Man Up!
By: Tim Owens, M.S.
Tim Owens is Managing Partner of the Owens Group www.owensgrouptraining.com and Director of the Man Up! Program
A program that helps adolescent boys with development into Real Men.
What is a Real Man?
John B. does hard, back breaking work in construction six days a week and often from sun up to sun down. So every Friday when he gets his pay check, he and some of the guys from work like to blow off a little steam by hanging out all night at the local watering hole where they have a few more drinks than they should, flirt with a few more women than they should, and spend a lot more of their pay check than they should. His wife every Saturday morning always smells the alcohol on his breath, and sees the lipstick on his face, but tries to ignore it because the one time she did mention it, he ended up in a blind rage, and she woke up in an emergency room looking into the eyes of their four children who were sobbing, afraid, and confused as to why their dad who they knew loved their mom would want to hurt her. John makes a decent living for his family, and even helps with homework and goes to after school events for his kids when he can, but is he a real man if he cannot control his rage and at times physically abuses his wife?
Robert C. works in the information technology industry and is very good with all things technical. His wife of 18 years is an alcoholic and spends more time away from home than at home with him and the kids. She doesn’t work, but demands that he bring his pay check home every two weeks and give it to her to manage. She won’t be accountable for her life style of drinking and bar hopping, but their home is always a mess, their bills are rarely paid on time, and the oldest daughter at age 16 has for a few years now begun to play the role of mother to herself and her younger brother and sister. Robert is a hard worker, and is very dependable, but is he a real man if he doesn’t confront and hold his wife accountable for the damage she is doing to herself and their family?
Joshua A., a sports fanatic, works hard, in sales, but is home by 6:00 almost every night. He makes a decent living, helps with chores around the house, but is the classic non-communicator when it comes to sharing his thoughts and feelings with his wife of seven years. He goes through the motions at home, and does everything he is responsible to do at work, but his wife feels like they are emotionally divorced. Joshua spends hours in front of the television watching sporting events and sports news. His wife believes he cares more about the individual lives of the players on his fantasy sports teams than he does about her and the children. They make good money, live in a nice home, have two young children, but ultimately they are strangers to each other. She has tried on several occasions to talk with him about it, and he always just brushes her off and dismisses her loneliness as her issue and not his own. Joshua is responsible at home, takes care of his family monetarily, and provides a comfortable life style for them, but is he a real man if he is unable or unwilling to help meet his wife’s emotional needs as well?
So what is a real man? How do you know when you are one? By what process do you become a real man? How do you let others know in appropriate ways that you are a real man? These are some of the questions and issues that we will address each month in Man Up!
The call to every man to Man Up! Is a call that often tends to be much more complex than at first it appears. To many men being a man is simply a matter of having the right plumbing at birth. I submit that there is much more to being a man, than possessing the requisite male genitalia. Being and becoming a man is a process that requires sustained work, discipline, and desire throughout one’s life.
As my dad would often say to me “…it ain’t easy, but easy jobs don’t pay much.”
It’s my strongly held belief that there are many attributes that make a man a “real man”, but there are three attributes that are most common to most real men. These three attributes for me serve as the base line, the starting point, the line of demarcation that separates real men from want-a- be’s, impersonators, and frauds.
Real men, ultimately, are effective at gaining respect, managing resources, and handling responsibility and all within the context of building and maintaining quality relationships at home, work and in the community.
