Is It More Important for Men to Be Kind or Successful?

The night before my wedding, I stayed at an Airbnb with my best friends from college. Not a lot of people were keen on this idea. The implication of the groom possibly getting absolutely trashed and barely getting any sleep the night before the wedding certainly raised some red flags.

However, in defending my decision, I touted the whole resume of one of my best friends who was in charge of the Airbnb reservation. I know him as a nice, loyal, and reliable friend, but I described him by his accomplishments: he just got his J.D. as a lawyer from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, of all places. He’s working at a firm making over $200,000 a year, and he’s worked in the past at the SEC.

Immediately, all fears of me getting way too drunk the night before the wedding were assuaged, and it didn’t happen. I realize I described one of my best friends more by his resume than the content of his character, but the same has happened to me more often than not.

This often happens around family or people that don’t know me as well, but when I’m introduced with my wife, the first way people introduce me is that I’m successful. Of course, I don’t think I’m successful. I feel like I’m not doing enough or not achieving my potential every day, which isn’t particularly healthy but inevitably, I’m more ambitious than I would like to admit.

But my father-in-law, for example, will tell his friends and family that I’m a law student at night and going to be a successful lawyer, while working the day and providing for me and his daughter. My own father tells people that I’m a smart and successful law student who has also achieved significant success as a teacher and my work in special education in the school system. People tell others I run marathons or I accomplished X or Y thing.

Of course, the implication is that I’m successful, but the more important thing for men should be the content of their character and whether, you know, they’re nice and compassionate people. I would take being known as a kind person over being successful any day of the week. And I do hope that’s what the people I care about most know me as.

I have the approval of my in-laws and I appreciate and love them very much, and I know that feeling is reciprocal. However, I do wonder how that approval would have been different had I not been successful. What if I was unemployed, hadn’t graduated from college, and had no foreseeable prospects of future success? I would love to think that I’m nice, charming, and funny enough to win the approval of any in-laws, but I would be fooling myself and everyone else if “successful” wasn’t one criteria a lot of especially more traditional parents look for when sizing up a man who wants to marry into their families.

Of course, if I was successful and an asshole, that probably wouldn’t help either.

And I also know a lot of people who aren’t as successful but are equally as deserving of love and approval. My older brother is an example. I promised I wouldn’t write as intimately and vulnerably about my family as I did before, but my brother hasn’t achieved the same level of academic and career success as I have, has struggled his way through a lot of his life through a variety of mental health struggles, and is seen as somewhat of a black sheep as a result.

Although I appreciated the implications of my parents calling me their golden child and saying they were proud of me at my wedding, I have never heard them once say the same about my brother. I don’t necessarily believe in telling someone “I’m proud of you” when you’re not, but I see it as emblematic of a larger societal issue.

As a society, as progressive as certain circles have gotten, we still judge men for what they do, not who they are, as

Carlyn Beccia

has excellently noted, I think men should be more sensitive, kinder, and not feel the pressures to provide as much as they do now. But I am also no fool — I know that men on the surface, men are often judged by what they do more than who they are. They’re not only judged by what they can provide, but by their toughness, competitiveness, and other more traditional values.

Yes, the world is changing. But it’s not changing as fast as it should.

Men want to be loved for their character, not their success

Some people think there’s no problem with evaluating men by their success, at least in more traditional circles.

The problem with that kind of mindset is that love is not unconditional. You can lose your job any time. You might lose money to pay for school. All of a sudden, your status as the provider of the family is in jeopardy.

It’s such a precarious position that you’re constantly in a state of insecurity. And when you fail those standards and operate in that framework, you just feel like you’re absolutely worthless and there’s nothing positive you can contribute.

As long as the people you love the most and your immediate family give that unconditional love, that’s what matters. And no one thinks everyone can love them unconditionally, per se.

