On Understanding Men (Or Trying To)

I’ve been trying to understand men lately, and I don’t mean that in the wounded way of someone processing trauma or working through bitterness.

I mean it in the genuinely confused way of someone who keeps encountering a pattern of thinking that feels fundamentally foreign to how my brain works, and I’m not sure if what I’m seeing is real or just artifact of small sample size and concentrated life experience. Especially as a single mom raising a little man of my own. That said, this isn’t about men being evil or unbiblical or broken beyond what we all are as humans. It’s about trying to figure out if there are actual differences in how men and women tend to approach relationships, commitment, risk, and legacy….. and whether those differences are biological, cultural, or simply today’s flavor of fallenness in the current day and age.

I want to be careful here.

I’m aware that any observation about gender differences risks either essentializing traits that are culturally constructed or dismissing real patterns as mere stereotype. But I also think there’s something worth examining in the consistent ways men I’ve encountered seem to operate differently than I do, and whether Scripture or psychology or just honest observation can help make sense of it.

All 3 of my relationships involved men who admitted… eventually, when pressed…that they’d chosen me because I was the best available option they could see at the time.

Not because they’d spent months considering what partnership with me specifically would look like, not because they’d discerned some unique compatibility, but because I was there, I met basic criteria, and pursuing me seemed like reasonable next step. This felt deeply pragmatic in ways that troubled me. Like choosing a taxi based on which one pulls up first rather than considering where you’re trying to go and which driver might best help you get there.

I don’t think this is morally wrong necessarily.

Marriage in most cultures throughout history has been pragmatic arrangement based on availability, family connections, economic considerations. The idea that you should marry for “passionate love” is relatively recent Western innovation, and it’s not clear it’s produced better marriages than more practical approaches.

But it does suggest a different framework for relationship than what I bring. I just can’t imagine choosing a partner simply because they’re available and meet basic qualifications. I need to understand how they think, whether we share values, if our patterns of relating complement or clash. The idea of committing to someone just because they’re a reasonable option feels like starting a journey without checking if you’re both heading to the same destination.

Maybe men are just more efficient in their decision-making. Maybe the extensive processing women do is overthinking rather than wisdom. Or maybe we’re operating from different premises about what relationship is for and what makes partnership successful.

There’s a way men I’ve encountered talk about relationship that sounds transactional in ways that make me uncomfortable.

Not crude exchange of sex for provision, but an underlying framework of “what do I get out of this?” They want peace. Comfort. Available sex. Respect. A home they can return to at the end of the day where they can take off their armor and not have to perform strength they may not feel.

These aren’t unreasonable desires.

Paul instructs wives to respect their husbands (Ephesians 5:33), suggests that it’s better to marry than to burn with passion (1 Corinthians 7:9), acknowledges that both men and women have needs within marriage that should be met (1 Corinthians 7:3-5). Home as refuge from the demands of the world is biblical concept, not selfish expectation.

But there’s a difference between wanting these things within relationship and wanting relationship primarily as means of securing them. Between desiring partnership and desiring benefits of partnership, with the partner being somewhat interchangeable vehicle for obtaining those benefits.

I wonder if this is where the taxi analogy breaks down.

If relationship is primarily about what you receive, then any taxi that gets you to the destination works. But if relationship is about the journey itself, about who you’re traveling with and how you navigate together, then the specific person matters in ways that can’t be reduced to whether they provide peace and comfort and available sex.

Maybe women are guilty of their own version of this. Wanting emotional connection, security, validation, partnership in parenting and household management. Maybe we’re equally transactional, just about different currencies. Or, maybe the transactional framework itself is the problem, evidence of how thoroughly consumerism has infected our understanding of covenant.

Men I’ve known also seem to be drawn to whatever is new, exciting, and challenging.

They pursue the interesting without much thought for whether the interesting will remain interesting once it becomes familiar.

This makes them good problem-solvers and leaders: they can see potential, get excited about possibilities, generate energy around new ventures. But it also seems to make them restless in relationship once the initial excitement fades and partnership becomes the daily work of maintaining connection rather than the thrill of establishing it.

I don’t know if this is male nature or just cultural formation. We raise boys on narratives about conquest and achievement, about pursuing challenges and overcoming obstacles. We don’t spend nearly as much time teaching them about maintenance, sustainability, the value of what’s familiar and stable.

So maybe men aren’t naturally drawn to the shiny and new.

Maybe we’ve just trained them to be, and then we’re surprised when they apply that training to relationships and get bored once the conquest is complete. Or maybe there is something biological about male attraction to novelty, something evolutionary about pursuing variety that served reproductive purposes in contexts very different from modern monogamous marriage, and we’re asking men to suppress drives that made sense in different environments but create chaos in ours.

I genuinely don’t know. But I notice that the same trait that makes men willing to take risks and pursue challenges also seems to make them vulnerable to restlessness in commitment, to the appeal of whatever seems more exciting than what they have.

There’s a pattern I’ve encountered where men want their partners to be attractive but not too attractive, to look good but not in ways that might attract other men’s attention.

In my relationships, I was often told I “didn’t need” makeup or nice hair once we were committed, that I looked fine as I was, that efforts to look attractive were unnecessary or even evidence of attention-seeking. But the underlying message seemed to be: you need to be attractive enough that I’m not embarrassed by you, but not so attractive that other men notice you, because then I have to worry about competition.

