From Awareness Builder 101: Chapter 34

34. A real man!

 

It is rather easy to figure out what a real man is. Just follow the commercials and let them tell you what clothes you should be wearing, how your hair should look like, a beard or not. What deodorant to use, how cool your car needs to be, how to show your muscles. How to walk, how to stand. How to talk and, for the post-modern man, how to cry.

Widen it to society and there are more patterns you could simply follow on your path to becoming a real man. It will inform you about which jobs are manlike, how to work your way up as man. How to be with other men, how to be with the ladies. The list of unwritten tips, advice and instructions is pretty long!

If you need more, just watch the movies! They’ll spell it out for you! So many examples of real man are given, it’s almost kind of stupid if you then still don’t know!

 

Before writing this article, I googled ‘real man’. The results are rather confusing! Instead of pictures of real men, Google Image mainly gave a series of quotes about how a real man is. A movie star with muscles as from steel shared his picture and next to it a one-liner that a real man should stand for his word and speak through his actions. Lots of quotes about how real men should behave. Many ‘wise words’ about how a man should be with a woman. One caught my eye. I guess it’s aim was to underline that a real man accepts a woman how she is. A nice attempt yet maybe in essence still completely missing the point: “A real man never wants to change anything about a woman except her last name”.

 

You are perfect as you are, I accept you as you are BUT all you need to change for me to marry you is your name. Your name?!? Our name is maybe the first word we recognize as a baby and maybe the last thing we can grasp when we grow really old. These few letters, in that unique order, forming your name is in a metaphoric way almost like your DNA. It’s YOU! A way of diminishing people is to constantly not call them by their name. To ignore that essential part of them.

 

I want to believe most men these days don’t really buy the bullshit of commercials about what a real man is. I also want to believe most men these days are man enough to know how to be with a woman as well as with another man. That they know what it is to be human. Simply human. Correction, beautifully human.

 

Maybe a final step there is to let go of the old habit a woman has to change her name when she decides to marry a man. To no longer force her to give up a huge part of a human’s identity so a man can call her ‘his’. For a real man it’s not in the name…..

 

 

Journaling questions for this chapter:

 

 

What is my take on ‘a real man’?

 

 

Where do I put myself, or (other) men, in a harness of made up rules?

 

 

How is this question about what a real man is, important to me in the first place?

 

 

© 2026. Alex Verlek, Coaching Works International.

 

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