and in the Somatic Sunday newsletter. She publishes first person essays from men in Mutual Terrain and writes from a more feminine voice on Substack. Christina also owns a tutoring company Connected Tutors and is a parent to three teens.*