Nothing I had ever experienced prepared me for what came after my divorce. The only thing about myself that was clear to me was that I was angry. Not just angry, but outraged. My ex-wife was an alcoholic who insisted at the end of our marriage that I was 100% responsible for the divorce. She insisted she had done nothing wrong.

I didn’t focus on the obvious, which was that it takes two to make a marriage work or end in divorce. I was focused on the notion that a woman had hurt me and done me wrong. My outrage was being left with children to raise and no acknowledgement that was going to prove difficult. I think I hated women with such passion and resolve that I dated for a long while as a way to get back at women. Sex became angry sex, and my out of control anger infested each relationship I became involved in until it spun out of orbit and crashed on the trash heap.

Sadly, what I’ve noticed over twenty years working with men is that few travel a different road than the one I chose. It’s easy to see how another man is ruining his life by allowing his divorce to influence every relationship after his divorce.

I remember vividly a time soon after my divorce when I met a woman and after a while asked her out. She said as kindly as possible, but firmly, “Call me in a year when you’re over your divorce.” That statement made me feel awful enough to consider its validity. Of course, she was right not to want to be with an angry man who was living in the past and couldn’t let go. But I also wondered where that left me in the dating world.

I brought my dilemma to my men’s group to discuss and found that every single man who had gotten divorced, behaved similarly. All of the men talked about angry sex and the desire to punish women for what they felt their ex-wives had done to them. But each man had figured out that his temporary blindness towards women was just that, temporary. A few of the wiser men decided to take a time out from dating until they’d struggled with their divorce demons and won.

I had always had a woman in my life since I was a teenager. I’d never taken a break from dating or being in a relationship. So I decided to follow what appeared to be wisdom, and stayed home until I no longer felt I was on a mission to take revenge on womanhood. It took several months to become self-aware regarding my “issue” with women, and a few months more to realize how wrong I’d been about any woman being responsible for my anger or grief.

I’ve written many blogs about angry men and men who seem oblivious to the emotional aspect of relationships. I’ve read many responses to my blogs from men who contend that women don’t deserve or need any emotional connection because all they want is sex too. They further contend that if and when a woman mentions the word emotional, that they want to run away as fast as they can. This type of disrespect for women is pervasive and troubling. That’s fact. What’s not written yet is whether or not enough men will take the bull that is their issue with women, by the horns, and wrestle with it sufficient to let go of their anger.

There’s another aspect of divorce that seems to throw a steady stream of gasoline onto an already raging blaze. It’s about children, child support, custody, and visitation rights. For many men, not paying child support is a method for getting back at an ex-wife. I understand that feeling of being seen as just a checkbook and not a man. But the child support a man pays to his ex-wife typically doesn’t begin to cover the true cost of raising children. I have rarely met a woman who was living high on the hog because she received child support.

Those children are the product of a man’s best intentions gone astray. A man who can let go of the notion that he can get back at his ex-wife by denying her child support is a man who will rapidly let go of his anger and move on. While I was mostly a single dad, there were times when my children lived with my ex-wife, and I recall how used and abused I felt writing her a check each month, and being asked to buy my boys new sneakers or clothing on top of what I sent.

These are your children, guys, and the more involved you remain, the better your relationship will be with them as they grow up. Write the check each month, mail it, and let your anger go at the mailbox. Don’t remain angry because it will preclude you from ever being in a good relationship again. Look at your anger and the causes for it, preferably with other men who’ve gone through your drama and come out the other side intact. A man doesn’t punish his children through his ex-wife. He recognizes his part of the fiasco and tries to do better the next time. An angry man who marries while still angry will only inflict pain on his new wife and himself.

The woman who declined dating me until I’d spent a year working through my divorce was right on the money. A woman who dates a man who recently divorced is only going to get his leftover anger and disappointment, not his heart.
Act like a man!

When a woman tells a man how she’s feeling, she wants to hear what he feels about what she said. She isn’t interested in what he thinks about her feelings. Thoughts and feelings are entirely different, come from different parts of the anatomy, and are not interchangeable.

Thoughts emanate from the brain and are debatable since they are opinions, unless of course the topic is baseball statistics. Relationships suffer when opinions are given with the expectation that the other person will buy into a certain point of view. But resolving a crisis in a relationship with opinions rarely works because both partners are expressing a point of view, an opinion.

Feelings come from the heart and are a person’s absolute truth, and as such are not debatable. No one can dispute another person’s expressed emotions. No one can say that someone’s feelings aren’t valid. Feelings are all that is absolutely true in a relationship and can always be relied upon for clarity.

A woman in a relationship expects to be met on an emotionally level playing field by a man, and while they doesn’t frequently occur, it still remains the best way to express the truth and move relationships in the right direction.

I think, versus I feel, is a classic relationship dilemma. A man who tells a woman, “I don’t think we’re making love often enough”, might hear in return, “Well, I’m just not feeling sexual lately.” Thinking and feeling are like oil and water when it comes to resolving relationship issues, and if both partners argue what they think, there won’t be any resolution. Sure, one person might be more strong-willed than the other and push a point of view, but that won’t sit well for very long and at some point becomes bullying.

Thoughts don’t trump feelings. They are as far apart as  black and white, and no matter how much a man digs in and argues his point of view, his opinion, that will never change how a woman feels. His expressed feelings however, can change how a woman sees his position. “I’m missing the warmth and closeness I feel when we make love”, goes much further towards the relationship being sexual than “I need to get laid.”

It’s difficult for men to make this quantum leap, especially since few of us were taught to express our feelings as boys. When I was injured I was told to suck it up and be a man. When my dog was killed by a car I was told not to cry and to be a man.

