Eugene Gladstone O'Neil (Playwright) Creative Commons

Mourning Becomes Electra Creative Commons

Why Men Write: Life, Death, Sex, and Soul
Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a marriage and family counselor for the last 45
years. He is the author of 8 books, including Looking for Love in All the Wrong
Places, Male Menopause, The Irritable Male Syndrome, and Mr. Mean: Saving
Your Relationship from the Irritable Male Syndrome . He offers counseling to
men, women, and couples in his office in California or by phone with people
throughout the U.S. and around the world. To receive a Free E-book on Men’s
Health and a free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go to www.MenAlive.com. If
you are looking for an expert counselor to help with relationship issues, write
Jed@MenAlive.com

“It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful
as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who
does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be
a little in love with death.”

--Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

This piece is inspired by Helen Black’s wonderful article, Why Women Write.
She says, “It’s not like I’m not writing for men…but women have a certain way of
conversing with each other.” And men, I believe, have a different way of
conversing.

And, of course, I’m not talking about why all men write. I’m just sharing some
things about why I write that might resonate with others.

So, early on in my marriage, my wife, Carlin, and I decided we needed a day just
to ourselves. We both worked. We both had children from a previous marriage.
We were both writers. And we both hungered for time to ourselves to think, to
feel, and to write. When I got back from my first “alone” day, Carlin asked where
I went. I told her I went to San Francisco and spent a wonderful two hours in a
restaurant we both had enjoyed.

We got into a big fight. “I thought this was supposed to be a time to for
ourselves,” she fumed. I fumed back, my voice rising in anger. “And I thought
this was my time. If I’m going to have to get your permission before I can go
where I want, I’d rather not go at all.”

Once we calmed down, we talked about what we were really angry about (Have
you noticed that we’re never angry for the reason we think?). For Carlin being
alone means being in a place where there are no people. She assumed if I was
in a busy public restaurant, I was there to engage with others (and in her fears,
pick up some cute young thing and commence a torrid affair.) She told me she
couldn’t sit alone in a restaurant without being eyed by most men in the
restaurant. And yes, she was quite attractive then and still is at age 70.

I explained that I could sit in a restaurant, or any public place, and I would be
invisible. I often had images of myself sitting and dying in a restaurant and no
one noticing. I might have my eyes on someone beautiful in the next booth, but I
knew there were no eyes on me.

Men and women may write for similar reasons, but we see life through different
lenses.

I recalled the first book I wrote shortly after Carlin and I got married in 1980. It
was published in 1983 and created quite a stir.

Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man

After fifteen years as a psychotherapist many friends and colleagues told me I

should write a book about men. “I’m not a writer,” I insisted. “But I’d sure like to
read something by a man who wasn’t afraid to tell the truth about the male
experience.”

I never intended to write a book. I started out writing a journal that later turned
into a book. The book opens with a scene of my wife, my best friend, and me on
a camping trip together--and a sexual scene that no one expected would ever
happen, but when it did, it changed our lives forever.

No publisher wanted to touch the book. I was told it was too personal, too raw,
too close to home for the men and women who read it. Just when I had decided
to publish it myself I got an offer from a major publisher. By then, I was excited
to do the book my way and not to censor it to fit the sensibilities of the publishing
world.

I talked about my father’s attempt to commit suicide when I was 5 year’s old and
the fears I lived with all my life:

 My feelings will destroy me if I let them out.

 I’ll go crazy like my father.
 I’ll be a failure at work and lose my family’s respect.
 There’s something dangerous and violent in me waiting to destroy the
people I love the most.
 Women will “love” me, but underneath they surface, they’ll feel pity and
contempt like they did towards my father.

I described the 10 Commandments That Move Me:

 1. Thou shalt not be weak, nor have weak gods before thee.
2. Thou shalt not fail thyself, nor fail as thy father before thee.
3. Thou shalt not keep holy any day that denies thy work.
4. Thou shalt not express strong emotions, neither high nor low.
5. Thou shalt not cry, complain, or ask for help.
6. Thou shalt not be hostile or angry, especially towards loved ones.
7. Thou shalt not be uncertain or ambivalent.
8. Thou shalt not be dependent.
9. Thou shalt not acknowledege thy death or they limitations.
10. Thou shalt do unto other men before they do unto you.

And I talked about the birth of our son:

I coached my wife through 14 hours of Lamaze breathing. But when it was time
for her to go into the delivery room, I was told I needed to wait in the waiting
room. I was crest-fallen, but also relieved. I had a secret fear of passing out
when I saw blood or felt my wife’s pain.

I kissed my wife’s forehead, squeezed her hand, and walked out one door as she
was being wheeled into another room.

