While I no longer read the top sources for daily news, I do read some of my favorite columnists – if they are writing about anything other than politics. Below is a good article by NYT columnist David French about what men want. Found it interesting. You might as well.

Hope Valentine’s Day treated you well. Late wishes from me! Love, Vicki P.

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Men Need Purpose More Than ‘Respect’

By David French, 2.12. 23

This month, the popular conservative podcaster Matt Walsh tweeted a thought that rapidly went viral, with approximately 18 million views. “All a man wants,” he wrote, “is to come home from a long day at work to a grateful wife and children who are glad to see him, and dinner cooking on the stove. This is literally all it takes to make a man happy. We are simple. Give us this and you will have given us nearly everything we need.”

The message was obviously trollish and intended to generate outrage. Bringing back “Leave It to Beaver” is not a serious strategy for renewing American masculinity. But it touched on an important question: How much should a man’s self-worth depend on the respect or gratitude of others?

I raise this because an overwhelming amount of evidence — from suicide, to drug overdoses, to education achievement gaps — indicates that millions of men are in crisis. And simply put, while many men demand respect, what they need is purpose, and the quest for respect can sometimes undermine the sense of purpose that will help make them whole. To put it more simply still: What men need is not for others to do things for them. They need to do things for others: for spouses, for children, for family and friends and colleagues.

Many Americans — especially in evangelical circles — are familiar with the saying, “Men want respect while women want love.” They may need both, but they sometimes want different things. The concept was popularized by a writer and pastor named Emerson Eggerichs, who wrote the book “Love and Respect: The Love She Most Desires; The Respect He Desperately Needs,” but it’s hardly an exclusively Christian concept. Eggerichs interviewed men and women and found that — in times of conflict — men overwhelmingly felt disrespected, not unloved, and if forced to choose, they would choose respect over love.

The demand for respect is a hallmark of much right-wing discourse about masculinity. In this narrative, too many women don’t respect their husbands and the culture more broadly devalues men. Parts of this argument have merit. As the Brookings scholar Richard V. Reeves notes in his indispensable book, “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It,” the phrase “toxic masculinity,” for example, is counterproductive. It teaches men there is “something toxic inside them that needs to be exorcised.”

Yet there is a danger in the quest for respect. Finding happiness in another person’s regard is elusive and contingent. After all, we have little true control over how others perceive or treat us, yet when we’re denied what we demand, we’re often filled with helpless rage.

More important, a demand for respect or honor should be conditioned on being respectable or honorable. When a man demands respect without being respectable, that often looks like domination and subordination. To elevate himself, he must belittle others.

But is respect a key to happiness and meaning? Let’s consider veterans. They form one of the most respected communities in America. The military is the second-most respected institution in the United States (barely behind small businesses), and many Americans perceive vets as “more disciplined, patriotic and loyal than those who have not served.”

Yet as The Times reported in 2021, the suicide rate for veterans is “1.5 times as much as the rate for civilians.” For younger post-9/11 veterans, the suicide rate is 2.5 times the rate for civilians. Men I served with have died by suicide. That’s a staggering toll for one of America’s most-respected populations. Clearly, even profound familial and national respect is not enough to immunize men from deaths of despair.

Yes, the trauma of combat accounts for some of this terrible toll, but not all. If you speak to struggling veterans, many will tell you that they have respect, but they don’t have purpose. That lack of purpose is often exacerbated by the loss of fellowship. My own experience helped me understand this powerful reality. Every person endures dark nights of the soul. One of the worst of my life took me by complete surprise. It was at the end of my deployment in Iraq, where I served from 2007 to 2008, the first evening after I departed Forward Operating Base Caldwell in Diyala Province to begin my long journey home.

I was a reservist, so I didn’t return with the unit but by myself. I’d longed for this moment — I was returning to my wife and children! — and yet I felt bereft. Empty. After almost a full year of having a very clear, decisive and delineated mission (with life and death often at stake), I was returning to a more complicated, confusing reality of often conflicting responsibilities — one shared, I think, by most American men and women alike.

I was confused by my feelings at the time. Now I understand. My mission was over. My brothers were gone. They were returning to Fort Hood in Texas. I was in Tennessee. Our relationship could never be the same.

Veterans’ groups are supremely aware of this need for fellowship and purpose. “Next mission” is a common phrase in the veteran community, and it’s explicitly intended to help veterans find purpose in their lives. And the need is great. I’ll never forget the friend who told me, shortly after his deployment, “I’m not even 30, and I’ve already done the most significant thing I’ll ever do.”

While his despair was genuine, he was fundamentally wrong. As a husband, father and entrepreneur, he’s forging his own path and leaving a new legacy. I rediscovered my own sense of purpose in my family and in a different cause, defending civil liberties in courtrooms across America. But it took time. Nothing at home was comparable to the sheer intensity of my deployment abroad.

One does not have to join the infantry to find purpose in life, and a man can and should find immense meaning in the simple yet profound daily rhythms of fatherhood, friendship, healthy romantic relationships and an honest day’s work.

The true challenge to American masculinity is far upstream from politics and ideology. It’s not fundamentally about what ideological combatants say about men — that they have become “toxic” on the one hand, or “feminized” on the other. Rather the challenge is much more about a man finding his purpose, and there are few better purposes than helping the people you love walk through life.

Virtuous purpose is worth more than any other person’s conditional and unreliable respect. It is rooted in service and sacrifice, not entitlement. And those qualities bring a degree of meaning and joy far more important than the gifts that others — the “grateful” spouse who cooks dinner, the implausibly reverential children — can ever offer. What we do for others is infinitely more rewarding than what we ask them to do for us.