Men Are Wonderful Entry 3: The Grit Factor

How many hits did you take this week, sweetheart? Disclaimer: This article is not about how women can be equally as gritty as men, so if you are looking for a piece of writing focused on gender equality, this is not that. This article is just focused on wonderful men. Just them.

The concept of grit or grittiness has already had its fifteen minutes of fame on the stage of popular opinion, but a quick summary of the grit factor is that it is the ability to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’. Will Ferrell said it this way in the movie Daddy’s Home (2015): “Dads take sh*t. That’s what we do!” But it’s bigger than taking sh*t, which is discussed by some loud voices as if it is a sign of weakness when in truth putting up with what you don’t prefer is a fact of life.

Grittiness is found in a man who says, “No matter what happens, I will keep my commitments. I will keep my focus. I will get to my destination. There is nothing, no one, no circumstance with the power to prevent me. The matter is settled.” He may fail along the way, he may cry, his heart may break, and he may be unjustly accused of myriad things while he is striving to keep his word, but MOST MEN (don’t believe the hype) are packed with yummy, remarkable, beeline-to-the-finish-line grit.

We observe this wonderful trait — grittiness — in three major ways in men’s everyday lives.

1- Grit in the Face of Impossible Expectations

Expectations have fists. I’m not talking about kindergartners on the playground duking it out over who was supposed to take a turn on the slide next type fists. I’m talking about WBC Heavyweight Champion Tyson-Fury-type fists, fists that come in bearing all the weight of a giant against the face type hits.

When a man is born, he’s expected to get a job, and it’s normally one of those 12-hour-a-day dirty jobs that we women typically don’t want. 🤷‍♀️ We are pretending that this has changed because it is 2023, but I’m a boy-mom and — ahem — it hasn’t changed. When there are job shortages in warehousing, public works, construction, sanitation, and skilled trades, the whole world freaks out and shouts, “Ay! Where are the men?!” And they should because these are all still predominantly male jobs.

As soon as a boy can think outside of himself, he is expected to defend his mama and look out for his siblings. When he gets to school, he is expected to be mannerly to all the girls, and a scrapper (a shadow boxer) amongst all the boys, and it’s supposed to be this immediate thing! (Observe this in your sons.) He’s supposed to know how to defend himself according to the situation as a part of his social development.

His hormones kick in during puberty and almost no one wants to talk to him about how terrible it is. Females are often offered counseling — even in schools — and we sit around in small groups, or we text, or we video chat, or we gather in home groups with older women and we talk about the changes. But males… too often they are hardened in the crucible of puberty and baked into themselves.

Testosterone is the atomic bomb of nature’s arsenal of hormones. It’s a cruise ship without a captain unless someone can teach that boy — apart from trial and error, please — how to man that thing. And then, he becomes a man and he’s hit with the War of the Sexes delusion (which is 1,000% false, obviously), and he’s told that unless he’s in the top 20% of I-don’t-know-what-or-who-made-the-arbitrary-scale, he’s undesirable.

This is a man’s life, ages 0–25. If he’s lucky, his parents and extended family will tell him “Good job” as he survives the hard turns. But maybe, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll just keep telling him, “You need to try harder!”

Men, not all women are blind to the setup you get born into, and we’ve got our own things going on (sure), but our things are not like your things. This is hard. If you’ve survived it with any honor, love, and self-esteem left, you’ve done something amazing and we love you for that. That you got to 25 and didn’t kill someone or yourself, that’s wonderful.

2- Grit in the Face of Heartbreak

I don’t think I understood heartbreak to be a masculine thing before age 25. That’s when I got married and I had to learn a man’s ways up close and personally. In my subconscious, heartbreak was a thing that happened to women because of things men did. Now, you may feel judgmental about me carrying that belief in my soul for all those years, but I’m giving you a valuable piece of information about child development that needs to be evaluated closely. That belief was reinforced regularly by women (and men) that I trusted because of the negative experiences that shaped their lives. But we’re not here to talk about that right now.

We are talking about the fact that men’s hearts break… shatter… implode… sink down into deep, dark holes or cycles of manic depression, and we often have no idea that they are emotionally disabled and crushed because men learn to ignore their breaking hearts early. It’s not that there are no older men who could provide wisdom about the issues connected to these dark moments. It’s that even if there are mentors available, many men are so used to powering through whatever that they aren’t even aware that they should ask for help. In women’s minds, there’s an indicator light that turns on and blinks, “Call your mother.” In men’s minds, the light blinks, “This is life. You gotta take it.”

This my-heart-is-broken-and-I-can’t-tell-anyone business, this is bad business. It oozes itself into every area of a man’s life and psyche, and it leads to the gradual destruction of everything he loves. At some point, a man feels this — that he’s going to lose his mind and everything he loves — so he learns to confide in his friends while they drink beers and watch sports, or he learns to pray while he’s out in the garage working on something, or he learns to pull apart his anxieties while he’s sitting on the lake catching (or not catching) fish, or while he’s trudging up a mountain with other climbers, or while he’s pummeling other players during rugby.

These outlets, whatever they are, are a man’s brave attempt to deal with his heartbreak without worrying the women. Even when he is falling apart, he is thinking, “This is life. You gotta take it. It’s not hers to carry.” Men, you are wonderful, and we love you for this, but seriously… guys… we want you to talk to us about some of these things! And if you can’t, you need to find a man you can trust and exorcise some of this. We want you to live!

3- Grit in the Face of Age

This is the hardest one of all, I think. A man spends his whole life learning to be tough, to lead no matter what, to carry the weight, to be strong. And then, suddenly (seems that way because you’ve been working all those hours, LOL) you’re 50… 60… 70… maybe dead by 80. I can talk about this gradual decline because I had to watch it in fast forward as my first husband died. (I was a young widow to a great man, so this is backstage pass information that maybe other people are not privy to.)

Speed, power, and virility… the man’s favorite things… these are the first things that begin to wane. His athleticism. His ability to respond to a crisis in the blink of an eye. His ability to respond to his sexual interest in the blink of an eye. His ability to run up the ladder and fix that right quick. His role as the deadlift champion of the house. 😂 The things that make our men superhero status in our homes change with time. It is traumatic for men to observe and then accept these changes in their most loved superpowers, but they feel the need to camouflage these changes for as long as they can in the hopes of stemming our (women’s) disappointment. Sweetheart, we are not disappointed. We are proud to see you make it this far, still with us! Still keeping your word! Still being the man we chose!

And with time, the more needful things like organ function, eyesight, balance, continence, and cognition will also decline at their speeds. Aging is cruel. But do you know what’s amazing about men who love their families? All the while that they are on the decline, they are still determined to lift everyone else for as long as they can. For example, in my husband’s last 30 days of life, he remembered my son’s and my birthday and called us from the ICU. We were worrying about whether he would live, and he was more concerned about making birthday calls. Who does that? Only a wonderful man could. Facing old age requires a lot of grit from men, and they know from the beginning that it is a fight they are going to lose.

So, We Appreciate You

In the spirit of the other articles written in the Men Are Wonderful series, I just want to say, “Thank you.” So much of the banter about men being gritty is applied in the grimy sense, and that’s just ridiculous since most of a man’s life is about adapting and surviving, not being shiftless and disgusting. We, your mothers, daughters, wives, and lovers… we see how much steadfastness you put into living every day, and we love that. We love you for that.

In your grit and longsuffering, you have made us so proud.

Keep reading the Men Are Wonderful series with Entry 4: In Their Brute Strength.