But the world of being a man is ruthless in that regard (not that being a woman isn’t, but it’s just different). The patriarchy judges women more for promiscuity, being assertive in the workplace, not wanting kids, and not having a clean house. Those are all terrible things. But the patriarchy judges men just as harshly when they fail to provide, fail to be tough, and don’t take out the trash and mow the lawn well enough.

I like to think I see myself differently and my wife and I have a more modern and progressive marriage. But we still fall victim to these pressures frequently due to our upbringings.

As an educator in a predominantly Black school district in mostly inner-city schools, I see these traditional expectations among the boys I teach in particular. In a lesson regarding peaceful and healthy ways to resolve conflicts, I asked my class “when’s a time you walked away from or backed down from a conflict?”

The most soft-spoken, polite, and kindest student I’ve taught said “I’ve never backed down from a conflict.” There’s a visceral homophobia due to some of these social pressures even though the kids don’t want to deprive gay people of their rights, pressures the boys, in particular, have not to be seen as weak.

For the Black community, it’s different because of systemic racism and an even more severe kind of pressure that often prevents Black men and boys from seeking mental health care. I’ve seen that some of boys I’ve taught, who are very good people and students, often feel like they have no choice but to respond to a provocation or conflict. Again, there are tons of reasons for this, including systemic racism, poverty, and the nature of growing up in the hood, but that mindset has led to some of my students suffering terrible injuries, and this year, one of my former students was grazed by a bullet when he got into a fight and the other student pulled out a gun.

Right now, according to Richard Reeves and Ember Smith at the Brookings Institute in an American Family Survey, Americans are more worried about their sons than their daughters. Conservative parents are most concerned about their boys, but the survey showed liberal parents are even more worried about their boys than their daughters than conservative parents were. 40% of liberal respondents worried about their daughters becoming successful, while 48% of liberal respondents worried about their sons becoming successful (the ratio was 32% to 36% for women).

The reason for this disparity is that liberal parents also feel like their boys are worse at dealing with setbacks than their girls: 50% of liberal parents responded affirmatively to the question “setbacks don’t discourage him/her. He/she doesn’t give up,” while 62% said the same of their daughters.

That is extremely telling, because although the same liberal parents profess to worry more about girls in America than boys becoming successful adults (43% to 40%), that concern doesn’t line up with their own kids.

Takeaways

There are plenty of reasons why parents think their boys have less grit and why men are struggling in general. But I think this judgment based on what you do versus who you are is one of them. I think the fact that men are still, for the most part, judged on something so conditional is a huge reason, and although I have been graced and lucky to have male friendships that are unconditional and aren’t contingent on what we do or produce, a lot of men can’t say the same. A 2021 May American Perspectives Survey found that 15% of men reported having no close friendships, but only 10% of women reported the same.

None of this should take away from our efforts to level the playing field for women and girls. But it should make us more cognizant of the fact that our men and boys are struggling, too. I don’t know if we can still say it’s as bad as women, but I would say they’re just different. As an Asian man, my struggles are different from Asian women — the Asian women in my life deal with exoticization and fetishization, but Asian men deal with simply feeling completely ignored, forgotten about, and completely invisible in society. I’m sure there’s a version of this for Black, White, and Hispanic men/women as well.

Again, I don’t think one is worse than another (although a lot of people feel otherwise), but the struggles are just different. In Asian culture, it’s no secret that boys are held to a lesser standard in terms of completing tasks around the house. But it’s also no secret that when boys fail to meet academic or career expectations, the wrath of fury and pressure can be significantly more brutal than for girls.

For men, the reassurance and practice of unconditional love is essential because being loved for what you do more than who you are is a very insecure and not very gratifying place to be. Plus, don’t we want our men to be kinder, more sensitive, and have fewer displays of anger? Although we’ve made a lot of progress, there is still more to be made.

We need to continue to level the playing field for women, but not forget that the patriarchy makes our men suffer, too, particularly in a changing world that’s leaving them behind. Although a lot of liberal parents won’t profess to agree on a systemic level, the data shows they agree when it comes to their own kids.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Men

Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race

The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow

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