What He Won't Say Out Loud
A Lifetime of Straight Talk About How Men Think, Love, Pull Away, and Stay
He said he's fine. He's gone quiet again. He shuts down the moment you raise a problem, and you're left doing forensics on a text message at one in the morning. This book explains what's actually going on in there, written by a man who lived most of it.
You'll recognise yourself somewhere in here
- He was warm and close, then something changed and you can't name it
- You bring up a problem and he goes behind a wall
- You can't tell whether he's serious about you or passing time
- Money turns into a fight every single time
- You tell him what you feel and he tries to fix it instead of hearing it
- Or things are good, and you'd like to keep them that way
Researchers who study babies found that little boys come into the world every bit as emotional as little girls, and in some studies more so. The difference comes later, as boys learn what's expected of them.
“I was about seven when I fell off my bicycle on a gravel road near my grandfather's farm. I came limping into the kitchen with tears streaming down my face. My grandfather looked up from his newspaper and said, kindly enough, Now, son. Big boys don't cry.
He did not mean any harm. He loved me. He was passing along the only lesson he had been given about what it meant to be a man. And I learned it well. I stopped crying in front of people. Over time, I stopped crying at all. Then, without ever deciding to, I stopped talking about most of what I felt.
If you want to understand the silence of the man in your life, you have to start there. Not with him at thirty or forty or fifty, but with the little boy he used to be.”
Chapter 1. The Man Behind the Silence
What's in the book
Five parts, twenty-three chapters, and a letter at the end.
Part One: How a Man's Mind Works
- 1 The Man Behind the Silence
- 2 What He Means When He Says “I'm Fine”
- 3 Why He Tries to Fix Everything
- 4 Respect, Pride, and the Fear of Not Being Enough
- 5 How Men Show Love
Part Two: When He Pulls Away
- 6 Why a Man Pulls Away
- 7 Cooling Off or Checking Out?
- 8 What to Do When He Goes Distant
- 9 The Silent Treatment and the Stone Wall
- 10 When He's Hurting and Won't Say So
Part Three: Is He Serious About You?
- 11 Does He Love You, or Is He Using You?
- 12 Signs a Man Is Serious About You
- 13 Hot and Cold: Understanding Mixed Signals
- 14 Commitment: Why Some Men Wait and Some Never Will
- 15 Red Flags You Must Never Explain Away
Part Four: Money, Pride, and Partnership
- 16 What Money Means to a Man
- 17 Talking About Money Without Starting a War
- 18 Who Pays, Who Provides, and What's Fair
Part Five: Building Something That Lasts
- 19 How to Talk So He Can Really Hear You
- 20 Affection, Desire, and Closeness
- 21 Friendship: The Quiet Foundation
- 22 When to Stay and When to Walk Away
- 23 What Thirty-Eight Years Taught Me
At the back
- ◆ A Letter to the Woman Holding This Book
- ◆ Questions Worth Asking: 20 conversation starters
- ◆ Sources and further reading, in full
- ◆ Where to find help
From Chapter 6: Why a Man Pulls Away
Of all the questions women have asked me over the years, this is the one I hear most. “He was warm, attentive, and close. Then something changed.”
“It is a painful question, because the not knowing is often worse than the answer. When a man pulls away, a woman's mind starts spinning. Did I say something wrong? Is there someone else? Was it ever real?
In my experience, one of the most common reasons a good man pulls away is stress that has nothing to do with you. Work trouble. Money worries. A sick parent. A health scare he has not told anyone about. Many men handle stress by going inward. They try to work through it alone before they share it. A man in this state is not necessarily pulling away from you. He is pulling into himself. But from the outside, those two things look almost exactly the same.
A clue that this is what is happening: he is distant, but not unkind.”
The chapter goes on through four more reasons: conflict that floods him physically, the feeling he can't win, things getting serious, and the one nobody wants to read. Then it tells you how to tell them apart.
Read it tonight
173 pages. One evening. Fewer arguments with yourself at one in the morning.