But something happened to me as I went to wait with the other fathers. I couldn’t
go through the waiting room doors. Something pulled be back. Some call from
the life that was coming into the world.

I turned around and walked into the delivery room. There was no question of my
leaving and I held my wife’s hand as our son, Jemal, was born. With tears of joy
I welcomed him. I knew that it was h is spirit who called to me. It was his spirit
who refused to have a “waiting-room father.”

The nurse handed him to me and looking into his bright eyes, I made a vow to
him. I told him I would do everything I could to be a different kind of father to him
than my father was able to be for me. I also made a vow to create a different
kind of world, a world where father’s were not asked to leave their children and
their wives to wait alone and away.
Looking for Love in All The Wrong Places: Overcoming Romantic and Sexual
Addictions

I wouldn’t say my first marriage ended because my wife and I (and most of our
friends) were trying out the excitement and danger of open marriage and other
forms of sexual experimentation. But it certainly didn’t help it.

I continued to write about what I knew most about and what I was most confused
about and what I what I was still trying to sort out. When Looking for Love came
out in 1988, it was certainly a “hot topic.” My wife, Carlin, believed in my writing,
though she had some reservations about how honest I felt I needed to be in
sharing my experiences.

Both of us, married for the third time, we felt we had sorted out some of our crazy
“love” addictions.

The book opens with these words:

When we find that our romantic relationships are a series of disappointments yet we
continue to pursue them, we are looking for love in all the wrong places. When we are
overwhelmed by our physical attraction to a new person, when the chemistry feels
“fantastic,” and we are sure that this time we have found someone who will make us
whole, we are looking for love in all the wrong places.

When we are in a committed relationship but find ourselves constantly attracted to

others, we are looking for love in all the wrong places. When our desire for “more sex”
interferes with our family or professional lives, we are looking for love in all the wrong
places. When we are as preoccupied with not having sex as others are with having it, we
are looking for love in all the wrong places.

I covered the topics I, and so many of my friends and clients, had struggled with
including:

 The endless search for love.

 Sorting out whether it is “love” or “love addiction.”
 Coming together and coming apart: The approach-avoidance dance.
 You are my security blanket. Will you marry me and be my mommy?
 Addicted lovers.
 How to overcome sex and love addictions.
 Healthy love: Illusion or reality?
The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet

In preparing for my third book, I brought together three streams of my life and my
work: Addictions, the Men’s Movement, and Ecological Survival.

Once again, I was saying things that challenged some strongly held beliefs. I
had gotten a nice advance from Bantam books who were excited to publish the
book. But I ran into problems when I suggested that male “circumcision” was a
form of childhood sexual abuse.

Like most boys of my generation (whether Jewish or not) circumcision was a

reality that was rarely questioned. When I began writing about my own
memories of being circumcised (they were body feelings, without any conscious
memory). I knew I had been violated, even though I didn’t know when, how, or
why.

I met a woman from Africa who had been “circumcised” as an infant. She
confirmed what my body knew to be true. Most recognized that female genital
mutilation was a form of sexual abuse, but few believed that what boys
experienced was anything like what was done to girls.

The woman I met had been circumcised as a child and had become an activist
protesting the practices of female genital mutilation. “It never occurred to me that
what was done to little boys was anything like what was done to girls,” she told
me. “Until I witnessed a boy being circumcised—The screams I heard were the
same screams I remembered when it was being done to me.”

When I refused to remove the parts of the book that dealt with “circumcision and
male sexual abuse,” they refused to publish the book. Fortunately, they couldn’t
take back my advance and another publisher agreed to publish the book.

Writing the book, took me another step on my healing journey. I began each
chapter with a quote that spoke to my masculine soul including the following:

 “Try not to become a man of success, rather become a man of value.”

--Albert Einstein.

 “Civilized society in general has been like a rabid dog. Its bit infects the
healthy even though it contains the germ of its own destruction”—Andrew
Bard Schmookler.

 “Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but
something you gain…And you gain it by winning small battles with
honor.”—Normal Mailer.
  “When I get to heaven,” said the Hasidic rabbi Susya shortly before his
death, “they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ but ‘Why were
you not Susya? Why did you not become what only you could become?”

 “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” --Jean-Paul

Sartre.

 “One does not become enlightened by imaging figures of light, but by

making the darkness conscious.” –C.G. Jung

 “Men do not face enemy machine guns because they have been treated
with kindness,” says Sergeant Toomey in Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues. “They
face them because they have a bayonet up their ass.”

 A Cree Indian legend says that when the Earth is sick and the animals
disappear, there will come a tribe of people from all creeds, colors, and
cultures who believe in deeds, not words and who will restore the Earth to
its former beauty. This tribe will be called the Warriors of the Rainbow.”

