The flourishing of men and women is not a competition. It is a covenant.
One of the most quietly destructive ideas in contemporary cultural life is the belief that helping men somehow harms women — that concern for boys represents abandonment of girls, that attention to masculine suffering diminishes feminine suffering, that the flourishing of one sex necessarily requires the diminishment of the other. This belief is understandable in its origins. It emerged, in part, from real historical contexts in which resources and opportunities were genuinely zero-sum — in which women’s advancement required overcoming structures that had been built specifically to exclude them, and in which advocacy for men’s interests had been used, in bad faith, to resist that advancement.
But the belief, however understandable its origins, is wrong. And its wrongness has consequences that fall on everyone — on the women who love men and whose lives are shaped by men’s flourishing or suffering, on the children whose wellbeing is inseparable from the wellbeing of their fathers, on the communities whose health depends on the health of all their members, on the intimate relationships that constitute the primary site of human happiness and human pain. The flourishing of men and women is not a competition. It never has been. The question is not whether men or women should thrive. The question is how we create a culture in which both can — and what becomes possible when we do.
We Rise Together
Men and women do not live separate lives. This observation sounds obvious and is somehow consistently overlooked in the cultural conversations that treat gender as a competition between opposing teams. We marry each other. We raise children together. We work beside each other. We love each other with a depth and a specificity that no political framework adequately captures. We depend on each other — not in the diminishing sense of dependence as weakness, but in the honest sense of two people whose lives are genuinely intertwined and who are, for better and sometimes for worse, shaped by each other’s flourishing and suffering.
The practical consequence of this interdependence is that male suffering does not stay male for long. The man who is struggling — educationally, psychologically, relationally, economically — does not struggle in isolation. His struggle radiates outward into the lives of the women who love him: the mother watching her son disengage from school, the wife whose husband’s depression has become the ambient weather of their marriage, the daughter whose father’s withdrawal has left a specific and lasting absence in her formation. There is no version of male suffering that remains exclusively male. It travels. It lands in the people closest to the man who is suffering, and the people closest to him are, in most cases, women and children.
The inverse is equally true. The man who is educated, psychologically healthy, genuinely engaged in his relationships, purposefully contributing to his community — this man’s flourishing also radiates outward. Into stronger marriages. Into more present and more effective fathering. Into the specific quality of masculine steadiness that children need and communities depend on. Into the particular form of love that a whole and grounded man is capable of offering, which is qualitatively different from what a wounded and withdrawn man can manage.
This chapter is about those connections. About what becomes possible — for women, for children, for families, for communities, for love itself — when we stop treating male flourishing as someone else’s problem and start recognizing it as one of the most consequential investments available.
Education: Why Educated Boys Matter to Women
The educational gap between boys and girls has been documented consistently across multiple cycles of national and international assessment, and it is widening rather than narrowing. Boys score below girls in reading at every measured grade level. They are more likely to be held back, more likely to be suspended or expelled, more likely to drop out of secondary school. At the postsecondary level, women now earn the majority of bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees — a reversal of historical patterns so complete that it has generated its own research literature attempting to explain and address it.
The framing that matters here is not that girls are succeeding too much. Girls’ educational achievement is genuine and hard-won and worth celebrating without qualification. The framing that matters is that when boys struggle educationally, everyone loses — and the losses fall specifically and concretely on women in ways that deserve honest acknowledgment.
A generation of young men who are educationally disengaged, who have not developed the skills and credentials that the contemporary economy rewards, who arrive at adulthood with diminished confidence in their own intellectual capacity — these men become, in time, the partners and potential partners of the women in their cohort. The research on family formation is consistent: women’s rates of marriage and long-term partnership are substantially affected by the availability of partners with similar levels of education and economic stability. As the educational gap widens and the economic consequences accumulate, the pool of men that women describe as suitable partners — by the women’s own reported criteria — shrinks. This is not an argument for reducing women’s educational attainment. It is an argument for increasing boys’ — because the consequences of not doing so fall, with a specificity that deserves clear acknowledgment, on the women who will spend their adult lives searching for partners among the men their generation produced.
Women benefit when boys become educated, capable, purposeful men. This is not a political position. It is a demographic reality.
Mental Health: Why Men’s Suffering Is Everyone’s Issue
Every woman who loves a man is affected by his mental health. This is not sentiment. It is the straightforward clinical and relational reality of what it means to share a life with another person whose interior is in some degree of distress. The husband whose untreated depression manifests as irritability and withdrawal brings that depression into the marriage in ways his wife experiences daily, whether or not either of them has named what is happening. The father whose loneliness has calcified into emotional unavailability brings that unavailability to his children, who will spend years trying to understand why the person who was supposed to be most present felt most absent. The son whose anxiety or addiction or unaddressed psychological wound is consuming him is consuming, simultaneously, a portion of his mother’s heart that she will never fully recover regardless of how his story ends.