This might be understandable insecurity. Men know how men think, know that visual attraction operates differently for them than for women, know that other men will notice and pursue attractive women regardless of relationship status. So they try to reduce that risk by discouraging efforts at attractiveness that might invite attention.

But it also reveals something about how they view relationship.

Not as partnership between equals but as possession that needs protecting. Not as commitment that doesn’t depend on constant mate-guarding but as arrangement that remains stable only through preventing access to alternatives.

Jesus didn’t guard the disciples from other teachers or competing visions of God’s kingdom. He sent them out, knowing they’d encounter other options, trusting that relationship mattered more than monopolizing access. Paul didn’t try to prevent the churches from hearing other versions of gospel; he wrote letters addressing the heresies directly, trusting that truth would be compelling on its own merits. The mate-guarding approach suggests that relationship isn’t strong enough to withstand exposure to alternatives. That commitment requires constant management of circumstances rather than genuine choice renewed daily.

Maybe this is just realism. Maybe men understand something about male attention and female responsiveness that women don’t want to acknowledge. Or maybe it’s self-fulfilling prophecy: treat relationship as fragile thing requiring constant protection, and it becomes fragile.

My relationships also involved men who couldn’t see my son as person separate from his father.

He wasn’t Colin, an individual human with his own personality and needs and relationship to me. He was “half of your ex,” evidence of my history with another man….. someone else’s legacy.

This troubled me more than most of the other patterns because it involved a child. Whatever differences exist between men and women in how we approach relationship, surely we can agree that children deserve to be seen as themselves rather than as extensions of their fathers.

But maybe there’s something biological here I’m not accounting for.

Evolutionary psychology suggests men are wired to prioritize their own genetic legacy, to be suspicious of investing resources in children who don’t carry their DNA. Step-parenting goes against deep drives about passing on your own genes rather than helping another man’s genes survive.

This doesn’t make it right.

God explicitly calls us to transcend these drives, to care for orphans and widows, to see all children as image-bearers worthy of love regardless of their parentage. Jesus welcomed children who weren’t his own. God adopts us into his family despite having no biological claim on us (Romans 8:15, Ephesians 1:5).
But maybe understanding the drive helps explain the pattern. Men aren’t monsters for struggling to embrace children who represent another man’s relationship with their partner. They’re just fighting biological programming that made sense in different contexts but creates problems in ours.

Still, there’s something deeply troubling about reducing a child to someone else’s legacy rather than seeing them as full person. Whatever the evolutionary explanation, it feels like failure of basic human recognition.

Another thing: men are expected to have armor.

Emotional, psychological, spiritual protection that lets them function in hostile environments without being destroyed by the hostility. They’re supposed to be strong, competent, unflappable. They’re supposed to handle problems without complaining, lead without showing doubt, protect without admitting vulnerability.

This is crushing burden. And when they come home, they want to take the armor off, to be weak and uncertain and afraid without judgment. They want relationship to be the space where armor isn’t required, where they can be less than strong without losing respect or safety.

Paul’s armor of God in Ephesians 6 is meant to be worn constantly, not removed when you get home.

But maybe that’s the point: God’s armor protects without crushing, covers without requiring performance. Human armor, the kind men construct to survive in world that punishes male vulnerability, is different. It’s necessary for functioning but exhausting to maintain, and relationship becomes the place where they can briefly stop maintaining it.

Women want this too, though maybe in different ways.

We want space where we don’t have to perform competence or pleasantness or strength we don’t feel. But we’re not socialized into quite the same performance of imperviousness that men are, so maybe we don’t experience the same exhaustion from constant armor-wearing.

Or maybe we just have different armor: emotional management, relational smoothing, the work of keeping everyone comfortable and connected. And maybe we also come home wanting to take it off, wanting someone who will hold space for our actual feelings without requiring us to process and regulate and make everything manageable.

If both partners are trying to take off armor at home, who’s left wearing it? Who creates the safety that allows vulnerability? Maybe this is why partnership is hard…. we’re both looking for space where we can be weak, and neither of us has energy left to provide it.

I don’t know if these patterns are real or if I’m seeing things that aren’t there.

• I don’t know if they’re biological or cultural or just artifacts of my particular experience with particular men in particular contexts.
• I don’t know if understanding them would help or if understanding just provides explanation without solution: Yes, men operate this way, no, there’s nothing you can do about it except decide whether you can live with it.
• I don’t know if I’m being unfair, if I’m expecting men to function like women and then criticizing them for not meeting expectations they were never designed to meet.

What I do know is that partnership feels harder than it should if we’re genuinely made for it.

That the divide between how men and women approach relationship seems wider than just personality differences or poor communication.

That something about our cultural moment or our biological programming or our collective fallenness makes mutual understanding feel nearly impossible sometimes.

Maybe this is what Paul meant when he said it’s better not to marry unless you’re burning with passion (1 Corinthians 7:8-9). Not because marriage is bad but because it’s hard, harder than we admit, requiring constant work to bridge divides that feel fundamental rather than superficial.

I don’t have answers. Just questions, observations, the ongoing work of trying to understand men without becoming bitter about the ways they’re different from what I expected. Maybe that’s enough for now.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​