The secret conversations of men

Photo: Contributed - (Flickr user, triciawang)

What goes on in men’s minds, what conversations really take place in the locker rooms and lunch rooms of today’s husbands?

Do men really like their minivan? Is it a cool swagger wagon, or has it become a breeder bus? How will they ever keep up to the time demands of their kids, the monetary and emotional expectations of their wife? All common questions everyday guys ask themselves, as life’s screenplay unfolds.

Everyday life becomes scripted for many men, one that often deviates from the original screenplay and has them asking; what happened to my dreams, my goals, and what happened to the me,  what I wanted to be?

They find themselves on a treadmill, driving the kids to and from the mall, a litany of activities they don’t understand the value in, a continual shopping list of wants they don’t see as essential, while trying to hold down a 40 hour work week that is geared to materialistic acquisition, what advertisers pawn off as family needs, but are actually more excessive wants. A constant and financially draining competition with other families that actually bought into the consumerism mindset.

One of the most common deceptions, sometimes innocent, many times not, that men face is the “kid trap”; when the wife wants kids. She stops working, and decides to make a career out of raising them. Some never returns to the workforce, and the soul focus in life became being a mommy.

Sadly, this wasn’t necessarily the situation or life plan when they met; she was going places, she had dreams, goals, and aspirations; until she landed a good paying husband.

It became easy for her to not work, protected by tradition, sheltered by girlfriends, enabled by mother, and safeguarded by a double standard prevalent in society that allows for homemakers to be equated to working women.

Some men have a spouse who has chosen to stay home, to be a homemaker, the “toughest job on earth” according to many women’s magazines. While on the surface this arrangement worked well while young children where at home, the reality is it puts a heavy burden on the man to provide all the monetary demands of the modern family consumer unit.

You see the guys in the stark lunch rooms, heating up leftovers, drinking crappy coffee, meanwhile the wife is doing lunch with the girls, after a trip to the gym, frittering away money in the mall, and having to relax from the stress of it all, with a $5 latte. One can recognize his frustration, as the days’ pay, just got eradicated by a wife who has nothing better to do than spend money to compensate for low self-worth and needs of some instant gratification.

So, he begins to isolate, with his peers, into sports, and into the man cave. He begins to demonstrate reciprocal spending behaviors, buying his own toys, a pool table, an ATV, and the new truck, (she can have the new mini-van) anything but that symbol of masculine defeat.

Two people that started on similar paths, but diverged drastically and he doesn’t know what hit him, as he finds himself the leading man in a movie he never intended to star in.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.