Surviving Male Menopause

I began working on my male menopause series when I hit 50. The changes hit
me like a ton of bricks. Everything seemed to be falling apart at once. My
erections were going South, my hormones were dropping off, my energy was
going down, my sleeplessness was increasing, my prostate was enlarging. My
children were growing up and leaving home.

I wanted answers in the worst way. And I wasn’t alone. Mid-life men and
women weren’t content to slip quietly into old age. When I began research for
the book Male Menopause most people laughed at the idea. Well, really to be
truthful, most men laughed at the idea. Most of the women I talked to said things
like, “Well, it’s about time men finally figured out that they are as hormonal as
women.”

I said, “After completing four years of research, I concluded that midlife men
have significant hormonal and physiological changes and that ‘male menopause’
was the proper name to describe what all men experience as they move from the
first half of life to the second.”

When I began my research, I assumed I would find that men and women
differed greatly in how they experienced the “change of life.” I expected women’s
changes to be more physiological and hormonal and men’s changes to be more
psychological and social. But it turned out that as many women suspected, men
were every bit as hormonally driven as were women.
And once again I ran into a resistant belief system. In our youth oriented culture,
we didn’t want to believe that hormonal and physiological changes were
impacting men. In fact, most physicians I talked to felt that “male menopause”
was a myth. However, in England, Germany, Denmark, Russia, Australia, and
many other countries more and more medical professional were recognizing the
reality of male menopause.

Here’s what I said about Male Menopause:

Male menopause (also called viropause or andropause) begins with hormonal,

physiological, and chemical changes that occur in all men generally between the ages of
forty and fifty-five, though it can occur as early as thirty-five or as late as sixty-five.
These changes affect all aspects of a man’s life. Male menopause is, thus, a physical
condition with psychological, interpersonal, social, and spiritual dimensions.

The purpose of male menopause is to signal the end of the first part of a man’s life and
prepare him for the second half. Male menopause is not the beginning of the end, as
many fear, but the end of the beginning. It is the passage to the most passionate,
powerful, productive, and purposeful time of a man’s life.

The three books in the series, Male Menopause, Surviving Male Menopause,
and The Whole Man Program became best-sellers throughout the world and
were translated into more than 30 foreign languages. As more and more men
move into and through the male menopause passage, we continue to learn more
about what it means to be a male today.

The Irritable Male Syndrome: Understanding and Managing the 4 Key Causes of
Aggression and Depression.

By the time Irritable Male Syndrome was published in 2004, I was 61 and finally
confronting the legacy of my father’s manic-depressive illness. My wife, Carlin,
had been trying to get me to see someone to deal with my mood swings for
years, but I insisted I was just “passionate” like most creative writers and I didn’t
need any help. Besides I was a psychotherapist. If anyone would know if they
needed psychiatric help, it would be me. (Big mistake, of course).

I nearly waited until my marriage was on the rocks before I reluctantly went to
see a psychiatrist. After a three day evaluation the psychiatrist told me that I
was, indeed, manic-depressive or bipolar as it was being called today. She also
asked to see my wife.
 This is what Carlin told her:

“The thing that is most troubling about Jed is his rapid mood changes. He’s
angry, accusing, argumentative and blaming one moment and the next moment
he is buying me flowers, cards, and leaving me loving notes. He’ll change in an
hour from looking daggers at me to being all smiles and enthusiasm.

“He gets frustrated, red in the face, insists that we have to talk, then cuts me
off when he judges I have said something offensive to him. I become frozen
inside, feeling that no matter what I do or say, it will be ‘wrong’ for him. The
intensity and the coldness in his eyes scare me at these times. I usually shut
down and it takes a lot of time for me to return to an open feeling towards him.
My openness, trust, and joy in being together have suffered greatly.”

“He also can be infuriatingly inconsistent. I never know which side of him I’m
going to see. He is very picky about some things and sloppy about others. He
will spend time arranging scotch tape, scissors, and staplers on the top of a shelf,
marking each one’s place carefully with a piece of tape so he will return his
things to their exact place. But then he leaves things all over the house and his
home office is a disaster area. He can be so fussy that he will stand outside our
car if I have an old apple core in the ashtray, refusing to get in until I remove it.
But his own car is so littered with junk that I have taken two or three boxes of
stuff out before I could use it.”

“He never seems satisfied with how things are in the present. If we do
something nice together, he can’t relax and enjoy it. He jumps ahead and wants
to know when we can do it again. He’s never satisfied, always restless. No
matter what we have he always wants ‘more.’”

