Yesterday while riding up a crowded elevator, I heard a girl in her 20’s say, “I’m looking for a real man to marry.”
A real man, huh? As opposed to what, one of those mannequins you see in the men’s department of your local JCPenny with some stupid grin on their face?
I’m so tired of society measuring the male species by a set of archaic standards commonly known as being a “real man”. Last time I checked, there’s nothing in the Constitution of the United States or any other official documentation for that matter stating what a “man” should or should not be in society. And yet the morons of the world who are obsessed with how other people perceive them have adopted a set of criteria that we men struggle to achieve out of fear of being ridiculed and misunderstood by our other male counterparts. Sad and pathetic when you think about it really.
I’m embarrassed to live in a country where sentences like “I want to marry a real man” are not only spoken, they’re often accepted. When I think about the laundry list of meaningless qualities many of us think are so important when seeking out a mate, it’s no wonder why divorce and broken relationships are so common today. Having a man who’s honest, empathetic, trustworthy and most of all capable of loving another person unconditionally is always overlooked in exchange for boosting one’s self image in a world that’s continually judging us.
Booker T. Washington once wrote, “Character, not circumstances, makes the man.” Seems like a better way to measure things to me.