Profile of a Dad (With a Bod)

How heartbreak can make or break a man

Over the last week or so I started writing for fellow Medium peep Charles Roast, who enthusiastically and very kindly celebrated my two initial contributions to his new Medium publication, Dad Bod.

This morning, a few minutes ago, I read this from Chuck:

I have rarely read a more heartbreaking, honest, stripped-to-the bones account of what it’s like to be a struggling good guy in today’s world.

Chuck is stuck in that kind of horrific limbo that I might bet so many of us are. The virus has forced all of us to put our lives on hold. Chuck and his (soon-to-be-ex) wife are hoping to sell their large SoCal house right about the time that this country has hit the brakes. Bad break.

While I’m not in the middle of a divorce-with-kids, I am living in a stripped-to-the-bare-bones house which is also about to go up for sale. My plans to leave for PNW are on hold. In the meantime, I found my Forever House, right where I wanted it.

It’s like looking at the love of your life behind bullet-proof glass. I can see, but I can’t touch, feel, hear. I sure as shit can’t move in.

Right now Chuck can’t move either out or on.

He’s got a lovely sense of humor, which is what I responded to when I began writing.

Now I have a far better idea of the pool from which that humor rises. And why I like him, although we haven’t met. Pain is humor’s handyman. What doesn’t outright kill us off, can eventually make us laugh. Eventually.

We share a lot of the same kinds of pain. Chuck writes about how his wife steadily took over their 3300 square foot house with her work. My last BF did much the same kind of thing, although he was able to do that in my somewhat smaller house in just a few months.

Both our partners brought their anger, angst and work compulsions into every aspect of their lives, pushing both of us away, and ultimately, even undermining sex.

We both ended up sick, from the anxiety, the hurt, the self-recriminations, the viciousness with which we picked apart our good selves as life picked apart our relationships. The worse things got, the worse the internal voice. Hard to live with yourself.

And with partners who felt we were to blame. We happily wore that, too.

It was painful to read.

Very.

Man, I know this guy. I really, really, know this guy, in ways that I might not have anticipated. Chuck’s bubbling humor appears to be born of pain, loss, anger, hurt, a failed marriage, the need for affection, love, acceptance. Shall I go on?

Kindly, is there any one of us who does NOT know Chuck?

I am not trying to speak for him. This is how I feel his words. His words burn and hurt with truth.

Good men are made. As are good women. We are carved out of loving, losing, hurting. We are built and broken down and built again on the foundations of shitshows and busted promises, and on the times we got up and kept going. For our kids, for the promises we made in front of the authority who bound us, for the hope that somehow we could knit things back together.

Faced down the dirty dishes and recalcitrant fourteen-year-olds and the sight of our partner’s rejecting backs facing us in bed, even as we struggle mightily to ask for One. Single. Hug. A shred of affection from the person we stood shaking at the altar with, promising to love for life.

Chuck started Dad Bod with a laugh, a wink and a promise. I responded with same. Kindly, this is a lot deeper than finding ways to joke about the shape we’re in at midlife, a point I left behind two decades ago. Like Chuck, at the deepest level, I have not stopped wanting love or affection.

However, the reality of the dating scene, and how our experiences as partners have shaped us, make that scene as full of holes as the African savanna I just galloped for two weeks. Termite mounds and hidden aardvark holes, guaranteed to break your horse’s leg and possibly, your neck too. You learn to keep a sharp eye out, and watch the ground ahead. Not bad advice for life, that.

I am immensely grateful this morning for his clear-eyed, pain-filled, heartbreakingly honest walk through the detritus of his marriage, his too-big house, and the wreckage of the life he tried his best to build. As he implies but doesn’t say, everyone has a piece of this. We all do.

Just as I had plenty of the pieces that flew apart in the mess that was my ex. While he indeed had a mean streak, how I managed that (ineptly, thank you) didn’t help.

In a dating environment where there is so much attention paid to the superficial, it’s easy to forget that whatever evidence you and I have heaped on our human forms that speaks to the horrors and loves and challenges that life has tossed our way, the real truth comes when we can, with great courage and gentility, be brutally honest about who and what we are.

And kindly, in that brutal honesty, find real courage.

I saw great strength in Chuck’s story. The strength inherent in aching vulnerability. The very vulnerability that so many of us, so many men, refuse to admit. As a result, they weaken themselves.

Vulnerability knits the bone and muscle and sinews of character.

My writing coach Orvel Ray Wilson, who helped me pen two decent books, told me a while back that you and I need to write about the terrible, dark places that we face in the wee hours of the night. I’ve tried to do that. Part of what that does is allow me to be searingly honest about who and what I am. It also touches the spark of truth that we all share: the same hopes and dreams, the desire to be loved, to be seen as a good partner, a desirable and worthy sexual partner, someone deserving of respect and love, flawed but trying.

This was an exquisite, and exquisitely painful piece. I’ve read few more compelling statements about what it’s like to be a man in midlife, stuck in a house for an indeterminate time with a wife who has left the building in more ways than one. Like Chuck, or at least how I read this piece, I kept recommitting to someone who had already departed, with much the same result. Things failed anyway, no matter what we sacrificed, tolerated, forfeited.

Dad Bod in this sense speaks to every single one of us. For we’ve all been through it in one way or another. If we love, we will suffer. If we suffer, if you and I are fortunate, we grow, evolve, and become.

And if we do the work, I think we get better at love. I most assuredly hope so. Chuck isn’t giving up. Neither am I.

Chuck and I are both bound to our no-longer-safe-sanctuary houses for the short term. If this does little more than allow us to find our truth, it’s time well spent. If this process allows us to explore ourselves for what is worth, which is why Chuck wants help with writing a new online dating profile (I am hoping to be of service there), then Purgatory has a Purpose.

This is all sacred work. Every moment, every painful, hurtful, Dad-doubting moment of it. And I am deeply grateful to Chuck for the kind of brutal honesty that is a fine reminder that there are indeed, plenty of good men out there. Men whose marriages failed, but who want badly to be married, in love, in bed with someone who wants them, to raise good kids in a sometimes-scary world.

Men who really, truly, want to be good partners.

Good guys.

Hey, Chuck. That might make pretty good copy for a dating profile. I bet a lot of very good women would respond to just that.