How do you feel about yourself? No, how do you really FEEL about your “self,” your personhood? How do you feel about that core that is your essence, that lies deep within you? What has happened to you that informs how you feel about yourself?
For many, that core is understood to be your self. And how we feel about our self is known as self-esteem. Do you feel good about your self? Then you have high self-esteem. Do you feel bad about yourself? Then you have low self-esteem.
This issue has increasingly come to the forefront in my work with couples. In my therapy practice, I am seeing more heterosexual partners struggling because the woman is asking her male partner to “be more relational,” while the man is often left confused, even dumbfounded, by what that means.
Why is this happening?
Unpacking this phenomena requires recognizing the major changes that have happened in gender relations in the last quarter century or so, especially around how women are changing. They are becoming more economically self-sufficient, which is causing them to change what they expect from their partners. Men, in turn, are being asked to be more relational and less focused on their careers and fulfilling the role of being a traditional breadwinner. How does this fit into men’s sense of self-esteem? Read on.
Some time ago, social scientists and educators established that self-esteem plays a larger role in human development than simply being a description of how we feel about ourselves. Self-esteem directly impacts how we feel about our world, it impacts our motivations, and it even influences the quality of our relationships. For example, people with low self-esteem often struggle with motivation, which can limit the energy they put toward their goals. They are also more likely to experience difficulties in their relationships. Over time, others may perceive them as emotionally draining, or even toxic, to be around.
This realization, that self-esteem has a global effect on a person resulted in a generation of parents and educators diligently working to build the self-esteem of children. One way this manifested was that kids started getting awards for everything to boost their self-esteem. You sat in your chair at school for an hour? Here is an award for being the best chair sitter! And so on. Some cultural commentators (Manson, 2016) and sociologists (Best, 2011) believe this became excessive, resulting in a generation of kids who expected to get special recognition for the most mundane things.
Fortunately, in recent years, thinking about self-esteem has become more nuanced. The concept of self-esteem runs throughout couple’s therapist Terry Real’s work. In his most recent book, *US: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship* (2022), Real points out that many men are raised with cultural messages that not only discourage emotional openness but also position their very sense of worth and equality as something to be overcompensated for. In my own work, I see how powerful it can be when these limiting messages are named and challenged.
Real sees “healthy self-esteem” as being a kind of natural state, an “unfluctuating sense of yourself as a human being.” Everybody possesses this because it is tied to our deepest sense of self, to our essence. That deep sense of esteem is unruffled by worldly expectations, our achievements, or our accomplishments. It cannot be added to or subtracted from. Real calls this “inside out self-esteem” because it arises from within and then it emanates into our conscious lives.
Real contrasts this with “performance-based self-esteem.” This occurs when we base our sense of self-esteem on our worldly achievements and success. A person who builds their sense of self on a performance basis says to themselves: “I am worthy and valuable because of my accomplishments.” As evidence for this, they might say something to themselves, like, “I am the best salesperson in my district and I have more money in the bank than anyone in my neighborhood and I own the biggest house.” And so on.
Here, Real shifts his focus and applies self-esteem to differences between men and women. Traditionally, women established their sense of self-esteem based on their relationships and their connections to others. If they were part of a network of close friends and people they cared about, they had high self-esteem. Men on the other hand, were drawn into a performance-based sense of self-esteem. They based their sense of worth on their achievements, on their salaries, their position in the business hierarchy, and so on. The Sociologist Michael Kimmel, an authority on men and male development, confirms Real’s insight in his history of American manhood. Men prove their worth as men by performance, Kimmel claims, based on what they do in the world (*Manhood in America*, 2012). Tangible measures of success give men solid information about their net worth, and by extension, their self-worth. Money in the bank. Nice house. Nice clothes. Plenty of food on the table. A man’s self-esteem shoots up because these are indicators that he has performed very well.