There is no version of male suffering that remains exclusively male for long. It travels into the people closest to the suffering man — and those people are, overwhelmingly, women and children. The mother of the man who dies by suicide. The wife of the man whose depression went untreated for twenty years because he did not know how to seek help and no one around him created adequate conditions for him to do so. The daughter of the man whose addiction destroyed the family she needed him to be present for. These are not men’s stories. They are family stories. They are women’s stories. They are the stories of everyone who loved a man who was suffering and who suffered alongside him.
Healthy men create healthier relationships. Emotionally connected men create stronger marriages — partnerships in which the emotional labor is genuinely mutual rather than falling primarily on one person by default. Mentally healthy men become more effective fathers — more present, more emotionally available, more capable of the specific quality of engaged fathering that children’s developmental research has consistently identified as consequential. The investment in men’s mental health is not charity extended to men at women’s expense. It is an investment in the quality of every relationship, family, and community that those men inhabit.
Fatherhood: What Children Need and What Women Carry Without It
The research on father involvement is among the most consistent and most robust in the developmental literature. Children with actively involved, emotionally present fathers demonstrate better outcomes across a remarkable range of measures: academic achievement, emotional regulation, social competence, mental health, substance use, and the quality of their own adult relationships. These effects are not small and they are not reducible to economic provision alone — they represent the specific developmental contribution of paternal presence, which is distinct from what maternal presence provides and not interchangeable with it.
When fathers flourish — when they are healthy enough, present enough, and supported enough to be genuinely engaged in their children’s lives — children flourish. This benefit falls on children of both sexes. But it falls with particular immediacy on the mothers of those children, who carry a significantly larger share of parenting when fathers are absent, disengaged, or so compromised by their own unaddressed struggles that genuine engagement is beyond their current capacity. The single mother who is parenting alone, or the married mother who is functionally parenting alone because her partner’s emotional absence has removed him from the active relational life of the family, is carrying a burden that the involved and emotionally present father would be sharing. His absence or his diminishment is her additional weight.
This is one of the most direct and concrete ways in which male flourishing benefits women: when men are healthy enough and present enough to be the fathers their children need, the mothers of those children are relieved of the specific exhaustion of parenting without genuine partnership. And the children — the daughters who will grow up to be women, the sons who will grow up to be men — receive the specific developmental gift of having been fathered well.
Work, Purpose, and the Dignity That Sustains Everything
Men derive substantial identity from meaningful contribution — from work that matters, from responsibility that is genuine, from the experience of being useful in ways that make real differences in real people’s lives. This is not a statement about men’s deficiency or about any inadequacy in other sources of meaning. It is a clinical observation about the specific way that masculine identity tends to be constructed in most men who have grown up in cultures that have historically organized masculine worth around productive contribution.
When men lose access to meaningful work — through economic displacement, through the collapse of the industries and communities that once provided it, through the specific forms of purposelessness that accompany long-term unemployment or underemployment — the consequences are not only economic. They are psychological, relational, and familial. The man who has lost his sense of purposeful contribution is a man at elevated risk for depression, for substance use, for the specific quality of withdrawal and disengagement that makes him less available to the people who need him. His suffering does not stay private. It enters his marriage and his parenting and his friendship and his community, diminishing all of them in ways that fall on everyone who depends on him.
Dignity is not a luxury. It is a developmental necessity — for men and, through men, for the women and children whose lives are intertwined with theirs. Investing in the conditions that allow men to find and sustain meaningful contribution is not an investment in men alone. It is an investment in the families and communities that require men’s purposeful engagement to function at their best.
The Importance of Fairness
Fairness is not a grievance. It is a precondition of flourishing for everyone. People develop and contribute most fully in environments that treat them fairly — that evaluate them on the basis of their actual behavior and actual capacity rather than on the basis of assumptions, that provide them with genuine opportunities to develop and demonstrate their competence, that hold them to standards they are genuinely capable of meeting rather than standards calibrated to their failure. This is true of women. It is equally true of men and boys.
When educational environments are structured in ways that systematically disadvantage boys’ characteristic developmental patterns, everyone loses — including the women who will eventually share their lives with the men those boys become. When family systems make it difficult for fathers to maintain genuine involvement in their children’s lives following relationship dissolution, everyone loses — including the mothers who must parent without adequate support and the children who are deprived of the fathers they need. When cultural narratives frame ordinary masculine traits primarily as liabilities rather than capacities worth developing, everyone loses — including the women who love men and who are affected by what those men become.
Fairness is not a concession to men at women’s expense. It is the condition under which everyone is most likely to flourish, and it deserves to be pursued not as a political position but as a straightforward expression of the belief that human beings of both sexes deserve to be treated with accuracy and with genuine care.
People Become More of What Is Recognized in Them
There is a principle at the heart of this book — woven through the chapter on admiration, through the chapter on the hidden emotional life of men, through every section that has examined what happens to men when they are genuinely seen versus when they are viewed primarily through the lens of their potential for harm — that deserves to be named explicitly here: people become more of what is recognized in them.