Having little experience expressing feelings as a boy didn’t prepare me to share how I felt as a man. My emotional needs never got met because I didn’t know how to express my pain, anger, grief, or whatever was in my heart. Mostly I raged and inflicted anger on women.

I didn’t know how to dig deeper than my thoughts and actually feel what was in my heart. It took practice to move from my thoughts to feelings and I learned that skill with other men in a men’s group twenty years ago. Eight, often angry men learned how to express their anger in terms of their feelings. Once we made that leap our relationships grew exponentially.

Men can best teach each other how to express their feelings because trying to learn with women can be daunting since they’re far more experienced. Men require the feeling of safety that comes from learning from each other as equals.

I guaranty your relationship will grow if you learn how to speak from your heart. Your woman will respect your new-found ability and you will finally get what you need from a relationship.

Act like a man!

Men don’t change. That’s a widely held belief shared by men and women. Who a man is when a woman meets him is the man he’ll always be. Men are stuck in their dysfunctional behavior and have no interest or ability to change it. A woman in a relationship with an angry man has to decide whether or not to remain in the relationship and absorb his anger, or leave him. These are all false beliefs.

I grew up believing that people don’t change, because my father relentlessly raged out of control, dispensing physical and emotional violence on me. It wasn’t much of a stretch to believe men don’t change because if they did, my father would have become a calmer, more reasonable man.

I grew up and became a man who raged and I inflicted anger on women in relationships and anyone else I felt had crossed me. I did a fairly good impersonation of my father. The major difference was that I didn’t inflict anger on my sons, because on a deep, loving level I knew they didn’t deserve it.

Twenty years ago, in my early forties, I had all of the outward accouterments of success. I was a successful entrepreneur. I had a house at the beach, fast cars, motorcycles, and a steady supply of women who liked bad boys with toys. I should have been deliriously happy, right?

I was miserable, lonely, and weary from countless dysfunctional relationships with women. I didn’t have a man friend who I felt I could trust, and I was relegated to second guessing myself at every turn because I didn’t. I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

My business partner bought tickets to a Robert Bly day in San Francisco. I didn’t know who he was, but I was desperate and decided to listen to someone who professed to know about men. That day changed my life forever.

The next morning I asked my business partner if he was interested in starting a men’s group with me. We found seven other men in a week, and held our first meeting ten days after the Bly workshop. We were nine dysfunctional, angry men. We had misogynists, narcissists, angry men, serial daters, and men who had no sense of theirs or other people’s boundaries.

We decided not to have a leader or facilitator because we were independent, strong-willed men. Our dysfunctions surfaced immediately. One man stated, “I think a woman’s best purpose in life is a pleasure unit.” His comment was shouted down by eight other men. I got into my tough guy, angry mode in a flash and jumped down his throat. Everyone began shouting his thoughts, but no one expressed any feelings. Naturally, the shouting went on until it was clear to everyone that we were never going to accomplish anything until we could figure out a better way to talk to each other.

What we quickly gleaned was that talking about what we thought was merely expressing our opinions, and opinions weren’t going to change anything because they were debatable and resulted in circular arguments that resolved nothing.

We figured out that talking about our feelings was a better direction because what we came to understand is that when a man expresses his feelings, he’s expressing his absolute truth. No one could deny or challenge another man’s feelings.

From that point early on in the group, issues that were raised were discussed in terms of feelings instead of opinions. When judgments, opinions, and advice were substituted by sharing our experiences on an emotional level, the group shot forward. Healing began and behavior changed.

Not all of the men moved at the same pace. Some had difficulty accessing their feelings and kept talking about what they thought. At first the group was gentle with the men who lagged behind, but eventually what became clear was that the guys who either refused or were incapable of speaking from their hearts were holding the rest of the group back. All it takes is one reluctant man whose behavior acts like an anchor holding the group in place, to destroy the fabric of the group.

We lost a few men after a while and replaced them with men who seemed to have a better understanding of what we hoped to achieve together.

My first issue was my raging temper, which I finally understood had affected all of my relationships with women and prevented me from building trusting relationships with men. I was asked to talk about my boyhood, and after a few moments of anxiety and terror I let loose with the horror story that had been my life as a boy with my father. The tears flowed freely and it took a while before the pain I had held in for decades subsided enough to listen to other men talk about their experiences in relation to mine. I wasn’t alone any longer. I didn’t have to second guess myself because I had men in my life who cared about me and were willing to listen to my stories and share theirs with me.

In the years that followed, men dealt with divorce, fatherhood, trust, anger, relationships, dating, death, and more. No one was alone, ever. While we meet twice a month, we also meet for lunch, coffee, or just to share our current problems. The wisdom of the group is its collection of the experience of its members and serves as an encyclopedia of male behavior.

Four years ago I felt I had learned enough about myself and relationships to get married after twenty-five years of dating. I had learned the skills required to be in a successful relationship and I’m proud to be a good husband and partner.

The men in my group were all happy for me when I told them I was getting married, and I think they took pride in knowing that they had helped me change my behavior.

But not everyone was pleased. I called an old friend who I hadn’t seen in years and told him I was getting married. He yelled and screamed at me, telling me I was stupid and that I should live with her, not marry her. He went on to tell me that he thought I was a jerk because I kept changing and reinventing myself, while he was the same man he’d always been for forty years. When he said that I felt sad for him. He had no close men friends, couldn’t understand the path I was following to become a better man, and didn’t realize that forty years of being the same, dysfunctional man, was tragic, not rock steady.

Women often ask me, “Where are all the good men”? The answer is that they’re in small groups with other men trying to become better men, husbands, boyfriends, friends, and fathers.

Act like a man!