What makes a man?

This week’s guest post is from Chad, who writes at

The Human Fire

. Chad has been a long time friend, as well as my confidant and guide as I’ve explored many of the themes here at Get Real, Man. When he admires Coach Landry for how he groomed men off the field, he should admit how he’s helped so many people do the same. But he might be too modest for that. If his words resonate with you, I recommend checking out The Human Fire and reading more of this thoughts.

I’m planning out the schedule for 2024 and would love to share a few new perspectives. If you think you have a story to tell, send me an email and let’s talk.

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Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Growing up in Dallas in the late 70s and 80s, it was clear what made a man. If you didn’t play football for Tom Landry, or marry a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, your best hope was to get a cut of the ever-flowing Texas oil money, marry a former high school cheerleader, and buy a ranch like Southfork, home of J.R. Ewing, that man among primetime television men.

I did none of these things.

So, where did that leave me? Was I not, therefore, a man? If not, then just what was I?

I chafed against the things that supposedly made a Dallas man. Ok, maybe not the cheerleaders. You got me there. But mostly I wanted other things. Not pre-defined “manly” things, but interesting things.

Music. Stories. Coffee. Conversation. Feeling. Thinking. Sensing. Spirituality. History. Philosophy. Psychology.

These things, it seemed to me, weren’t part of the standard narrative of masculinity that defined my youth. In that telling, even if men were impressive physically-speaking, they came off rather dull, dumb, and uninspiring. Even the cheerleaders thought so, despite dating them. I know, because I often talked to those cheerleaders about interesting things. About human things.

As I grew older, I came to understand that the “Dallas Man” story was an arbitrary, reductive, and suffocating version of a man. The standard narrative simply sold men short. I realized, as my friend Latham Turner put it, “There has to be more to masculinity than this.”

This hit home for me in my early 20’s when I attended Coach Landry’s public memorial service. There, I saw some of the most feared linemen in NFL history weep openly at the passing of their mentor, praising his disciplined love and unflappable example of calm under pressure. They spoke of how that love helped them not only win Super Bowls, but helped them become better men off the field. Had J.R. Ewing, the vindictive, womanizing, fictional oil patriarch of Dallas been there, he might have scoffed at the un-manning of the Doomsday Defense.

I enjoyed playing and watching sports as much as the next kid. My backyard was the site of neighborhood touch football for years, and I played on the basketball team through junior high. But being on the lower end of the growth curve, I never had a future as a fearsome Cowboys lineman. My younger self needed a better answer to the question of what makes a man that didn’t reduce my identity to what sports I could play or my future earning potential. And if sports were the only arena where you could be manly, where did that leave me? 

My quest for a different masculinity

I could write a whole separate piece on my fraught, and ultimately futile, quest to find that answer in a series of mentors and older male role models. Suffice it to say here that, for me, the living were found wanting. The dead, however, offered promise.

I began to study history in earnest in high school, then via undergraduate and graduate degrees. These studies opened centuries-worth of other stories, other possibilities for being a man. Consider, for example, the ancient Greeks, with a vision of manhood defined by a refined athleticism, passions controlled by reason, and service to a wider community. (Apparently, given the prevalence among contemporary men for thinking about the Roman Empire, I am not alone here.) Or take the Hebrew prophets, calling kings to account, channeling the fiery word of truth, and standing firm in their commitments and conviction. Then there were the Renaissance humanists, dismantling the medieval worldview with the power of the pen, crafting a new culture from ancient ruins, and paving the way for the Scientific Revolution and a more cosmopolitan way of understanding a man’s place in the world.

The past provided me with alternative stories that showed me complex, rich answers to this question of what makes a man. Every age answered it differently. Men who had gone before me and left their mark on the world. Men who had thought deeply about the nature of things. Men who had successful marriages and friendships and collegial relationships with other men, across centuries and cultures. Men who were fathers, citizens, explorers, leaders, who all helped me better understand the man I wanted to be.

