Most men were given exactly two options, and neither one works. Close up and carry the whole thing yourself, or hold it until it cracks and comes out sideways on somebody who didn’t deserve it. Season 2, Episode 3 of Allied We Can is about the option nobody taught you — the third one.
Eric Miller makes the case that openness was never a question of how much you say. It’s a question of who you’re saying it to, what you’re asking them to do with it, and what you decided ahead of time to leave out. Get that order right and honesty stops costing you. Get it backwards and every attempt confirms what you already suspected about people.
This one is honest about where those two options came from, and it isn’t the tidy story about fathers handing down a code. For a lot of men there was no father in the house to hand down anything. For plenty of others he was in the house and unreachable. Many of us learned what a man is from our mothers, who did heroic work and still couldn’t show us the one thing only a man can show a boy. And younger men didn’t inherit one message about manhood — they inherited a pile of them that flatly contradict each other, then went online to sort it out and learned to perform instead of connect. Different training, same result: more than half of American men say no one really knows them, and among young men it’s closer to two out of three.
There’s one practice in here — the Ask, the Person, and the Line. About twenty seconds of thinking, then one sentence said out loud before the hard part. No app, no journal, nothing new to keep up with.
Also in this episode: discernment, which means reading whether somebody can actually carry what you’re about to hand them — a different question from whether they’re a good person. Why the men who get burned most often aren’t unlucky. Why waiting to be asked isn’t opening up. What to do when a good friend fumbles it. And what a sixteen-year-old learns standing in a driveway.
Run it when you’ve got the hour.
Chapter 3 of *Allied We Can Find Common Ground* goes deeper on this one. https://a.co/d/imxGqxa
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