Here's the simple, short answer: the men in this state are dying quietly and won't ask for help. The places that used to form us are gone. A man tells the truth more easily to men, and he learns the work by watching men do it. And for those who are lost, the ones most likely to reach them are men who've done some work on themselves.
The first part isn't an impression. Men die by suicide at roughly four times the rate of women, and make up most of the overdose deaths, most of the incarcerated, and most of the unsheltered.
So we start there. Not because it's the only need. Because it's the one in front of me, and because I'm one of them.
A room like this can go wrong. Here's how, and what I'll do about it →
What happens in the room
Men lie differently in mixed company. Not maliciously — automatically. Something in most of us starts performing: competence, or humor, or strength, or the version of himself he'd like a woman to see. The confession comes out fifteen percent softer. The failure arrives with a joke attached.
AA worked this out a long time ago, which is why men's meetings exist alongside everything else. It isn't a theory. It's just what happens, and I've watched it happen for years in church basements and rooms with bad coffee.
This work will not run on eighty-five percent honesty. If a man can't say I'm drinking again, or I hit my kid, or I keep lying to my wife, there's nothing to build on. He will not be steady enough to sit with anyone else's disaster.
You learn it by watching
The second reason gets said less. You learn to be a man by watching men.
Not because women can't teach — most of what I know about this work I learned from women. But imitation runs along lines of resemblance. A man who has never seen another man weep without apologizing for it, or say I was wrong with nothing attached, doesn't know it's available to him. In the room, he sees it done, by somebody built like him, with the same hands and the same history. Then he can do it.
That's an apprenticeship. It's how every craft has ever been passed on.
The rooms that are gone
I have been the man with no one to call. It didn't only hurt me. It came out of me, sideways, at the people closest to me, for years, and most of them never knew what it was. I don't think I'm unusual.
There used to be places where a man got shaped by other men without anyone calling it that. The parish, the union hall, the lodge, the volunteer department, the crew, the basement meeting. Some were good and some were rotten, and I'm not nostalgic about the rotten ones.
Nearly all of them are gone or hollow, and what replaced them is a phone. So there's a generation of men with no place to be formed and no older man to say that's enough, or you're better than that, or sit down, I'll show you. I'd rather build one good room than complain about the bad ones.
The form is old, and it comes in pairs
None of this is my invention. Benedict wrote his Rule for a house of men in the sixth century, and — as the tradition has it — his sister Scholastica had a house of women down the road running the same Rule. Zen has had monks' halls and nuns' halls for as long as it's had halls. In the tradition I train in, the two lines have run side by side the whole way down.
Nobody looks at a monastery and calls it a boys' club. It's a house. Houses have walls, and the walls are what make the sustained work possible — the same men, the same room, long enough for something to take.
So this is one house. Not the only shape the work could take, and not necessarily the best one. The one I can build, being who I am. If somebody builds a wider one, or a better one, I'll be glad and I'll send people.
Where it goes wrong
A room of only men can curdle. Into a grievance club. Into a place where cruelty gets called honesty. Into a mutual-congratulation society where nobody is ever actually challenged. I've seen all three, and none of them announced themselves on the way in.
The only real guard is that the room isn't the point. We spend ourselves on people outside it — men, women, and children, whoever's in front of us. A room that turns inward dies of it. Benedict knew that too; his monks were bound to the guest and the sick before anything else in the house.
If this ever becomes a place where men complain about women, it will have failed. I'll say so out loud and shut it down.
If you're not a man
Let's get the record straight on who's late here. Women have done these works for two thousand years — the visiting, the sitting up all night, the washing of the dead — mostly unasked and mostly unthanked. Every hospice I've been in was held up by women. The reason I'm building a room for men is not that men are better suited to this. It's that we've been absent from it too often, and the absence has cost us and the people around us far too much.
The writing is open to everyone and always will be. And if you want a hand in the work itself, write me — there will be more that needs doing than a small company of men can manage, and I'm not turning anyone away.
The form comes in pairs, and it has for fifteen hundred years. If women want a house running the same rule, I'll help build it, and then I'll stay out of the room.
Come and see.