But, like a toddler playing with random Lego pieces, I struggled to put those building blocks together into an actual, coherent structure for the twenty-first century. I have deep compassion for every man who has struggled similarly, often on their own and without help. Absent a defining narrative, the temptation to find order - at all costs - is great. I see this in one popular but, I believe, ultimately misguided attempt to address men’s experience of confusion over our masculinity narratives. 

To be a man, or to be a not-woman?

I’ve spoken with many men who feel an affinity with the writings of controversial Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. Unlike some of my liberal-leaning friends, I understand the affinity. Peterson writes to bring order to the chaos he sees present in contemporary men’s experience. And to stem that chaos, the order of rules is highly appealing.

For Peterson, chaos and order are primal forces with a cosmic, yet gendered, quality: chaos being feminine, and order being masculine. Being a man, therefore, means avoiding anything associated with the chaos of femininity - the chaos of being a woman. Rules keep a man safe, and keep a man from being a woman.

Against this view, we need not make ourselves men by becoming “not-women,” by defining ourselves against the other half of our shared humanity. A buddy once accused me of having a vagina because I was expressing my feelings of concern about being a competent dad. Feelings are a characteristic of being human, not about having particular reproductive organs. Yet even in the twenty-first century this basic truth escapes many of us. My friend might have better connected with me, and deepened our friendship, if he had validated my emotional experience rather than try to shame me for not being his definition of a man.

Seen in this light, Peterson’s way of understanding masculinity comes off highly sexist. Masculine and feminine qualities exist in all human beings. As a father, I need the capacity to care and express tenderness as much as I need strength and discipline. As a lover, I need empathy to connect with my partner even more than I need virility. As a citizen, I need a respect for all needs, not just an assertive advocacy of my own, in order to help work toward a just peace. To exclude a whole set of qualities in order to define oneself is to be cut off from half your humanity. That’s no more a workable definition of manhood than was the Dallas man of my youth.

“There has to be more to masculinity than this.” Indeed. Narratives that define a man as a not-woman cannot provide the basis for men to fulfill their potential or purpose. They reduce being a man to one thing, or one set of arbitrary expectations, excluding the vast majority of men from their narrative. We can’t sustain ourselves, let alone our planet, with such reductionism.

Manhood is a conversation, not an answer

For a long time, men have been defined primarily by what they extract from others and from their environments. We’ve sought rules to order our chaotic experience. But this just shows how little we grew, how impoverished our development has been. Our partners need more from us. Our children need more from us. Our world needs more from us. What if what makes a man is his capacity to be a source for the regeneration of all good things in human life? That’s the conversation about manhood I want to have.

Reflecting on my own experience of mixed manhood messages, as well as the longer intellectual tradition that asks “what makes a man,” I find myself wishing we would stop insisting that being a man is about “one thing.” Manhood can include providing for your family, but we need not reduce it to that. Manhood can include exhibiting physical strength and vitality, but we need not reduce it to that. Manhood can include building businesses, or building a fire, or building a cabin in the woods with your own bare hands, but we need not reduce it to any of those things.

Rather than understanding the making of a man as one thing, a better path lies in seeing manhood as a conversation, one about the ability to marshal the many things needed from us as men, at the right time, for the right purpose. I’ve learned this through my son, who is an exquisitely sensitive little boy. There are times when he needs boundaries, times when he needs tenderness, and times when he needs rough-housing. As his dad, to be a good dad, I’m learning to recognize when he needs which of those things, and to orient myself to show him those qualities at the right time. I don’t always get it right, but if I can get it right most of the time, I know he’ll learn to trust himself and his experience of the world. That might be the most manly thing I can give him as his father – something that will give him the tools to make himself into the man he desires to be.

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Chad Smith is a dad, entrepreneur, and spiritual guide living north of Boston on the Massachusetts seacoast. A former pastor and independent school dean of ethics, he is currently the CEO of HumanWealth Partners, a boutique firm specializing in coaching, consulting, and communication services. He also writes at The Human Fire, where he curates the human disciplines for human excellence.