Monday, August 17, 2026
Happy Monday, my friends! Last week I named something plainly for the first time really in any space: that what I had called “wanting to be one of the guys” was, underneath, wanting to date them. But that confession and realization is deeper than just identifying a “type” and more about who I am and how I see myself beyond externally objectifying other people. This week I want to peel back another layer, looking further into a reality that I still find myself circling with some hesitation.
I spent years assuming that if I wanted to date a certain type of man, I needed to be as close to the same kind of man, masculine, dominant, sure of myself in the way that men in LL Bean and Brooks Brothers catalog ads always seemed to be. The Jimmy Stewarts of my generation. The men with the canoe paddles and the flannel and the easy, weathered, natural confidence. I assumed my desire had to mirror theirs, had to compete with theirs, had to prove itself against theirs. What I didn’t expect, and what took me a long time to admit, is that I didn’t just see myself standing next to those men in the photograph. I saw myself standing where the women stood.
Not because I wanted to be a woman. I want to say that plainly and without hedging, because it matters and because I don’t want anyone reading this to hear claiming an identity that I don’t hold. I’ve never experienced any sense that I was a woman or that womanhood was my own identity. This was never so much about gender. It was about something else, role, position, energy, and I’ve had to learn the difference between those things slowly, and mostly by getting it wrong first. I’ve had to acknowledge the extent to which the patriarchy infects my own consciousness even while I benefit from its constructions.
What I recognized, once I let myself look honestly, was that the strength I actually admired wasn’t the virile, commanding strength of the men I’d spent so long trying to become. It was a different kind of strength altogether, one I found in the more feminine men I knew: strength of ease rather than control, of presence rather than dominance, of being fully inhabited in a role I had been taught to see as lesser. I found myself drawn not to standing beside the man in the photograph, competing for space in his kind of strength, but to occupying the position across from him. Received rather than asserting. Held rather than holding. Wanted rather than pursuing.
That recognition unsettled me more than I expected it to, because I had spent so long building an identity around being the dominant one, the top, the masculine gay man who fit neatly into the mold I’d inherited from every one of those ads, from countless movies, from TV, and from all sort of media. Admitting that I wanted a different position, the one I’d been taught was softer, weaker, feminine, felt like admitting defeat in a contest I didn’t consciously know I’d been running my whole life.
But it wasn’t defeat. It was accuracy. For the first time, I wasn’t trying to squeeze my desire into a shape borrowed from men I admired from a distance. I was finally looking at what I actually wanted, and where I actually saw myself, without editing the picture to make it more acceptable. There was a real and quiet relief in that, even alongside the discomfort. Yet there was a level of vulnerability that continues to unsettle me, which I’m dealing with now as I write this series of Monday Moments because this isn’t a story of discernment from my past. This is something I’m working through now.
Where in your own life have you assumed a role that wasn’t yours to fill, simply because it was the only shape available to the desire underneath it?
Let us pray: God, who made us in a multitude of shapes and strengths, free us from the roles we inherited rather than chose. Give us the honesty to notice where we actually stand, even when it surprises us. Teach us that strength wears many faces, and that being received, held, and wanted is no lesser thing than asserting, holding, or pursuing. Meet us in the quiet relief of finally seeing ourselves clearly. Amen.
Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.
Faithfully,
Ben +
