I Call It Evolution

I grew up under two very different kinds of love: one that clenched its fists, and the other was a strict but warm embrace.

In 2016, I wrote an essay defending the embrace. I was 25, on the bus, typing it into my notes app. I thought I knew what I was defending. I didn’t know the half of it.

From 2016, unedited:

The “pussyfication” of America? I blame the fathers who weren’t there — and I praise the mothers who raised those boys the best they could. Those mothers gave a different kind of love than a boy would have gotten with his father around.

I don’t use the term pussyfication. I call it evolution — evolution from the neanderthalistic attitude that was displayed and accepted.

We no longer live in times where you can disrespect a woman and get away with it, and I’m glad we can no longer inflict pain and despair on our amazing counterparts. We must love our women, protect them, and most of all respect them!

You wouldn’t be reading this if it were not for the woman who birthed you.

Ten years later:

That version was pushing back on something I kept hearing everywhere. Friends, other gamers, online, even small talk on the street. That games were getting pussified. That everything coming out was trying to emasculate men, like some kind of mind control.

The conviction hasn’t changed. The understanding has.

Rereading it, there’s one word I’d stop and sit with. Protect. I wrote it like it was obvious. Love them, protect them, respect them. Three items on a list, equal weight. But protect is not like the other two. Protect means there’s a version of this where something comes for the people you love and a warm embrace isn’t enough. I wrote that word without once asking what it would cost me to mean it.

It cost more than I thought.

Here’s what I missed back then. My mom was strict. She had to be. But she was warm too. She didn’t pick one. She was both, every day, without making a speech about it.

That’s the thing I didn’t understand back then. I was defending tenderness like it was the opposite of toughness. It’s not. The strongest person I knew was both at once.

Tough isn’t the same as cruel. What I called neanderthal back then was toughness aimed at the people you’re supposed to be shielding. I still don’t want any part of that. But there’s a steadiness that’s just the floor under the tenderness. The thing that makes gentleness a choice instead of a condition.

So here’s what I actually want to know. When you’re tired, when you’re scared, when nobody’s watching, which one do you reach for? The fists or the embrace?

Because that’s the one you inherited. The other one you’re still learning.

I’m still learning too.