A raft of research shows, however, that basing your sense of self-worth on your financial accomplishments and net worth is a pretty lousy way to build a sense of self-esteem. If you are middle income or greater, improving your income, your status, and so on, will temporarily boost your sense of self-esteem, but shortly thereafter, it will not! It is like a drug fix; a temporary high. You come down after an initial boost to your self-esteem. That puts many men on a treadmill, where they must constantly earn more, and achieve more recognition and the bigger paycheck in pursuit of a self-esteem boost that is at best, temporary.
Real proposes that this relentless pursuit of success has fostered traditionally masculine men who only feel good when they are winning at whatever game they are playing. But actually, Real holds, despite the outer markers of success, these men possess a “fragile ego.” They are slaves to a chronic need to prove, prove, and then the relentless push to prove more. Real claims that this man’s inner self – and how they feel about themselves – is awash in alternating shame and grandiosity based on his status in the game.
This message rarely reaches people—and when it does, Real states, men in particular often miss it. Traditionally masculine men, who embody the kind of over-the-top aggressiveness and hyper-competitiveness are enmeshed in this performance-based self-esteem. They are like a hungry fish going for the bait! Traditionally masculine types are always striving for the better job, the higher earnings, the faster car, etc. You know the drill. That leads men on the famous rat race. The human effects of this hyper-competitiveness, however, are quite sober and marked by morbid measures: psychosomatic ailments, failed marriages, poor relationships with children, heart disease, and an early grave. Men’s bodies and their relational lives simply cannot keep up.
But wait! The story of men’s self-esteem has another chapter, and it doesn’t get any easier for traditionalists. This chapter starts with the changing roles of women. Real accurately points out (while stepping back and shifting to the larger historical context we live in), that, “Economic realities have changed. We’re living through a cultural shift where men’s self-esteem can no longer be reliant on being the strong, successful provider.” For the last half century, more women have been achieving financial independence in untold numbers of ways. Many women are no longer dependent on men to be the sole provider in their families. They have become better educated, have entered the workforce in a major way and are making a good living themselves. The result is a revolution in the nature of close relationships between men and women. Women now want partners who offer more emotional connection, more vulnerability, more intimacy. They also want to be in relationships where the man and woman are equals and the parenting of children is shared.
“What?” cry these performance-based men and their fragile egos. Real notes that many men are not getting the message, leaving them “floundering.” The old performance-based self-esteem is no longer working for them. The old formulas that used to unlock the portals to being admired (and unlock the keys to her bedroom) are no longer viable for an increasing number of men. Many men are struggling here, according to Real. “They are in desperate need for the tools required to meet these new demands for relationships.”
Men need a new roadmap to guide them toward a new vision for masculinity, Real holds. That new vision leads to a more relational self for men, one where their values and priorities shift. Growing some wisdom so as not to get trapped in chasing shiny objects to build one’s self worth is one bit of useful knowledge for men in this regard. Valuing connectedness and relationship is another useful shift.
Although many men are struggling with this new formula for success, others are making the change. It shows up in the statistics. The amount of time fathers spend with their young children is increasing and has been for decades. The numbers of men who are in relationships that are called “modern companionate marriages” where the couple are equals is also increasing. These couples share the financial burdens, they share parenting, they share household duties.
That leaves us with a curious split screen. On one side are men whose self-esteem is built on purely performance-based notions. Their bank accounts may be getting bigger, but their relational selves remain immature and undeveloped and their egos are fragile. On the other side are the men who are boldly stepping into these new relational selves while holding “performance-based self-esteem” at arm’s length. They happily tell us, that they don’t miss those old performance-based measures of success at all. And their sense of self? Their “inside out self-esteem” shows up on their faces that are wreathed in stress-free smiles.
References
Best, J. (2011). Everyone’s a winner: Life in our congratulatory culture. University of California Press.
Kimmel, M. (2012). Manhood in America: A cultural history (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
Manson, M. (2016). The subtle art of not giving a f*ck. A counterintuitive approach to living a good life. Harper Collins.
Real, T. (2022). US: Getting past you and me to build a more loving relationship. Random House.