“His forehead is often wrinkled up with worry. He seems to analyze

everything looking for problems. When I ask him what he is thinking about, he
always says, “nothing special.” It’s so frustrating trying to get through to him that
I have quit trying. His intensity is way out of proportion to the situation. Little
things become exaggerated. If I’m ten minutes late coming home he looks at me
like I’d committed a Federal crime.

“He’s extremely observant at times. His eyes follow me around the room and
he’ll often follow me or suddenly appear beside me when I’m not expecting it. He
invades my privacy without apology, but has an intense need for privacy himself.
He’ll read things I have on my desk and acts surprised if I become upset. At
other times he ignores me and acts like I’m not even around. We can go for long
periods without talking to each other and when we do talk it is superficial. Then
out of the blue he will want to get close. Sometimes he just seems to want sex.
Other times it’s like he’s a little boy afraid to be away from his mother.
 “He’s become hypersensitive. He needs earplugs to sleep, claiming the
slightest sounds bother him. He can’t tolerate having a light on if he wants to
sleep, so I can’t even read a book at night. If I touch him, most of the time he
draws away as though he’s been burned. Just about anything can trigger a fight.

“I’ve grown tried of arguing with him. Nothing seems to get resolved. It
seems he thrives on the intensity of the arguments. If I try and talk reasonably
he becomes defensive. If I try and match his intensity things escalate until we
stand screaming at each other. He comes out of these bouts and wants to make
up and get close. For me, it’s just tiring. I am desperately tired of being blamed
for his pain. I think I can still revive my feeling for him, but right now I feel I have
to protect myself from what I am judging as his emotional abuse.

“I have lost a lot of feeling for Jed. I have talked to him many times about how
I can only open up and close down so many times. I feel like a clam. I
tentatively open up and see if things are safe. But no sooner do I get my shell
part-way open when I get blasted again. I’m reluctant to risk getting hurt again.
It’s become safer to stay closed. I am fairly content at this time to find my joy and
play with my friends, my work and other creative activities.

“I haven’t the slightest interest in an affair. I do have a great desire to have a

supportive, easy, and loving relationship with Jed and to enjoy life with him. One
of the things that attracted me to him in the beginning was his ‘up’ energy and
what I saw as his joy for life. It’s been difficult living with him through these
times. I’m glad he’s finally been willing to reach out for help. I am hopeful that he
will find something in his investigations that will break through for him and for us.”

In addition to starting medications, doing therapy, and couples counseling, I

began reading everything I could find on depression, attention deficit disorder,
anger, aggression, worry, irritability. One of the most insightful things I read was
written by Kay Redfield Jamison, herself a well-known researcher and therapist.
In her exceptionally fine book, An Unquiet Mind, she talked openly about her own
struggles with mental illness and her road to recovery.

Hers were the first words that captured what I had been experiencing over the
last 5 years:

“You’re irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and
demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and
you’re frightening, and ‘you’re not at all like yourself but will be soon,’ but
you know you won’t.
Mr. Mean: Saving Your Relationship from the Irritable Male Syndrome

I wrote my previous books for men and the women who love them and to sort out
my own life. This is the first book that I’ve written for women and the men they
love.

I had finally come to peace with myself as a man and had dealt with the
WOMAN. I’ll never forget how author Sam Keen described the hidden truth that
it takes men most of their lives to acknowledge and accept.

In his book Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man, psychologist Sam Keen talks
about his hidden dependency on women. “If the text of my life was ‘successful,
independent man,’ the subtext was ‘engulfed by WOMAN.” Keen goes on to
describe the ways in which the archetypal WOMAN (and hence all real-life
women to a significant degree) rule our lives.

“The secret men seldom tell, and often do not know (consciously) is the extent to
which our lives circle around our relationships to WOMAN…She is the audience
before whom the dramas of our lives are played out. She is the judge who
pronounces us guilty or innocent. She is the Garden of Eden from which we are
exiled and the paradise for which our bodies long. She is the goddess who can
grant us salvation and the frigid mother who denies us.”

It’s no wonder there are times that we “hate” the woman secretly are so
dependent upon. We long to let ourselves melt into her arms, but our shame
causes us to deny our need and project our anger on to her.

Eugene O’Neill never overcame the wounds he experienced as a child. He spent

his early childhood in hotel rooms, on trains and backstage, traveling with his
parents. Alcohol became is one true friend that nearly killed him. Writer Martha
Gore said of O’Neill, “His plays were written from his relationship with his
family---parents who loved but tormented each other, his older brother, James
Jr., who loved and corrupted him and died of alcoholism in middle age and
O’Neill’s own rage caught between love and anger at all of them.”

I’ll continue my own healing journey exploring more of my world in my writing.

So, why do you write? Is there a difference between “why men write” and “why
women write?” I look forward to hearing from you.