The Other Men

Every man who comes to me knows there are others. It is not concealed, it could not be, and none of them arrive under any illusion about it. What interests me is that knowing it and feeling it turn out to be almost unrelated, and the gap between the two is where a great deal of him becomes visible.

The first thing most of them do is compete, quietly, and usually while insisting they are not. He writes at greater length. He is more available than he can sustain. He works into a sentence some detail intended to distinguish him, and he is often not aware he has done it until later, when it embarrasses him.

I do not discourage this as briskly as he might expect. It is honest, in its way, and it burns itself out faster when it is not made shameful. What replaces it is the interesting part.

Because at some point he notices that the competition is unwinnable by design. There is no position of being the favourite that can be occupied and then defended. He can be attended to closely, and he can be thought about, and neither of those is a rank. Men who need it to be a rank tend to leave, and I would rather they left early than spent a year converting something good into a contest they were always going to lose.

The ones who stay do something I find genuinely admirable, though I rarely say so at the time. They stop measuring and start attending. What he receives is not diminished by anyone else receiving it, and once that lands he is free to be present rather than positioned. He asks better questions. He stops narrating his own worth.

There is a failure mode on my side too, and it belongs in this. A woman can use the others as a device, letting a man imagine competition in order to keep him working. It functions. It also converts the whole thing into anxiety management, and anxiety is a poor fuel that runs out and takes the good part with it. I do not do that, not out of delicacy, but because what I want from him is attention, and a frightened man attends only to his own standing.

He is not the only one. He is, when he is with me, the only one I am speaking to. Those two sentences sit together perfectly well, and the men who work that out stop asking me which is true.