Don’t Man Up, Grow Up

Why emotional maturity trumps performance.

Photo by Ben White 

Jason stood at the sink, drying dinner plates. His wife, Rachel, sat at the table, hands wrapped around a cup of tea, now cold. Her voice was quiet.

“I’m doing this alone,” she said. Inside, she felt like she was feeling something he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ever feel with her.

Jason stayed calm. He knew the drill. He was supposed to be compassionate. He made eye contact and said the things he was supposed to say:

“I hear you. Let’s figure it out.” But his body told a different story: tight chest, buzzing head, something hot in his throat. But he didn’t say that. He stayed composed.

And Rachel didn’t soften. She looked further away.

What’s Going On?

Jason’s no stranger to self-work. He’s read the books, tried therapy, and listens to podcasts about upgrading masculinity. Be steady. Be self-reliant. Be the rock. Most of it sounds reasonable, but somehow, it’s not coming together for him.

He’s showing up in a calm, supportive way, so why does she still feel alone?

The Problem

Rachel’s problem isn’t the dishes: Jason was right there drying them. Her problem is that she could cry in front of him and feel totally alone, like her sadness was just echoing off the walls.

Jason’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t care, but he’d been trained to manage emotions rather than feel them. So when Rachel reached out, what she felt was an absence, and what he felt was pressure to perform something he wasn’t experiencing.

Jason had spent most of his life being told to man up. Be the rock. Keep it together. That was the version of strength he knew, and that’s what he thought helped others when they were falling apart.

Georgetown University scholar Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò calls this emotional compression: the social norm of stoicism and restricted emotional expression. He argues that it’s a masculine-coded form of invisible emotional labor, performed for the benefit of others. (1)

That’s the bind many men find themselves in. Traditional masculinity taught them to prize composure and control, whereas modern relationships ask for vulnerability and attunement.

The problem, of course, is that all these rules about what it means to be a man—whether espoused by men or the women who love them—are social constructs. They're made up.

The Masculinity Trap

From an early age, most boys get the message: anger, pride, confidence, triumph, and determination are fair game. Whereas others, like fear, tenderness, sadness, shame, and grief get coded as weak or girlish. As a result, those emotions tend to morph into something else: rage, numbness, problem-solving, rumination or despair.

They absorb this training from fathers, coaches, movies, even well-meaning teachers: keep your cool, tough it out. And if you can’t tough it out, get angry. Maybe hurt someone.

By adulthood, many men manage emotions by suppressing them, detaching from them, or locking them down entirely. These strategies can work well, especially in sports, at work, or in a crisis. Other outlets—like working too much, taking risks, or numbing with alcohol—also code as masculine, but often create more problems than they solve.

In intimate relationships, however, these moves frequently backfire. Keeping your cool isn’t the same as being connected. And often, it’s not real calm: it’s managed intensity, a poker face over a throbbing nervous system.

Inside, many men get flooded in these kinds of conversations. But without the awareness to perceive their feelings more comfortably and flexibly, or the ability to process them into emotions grounded in context, they grip their internal experience in a raw, unprocessed way that only adds to their distress.

Because they can’t relax into it, the underlying feelings stay hidden and unexpressed, so what surfaces is anger or dissatisfaction—aimed outward. Because without nuance and courage, the discomfort can’t be framed as a valid male emotion.

What rarely gets said is: I’m scared. I feel useless. I don’t know what you need, and I don’t know what I need either.

Even for men who want to level up, the roadmap is confusing. The moves they’ve been taught—composure, control, fixing the problem—don’t translate into the connection their partner is looking for, so they feel like they’re failing. This also comes out as anger, or gets suppressed into stress.

That’s where we find men like Jason: standing at the sink, trying to be the man he thought he was supposed to be, not realizing the script itself is the problem.

What Is Emotional Maturity?

Emotional maturity means knowing what we feel. Even the emotions we’ve been taught are off-limits, like jealousy, embarrassment, and hurt. It means staying present with those feelings without overreacting, and tolerating the raw voltage that might make us want to shut it all down.

It also means facing the (specifically masculine) secondary feeling that often follows: the shame about having these feelings at all. Because deep down, many of us were taught that real men shouldn’t feel fear, or sadness, or shame. That to feel these things means we’ve already lost our status and our place in the male hierarchy.

But emotional maturity cuts through that performance and gives us something deeper. Neuroscience tells us that feelings are the roots of our reality. If we want real power—the kind that lasts a lifetime—we need to perceive those feelings clearly.

That’s the kind of emotional sovereignty the original Stoics pointed to: not suppression out of fear, but steadiness through awareness and insight. (2, 3, 4, 5)

When we can feel without flinching, we can choose how and when to act. That’s real power: staying steady within an ever-changing landscape of emotion, neither ruled by them nor rejecting them. The more we practice it, the clearer and more confident we become.

The more we embody this strength, the more it becomes its own form of power. We read the room better. We sense the unspoken context. We support others while they experience their own painful feelings. By speaking the language of emotion, we become fluent in the full breadth and depth of the human experience.

Emotional Maturity as a Practice

Emotional maturity isn’t a fixed trait. It’s something you build through practice, reflection, and the willingness to stay present in discomfort.

For a lot of men, that process starts in failure, or what feels like failure. When the moves that used to work—calm down, stay rational, keep things steady—suddenly don’t.

That was Jason’s entry point. Not a big collapse. Just a feeling of helplessness around his wife’s distress, and a feeling confused and embarrassed afterward.

And for him, that was exactly where growth started: naming the experience. I feel confused and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know what to say.

For men conditioned to shut it down and power through, that kind of openness and honesty can feel foreign, and scary. But it’s the doorway to something new.

It starts with the intention to notice subtle internal signals: the heat in our chest, the tight jaw, the urge to fix or withdraw. Almost like how we might notice changes in our car: when the brakes feel soft, the suspension is off, or the acceleration lags.

We learn to name those signals, not just as stress or frustration, but as specific emotions: guilt, sadness, helplessness. And as our emotional vocabulary becomes more granular, our communication becomes more precise.

We’ll also start to see patterns. Defensiveness isn’t just a reflex to debate. It’s a cue to look closer: What am I protecting? What just got stirred up? What part of me feels criticized, or not good enough?

This kind of self-awareness doesn’t weaken us. Just the opposite: it grounds us in reality. Because once we know what’s happening inside our body and mind, we have choices.

When Jason circled back later and said, “I froze. I didn’t know what to say. I was trying to stay calm, but I see now why you felt alone,” it wasn’t a grand confession. But it mattered to Rachel because it validated something she’d been feeling for a long time. And it mattered to him because he wasn’t trying to manage her anymore. He was just showing up.

Growing Up is Showing Up

Growing up means redefining strength: trading performance for presence, staying steady while feeling deeply, and becoming fluent in the full breadth and depth of human experience.

It means trading performative control for emotional presence. Staying steady while feeling something. That’s where real strength lives: not in the mask, but in the courage to be seen.

1 Táíwò, O. O. (2020). Stoicism (as emotional compression) is emotional labor. Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 6(2), Article 4.

2 Marcus Aurelius. (2002). Meditations (G. Hays, Trans.). Modern Library. (Original work published 180 CE)

3 Diogenes Laërtius. (1925). Lives of eminent philosophers (R. D. Hicks, Trans.; Vol. 2). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 3rd century CE)

4 Epictetus. (1995). Enchiridion (N. P. White, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company. (Original work published 125 CE)

5 Seneca. (1969). Letters from a Stoic (R. Gummere, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 65 CE)