I always considered marriage the epitome of feeling connected: you share a life with a partner and maybe even have children. Society at least acts like it is.
I have a coworker in his 40s, conservative and Christian, married to a woman holding a job, he is also employed and has a good job, all things considered and they have a child.
I don’t see this person much but each time he sees me he approaches to basically complain and rant, mostly about democrats and foreigners, getting very emotional to the point of crying.
At first I hated him for spewing so much shit, but now I think I’m starting to pity him: he has a job, is married to a working woman, they have a child, they are homeowners… and he still feels angry and needs to rant to feel good. It’s like he’s angry at everything.
Which takes me to think, maybe there are things men need emotionally that women cannot provide, but I couldn’t write a list.
What are some of these connections men need out of a marriage?
While I can’t attest to why your coworker is angry all the time, I can say that it is possible to feel lonely in a marriage. While you are connected in a functional marriage, your partner isn’t going to be and can’t possibly be the only source for your needs. You’re not going to have all the same interests as your partner and it’s good to have friends outside of the marriage to share those interests. Sometimes your partner will drive you crazy, so it helps to have friends that can help you with that. If you don’t have anyone to help with those needs it can get lonely quickly.
Yeah, have you ever had an annoying roommate? Isn’t it so much more frustrating and isolating than living alone? You don’t even have your own space to get away so you just become more irritable all the time. Now imagine if you wanted to not live with that person that you need to get lawyers, your family, another family and the government involved
A lot of people get married because “they’re supposed to”, “they’ve been dating for a while”, or because it’s arranged. Is it shocking that those people don’t have the foundation for a good long term relationship? Is it shocking that every day is a little bit worse for them?
The thing about marriage is that anybody can do it. You don’t have to love somebody to marry them. It isn’t special. There’s no test you have to take together or qualifications you have to meet.
So yeah - he’s angry, and lonely, and he’s also married, but none of those things are related to each other.
Sounds like he needs therapy, but in our society men aren’t encouraged to share emotions if it doesn’t perpetuate an image of strength. So he’s expressing his emotions in a “socially acceptable” way: anger. Which is probably what also got him into these backwards ideas about his political ideology as well.
It’s better to wake up alone knowing you’re alone, than to wake up next to someone and nevertheless feel lonely.
— Liv Ullmann, Norwegian actress
Yes, it’s entirely possible to be married and still feel alone.
However, ranting about democrats and foreigners tells me this is not about being married or not. The guy has problems and worries that have nothing to do with marriage.
Still, I can somewhat relate. Living in another country since many years (because reasons), and I don’t feel at home. Happily married, with kids, all good. But I’m not home, y’know?
People here don’t need me; they all hang out with their childhood friends they’ve known forever. I’m the new guy, even after all these years. That makes me feel lonely. And it has nothing to do with being married.
Could be his loneliness leads him to seek out that kind of political thought, cause and effect aren’t clearly established here. Isolation and other stressors have been known to drive people toward more reactionary conservative ideas.
But like others have said it could be his worldview leading to him feeling lonely and isolated, maybe threatened by changes in the world. It’s not your responsibility to help him but I occasionally see people become less reactionary when I try to include them more, not directly contradict them but steer him in kind of an anti-corporations and wealth-inequality kind of way (or something like that) when they act like this. He might be trying to bond over a what he perceives as a shared patriotic struggle and become your friend?
Even if you don’t agree 100% it’ll probably be a small relief if he knows someone he trusts has concerns about the percieved injustices of the world, and letting him vent probably helps too. Traditional Christian masculinity can be kind of claustrophobic and I could see him talking with OP as trying to broaden his horizons, as paradoxical as that might seem.
Either way good luck to OP and I hope the coworker’s outlook improves.
I feel sad for his wife. Unless she’s hateful too.
Cool incel vibes
Lots of great answers here already about the marriage part. I’m going to say something really unpopular in today’s society about things men need. Men need a non-verbal outlet for their anger and frustration. Even cerebral men will not successfully purge all of that negativity just by talking. That outlet can be weightlifting, running, hiking, boxing, or any number of things. Without that outlet that bitterness builds endlessly. Fight Club does a great job of showing the despair that comes from not having a physical outlet for those emotions. Or maybe not all men need that, but I know I do, as do all of my male friends. Obviously we can’t say if that has any bearing on your coworker’s situation, but you asked about needs that aren’t fulfilled by marriage alone, and that’s one that I’m aware of.
I find some of the most frustrating and angry times I have is when I don’t have a physical outlet. I need physical catharsis. Usually it’s weightlifting, a few times I’ve run until I drop. Ultimately I feel like a lot of it stems from society not fully being there with letting men be equally as emotional or emotionally open as women. This means the solution most find if they can’t express themselves that way, they do in a physical way.
This is just a personal take based on personal circumstances and lived experiences.