The boy who is seen primarily as a future problem tends to become more of a problem. The man who is viewed primarily with suspicion tends to respond with the guardedness and withdrawal that confirm the suspicion. The husband who is appreciated primarily for his utility rather than his humanity tends to produce more utility and less humanity, because those are the terms the environment has offered him.
The reverse is equally true and considerably more hopeful. The boy who is recognized as a future leader tends to begin behaving like one — not because the recognition invented something that was not there, but because it called forward something that was waiting to be called. The man who is seen and admired with genuine specificity tends to become more of what is being admired, because genuine recognition is one of the most powerful developmental forces available to human beings of any age. The husband who is appreciated not only for what he provides but for who he is tends to bring more of himself to the relationship — more presence, more devotion, more of the specific quality of engagement that makes intimate partnership genuinely nourishing rather than merely functional.
When we restore genuine respect to men — not as a political position but as a relational and cultural practice — we are not simply doing men a favor. We are creating the conditions under which men become more of what the women in their lives most need them to be.
Love Is Not a Competition
This book has been making a single argument across many chapters and in many registers, and this chapter is its clearest and most direct statement: men and women are not competing tribes. We are not organized against each other. We are not locked in a zero-sum contest in which every gain for one sex represents a loss for the other. We are partners — in the most literal and most consequential sense of the word — whose lives are intertwined in ways that make the flourishing of one the condition of the other’s flourishing.
The strongest relationships are not power struggles. They are alliances — between two people who have each done the work of their own healing and who bring that wholeness to each other, who admire each other specifically and honestly, who serve each other freely and generously, who have chosen each other with enough clarity and enough genuine knowledge to sustain the choice across the ordinary and extraordinary difficulty of a shared life. These alliances are not characterized by the careful monitoring of who is giving more and who is receiving more. They are characterized by the particular quality of mutual devotion that this book has been calling hot and holy love — the love that is both sacred and erotic, both steady and surprising, both deeply personal and, in its effects on the children and communities surrounding it, genuinely larger than the two people at its center.
This love is not possible between people who regard each other primarily as competitors. It is possible only between people who have recognized that their flourishing and each other’s flourishing are inseparable — that what helps him helps her, that what helps her helps him, that the wellbeing of one is not a cost to the other but a contribution to the shared life they are building.
The Future We Could Build
Imagine, concretely, what becomes possible in a culture that takes seriously the interconnection of male and female flourishing. Boys who are educated to their full potential become men with genuine competence and genuine confidence — men who are better partners, better fathers, better contributors to the communities they inhabit. Men whose mental health is attended to with the same seriousness that women’s mental health has increasingly received become husbands who are genuinely present, fathers who are emotionally available, friends whose reliability and depth are not compromised by the accumulated weight of unaddressed psychological suffering. Fathers who are supported in maintaining genuine involvement in their children’s lives become the developmental resource that research consistently shows children need — and the partners that mothers need in the actual practice of raising human beings.
The culture that produces these men also produces something else, less often discussed but equally consequential: women whose intimate lives are more satisfying, whose parenting partnerships are more genuine, whose communities are more trustworthy, and whose experience of love more closely matches what love at its best is actually capable of. The investment in male flourishing is an investment in all of this. It does not come at women’s expense. It returns to women — in the form of better partners, better fathers, better communities, and the specific quality of love that becomes possible between two people who are both, in the fullest sense, genuinely whole.
We Rise Together
The men we invest in today become the husbands, fathers, friends, leaders, and partners of tomorrow. Their flourishing and the flourishing of the women who love them are not separate projects. They are the same project, approached from different angles, and the work done on either side benefits both.
The goal was never to elevate men at the expense of women. It was never to conduct an accounting of comparative suffering or to determine which sex has been more disadvantaged by the arrangements human beings have made for themselves across history. The goal is flourishing — the flourishing of boys who deserve to be called toward their best selves rather than managed toward adequacy. The flourishing of men who deserve to be seen and respected and loved in the full complexity of their actual humanity. The flourishing of women who deserve the partners, the fathers for their children, and the communities that male flourishing makes possible. The flourishing of children who deserve to be raised by two parents who are each, in their own right, genuinely whole.
We rise together. Or we struggle together. The future depends on remembering that these are the only two options available — and on choosing, with the full force of our intention and our love and our willingness to do the necessary work, which one we are building toward.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Please swallow your pride
If I have things you need to borrow
For no one can fill those of your needs
That you won’t let show
If there is a load you have to bear
That you can’t carry
I’m right up the road
I’ll share your load
— Lean on Me, Bill Withers 1972
This article is an excerpt from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book exploring the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, devotion, and hot and holy love.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and leading expert in counseling, psychotherapy, communication, and human connection. Her first published study, released in 1993, explored the impact of family dysfunction on intimacy and communication in adult relationships. For more than three decades, she has developed innovative therapeutic models to help individuals and couples create deeper connection, emotional resilience, and high-caliber relationships.
