I’ve been sitting with some heaviness lately around a question I’ve been mulling over, and it keeps catching me out.
Who do I talk to?
Not chat to. Not have a beer with, or swap messages about the rugby with. I mean the stuff that's eating me. The fear, the shame, the three in the morning stuff. If it all came apart tonight, who would I ring?
I can answer that now. There are a handful of men I can call and say the truth to, and they'll meet me there without flinching. Some of that happens in a group, some of it one to one over coffee or on a walk.
That was not the case before my divorce. I had friends going back decades, and I'd never told a single one of them the truth about anything that mattered. The only people I could open up to were my sister and a friend who was patient and just listened.
But something changed for me, and that something was that I went looking. Not for friends; I had those. For rooms where a man could say the hard thing and nobody tidied it away or tried to fix him. Those rooms exist. I didn't know that for most of my adult life.
Mates and someone to talk to are different things
Ask a man who his best mate is, and he'll give you a name without thinking. Perhaps even several. Then ask when he last told them he was struggling. Not busy. Not tired. Struggling. Watch the pause. For most men, the honest answer is never.
The thing is this: on paper you look fine. There's a group chat, blokes you see, maybe you coach the kids' team and half the pub knows your name. Nobody clocks that there isn't one person you tell the truth to. That includes you. It's been like this so long it feels normal. This is what it’s like being a man.
Why divorce makes it so much worse
For a lot of men, the one person they talked to, even a little, was their wife. She was the only outlet. After the divorce, she's gone, and the number goes from one to zero.
That's part of why divorce flattens men the way it does. You lose her, and you lose the only thread of real connection you had, on the same day.
She was never meant to carry all of it anyway. A woman who loves you will often try to soothe you or fix it, and sometimes that's exactly what’s needed, but other times a man needs someone to sit in it with him, someone who isn't frightened of his pain. Most men never had that second person.
How you ended up here
Nobody chose this. Three things got you here long before you had a say.
The first is conditioning. Man up. Big boys don't cry. Perhaps you showed some softness on a playground once; it got used against you, and you built armour to protect yourself. That was sensible for a kid at school. The thing is, nobody told you that you could take it off later, so you kept it on for forty years, and now it's a cage.
The second is how men bond. We do it shoulder to shoulder. Fishing, the game, under the bonnet of a car. It's real, and I'm not knocking it. But you can stand next to a man for thirty years and never turn and say I'm not okay. It's a very good hiding place.
The third is that nobody taught you how. Your father probably didn't do it, because his father didn't either.
So you reached midlife with a skill you've never once practised. Of course you've got no one to talk to. Every man you know is in the same boat, and each of them is sure he's the only one. But we’re in the same boat. We just don’t know it.
What it's costing you
Without a place to express these feelings, they don't disappear. Instead, they come out sideways. A short fuse. A tight chest. Battling to fall asleep. Perhaps it’s in a bottle, or scrolling, working until midnight so you never have to sit still.
You also make the big calls alone. Money, the kids, the house, whether to blow it all up or rebuild. With only your own head for counsel, and in a crisis your own head is a hall of mirrors.
When nobody really sees a man, he starts to lose his own outline. You know who you are partly from how people who actually know you respond to you. Take that away for long enough and you go blurry.
Podcasts and videos can feel like company, but they’re a broadcast on go one way. A man can talk to you for a thousand hours and never once hear you.
The lock and the key
The lock on this door is the fear of judgment. Some part of you is sure that if another man saw the mess, he'd think less of you.
That fear was put there for a real reason. It's mostly pointing at a threat that left forty years ago. The decent men around you are wearing the same armour and wondering if they're the only one. When one of them takes it off, the other usually says some version of "thank God, me too."
I've watched that happen in a room more times than I can count now, and it still gets me. One man says the thing he's been sitting on for years, and two others go quiet and then say me too.
Honest vulnerability between two men tends to get matched, not judged. And nobody is going to ask you. Men don't do that to each other. Being the first to talk gets things moving.
Wanting someone to really talk to is one of the most basic human needs. A starving man isn't weak for being hungry.
How to start
You start by picking someone. Not a group, not a project. One who seems a bit safe, maybe someone who's been through something himself. You usually know who it is.
Then go first, and go small. Next time you're side by side doing whatever you do, say one sentence. "Honestly, things have been pretty rough lately." That's the whole move. See what he does with it. Most of the time he turns and meets you.
If you genuinely can't think of a single man, build it on purpose, the way I had to. A men's group. Group therapy. A coach. I'm often the first man a bloke has told the truth to in decades, and that conversation alone can shift a lot. The point is that you don't have to wait for it to happen to you by accident. Mine didn't.
When another man opens up to you, and he will once you start, don't fix him. Don't reach for advice. Just listen. Most of us are drowning in solutions and short on being heard.
I talk about this at more length in the latest episode of Said Out Loud: Divorce Recovery for Men, on Spotify and Apple.
If you've been carrying this alone and you're not sure where you actually stand, the Which One? quiz is a good place to start. Take it here: https://www.treeoflifejourney.co.za/which-one