A Man Needs to Be Needed

Masculinity is somewhat fragile. I don’t mean that men are emotionally frail or that women should tiptoe around male egos. I mean something far more profound: masculinity depends upon certain conditions and if we remove those conditions, something important in men begins to deteriorate.

Ancient Jewish wisdom recognized this long before universities developed sociology departments; actually before there were universities. Notice that before Adam gets a wife, God gives him a job.

“The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden, to work it and to guard it.” (Genesis 2:15)

Only three verses later does God say, “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make for him an ezer kenegdo”—a help opposite him. (Genesis 2:18)

This sequence reveals the correct order: Man. Mission. Woman.

Adam is not first given companionship or a fellow worker. No, he is first given responsibility, a job. He must cultivate something and protect something. Only then does God introduce the woman who will help him fulfill his mission.

Ancient Jewish wisdom’s fundamental message here is about masculinity: a man needs to be needed.

This helps explain a phenomenon that our therapeutic society prefers to treat as an embarrassing cultural defect. Men frequently experience loss of employment or inability to provide not merely as a financial setback but as an assault upon their very identities. It affects their sexual performance. The malady they often manifest indicates that the lack of a job, the absence of a mission, undermines their very masculinity. Clearly, earning a living isn’t merely about money. It shapes their very being as a man. (We discuss this in depth in our book, The Holistic You.)

This throws a little light on some otherwise puzzling modern statistics. Incontrovertible data now confirms, across many countries and cultures, an association between male breadwinner expectations and marital stability. The painful but true reality is that couples in which the wife earns more than the husband experience a three-times higher separation rate on average. I think the bottom line, unacceptable to our damaged culture, is that men and women are not interchangeable economic units.

A common fashionable mistake assumes that if a social reality makes us uncomfortable, it must merely be an artificial convention that can be educated or legislated away. Another example is the workplace research that shows how sex and hierarchy interact in complicated ways. Studies of male and female supervisors show that not only men, but a statistically significant proportion of women prefer a male supervisor. During the years I hosted a call-in radio show on the west coast’s KSFO, this topic was a perennial phone-call generator. The important point again is that male and female are not irrelevant variables.

And marriage reveals this even more powerfully.

Ancient Jewish wisdom describes why the Torah describes women as ezer kenegdo. A helper opposite him. She’s not alongside him doing exactly the same thing. She does something uniquely feminine. In basic biological terms, she receives the seed, in itself little more than an infinitesimally small package of genetic information, and nine months later, she delivers the finished product; 8 pounds of screaming baby. In the wonderfully concrete language of two millennia-old texts: “He brings home wheat; can he eat raw wheat? He brings flax; can he wear flax? She transforms what he brings into something higher. She lights up his eyes and puts him on his feet.”

It is hard to miss the message; it is a partnership. He brings. She transforms. Each makes the other more consequential. A woman with a baby seldom feels inconsequential. But it is often just as he becomes a father, that a man can feel a bit like a fifth wheel; who needs him?

Perhaps one of the cruelest things we can do to a man is convince him that nobody needs anything from him. A wife who earns more than her husband need not apologize for her success. But it is wise that she remains alert to opportunities for her husband to carry the weight he yearns to carry. Does her husband know, unmistakably, that something important depends upon him?

A husband should seek responsibility rather than comfort. A wife should resist casually communicating that she would function equally well without him. Parents should raise sons to become useful, productive, protective men.
Secular society should stop treating male pride in providing, protecting, and procreating as a psychological disorder. Masculinity may indeed be fragile. So is courage. So is civilization. So is marriage. Important things often are.

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