I think exercise is helpful to everyone who experiences stressful or frustrating situations regularly. Our bodies are still built for fight or flight responses, and physical exertion helps get rid of that stress response.
Dude can’t even ID who he needs to hate properly due too much fake news lol
I dotm get why you think he is lonely though… Sounds like he is trying to “educate” you on shot his shiti teevee told him lol
Yes, but based on your description that guy has other issues. He should probably see a therapist.
Dude was probably raised on stupid conservative shit and never did the work to find happiness in himself.
You don’t need connections to be happy and the connections people are drawn to tend to amplify what they’re putting into the relationship. If this dude is miserable and looking to others to fix it they’re just going to dig their hole deeper.
I’d clarify that this is different from leaning on friends when you’re going through a hard time, if you establish a positive relationship you can lean on it for stability when your life is rough… and some folks culture positive relationships during hard times by compartmentalizing them into a positive part of their lives (an example I’ve seen was a friend who joined our board game group during a rough time but didn’t reveal their troubles until later - when all that shit was going down our space was where she came to just have a good time and be positive).
Life’s hard. People raised on the ideology of bootstraps and “Having a family will fix it” are playing on extra hard mode.
Marriage is not a fix for anything it’s just a definition we give for two people that want to hold hands endure life together and I use endure on purpose. Since it’s the good and the bad that comes with it. To many people especially men raised on 1950’s fantasy think marriage is about getting something but really it’s about giving something sometimes everything for your family. So they get mad when both people in the marriage have to work but for some reason they think just because house work was gender coded to be women’s work they expect their wives to do that on top of everything else.
Marriage is no longer man and wife it two partners coming together to face the harsh reality that is our world. That means doing your fair share not being asked to do the damn dishes. Trading back and forth who is going to be the rock and who is going to be the one holding on to the rock. So they don’t get pulled under.
long story short your coworker is a dumbass that just wants things handed to him. Just because he checked a box that said I’m married now. where is my happiness.
Also I have been married for a long time and I will tell you. you go through phases. You will fall in love with your partner then after time you may fall out of love for a bit and then after some more time fall back in love again. But the whole time they are your partner, your family you just can’t imagine them not being their. That’s marriage.
So, there’s a lot of things to unpack here.
First, the idea that your spouse is your primary sole emotional connection is a relatively weird new concept on the scale of things. There’s been a huge period of history where your primary emotional connection was your male companions and your spouse was infantalized by comparison. If you were well-off you might be so lucky and have your group of emotional companions, your group of romantic companions, and the person who bears your legitimate children.
Second, there’s really not much of a good underlying working model for actual modern conservatism. The frontiersman/“house on the prairie” sort of rugged independence was never actually a thing back then and a lot of big issues like medical bills were a lot simpler when the answer to having any sort of illness was that you either get over it after relatively inexpensive and simple treatments or you die. So the conservative movement must necessarily sell you a false bill of goods. US politics are such that there is no actual fully-left political party, so that by default makes you a democrat.
There’s also a bunch of added uniquely christian baggage. So there are left-wing christians who also have their own set of weird baggage.
Third, mostly irrespective of politics, there’s a lot of cultural programming for males that they can’t actually worthwhile work though their emotions in a productive fashion. Movies, TV shows, books, literally everything in the media creates this idea of maleness and the writers are just trying to write a catchy story and seldom have time to think about what kind of male they are creating. This is, overall, a relatively recent concept.
Fourth, “things men need emotionally that women cannot provide” is actually pretty silly. Outside of practical advice about what to do with specific pieces of anatomy where maybe it would be nice to have some reference, the things people do is a pretty wide field. “Oh, someone to watch football with” ignores female football fans, et al. This ties in a lot with right wing men because they can’t necessarily have an emotional connection with someone not-male because that’s equivalent to messing around with someone’s property. And it also ties in with the social programming that created a stereotype for how men are supposed to relate to each other that’s just a writer trying to put a good story together without thinking of the social implications.
Radicalization doesn’t work on people who are emotionally connected and comfortable. Part of why we are where we are is that there’s a whole class of people whose happiness has been precluded by the structure of their lives and the best people who can take advantage of this are fraudsters selling a false bill of goods. And I don’t even really feel sympathy for those people anymore because they are hurting people who I do very much care about and after a point it doesn’t matter if they are just too dumb to see it.
But, I guess, to return to your initial point, the idea that if you find a person and get married to them that you have “solved” connection, that’s the road to unhappiness. Partially because marriage generally requires a commitment and effort to stay together as things happen and people change… but also because relying on one single person without other social connectivity is not a stable equilibrium.
Yes, my ex wife and I can attest to that. Your coworker seems like a dick and should talk to a therapist.
Your coworker is just a miserable piece of shit. Even if he was able to personally remove all democrats and immigrants, as he so claims to want, he’d still be a miserable piece of shit and no happier.
