An Article Series Introduction
For medical reasons – my wife and I couldn’t have children of our own. As I matured and entered middle age, I started noticing the young women around me differently—nieces, daughters of friends, young women at my religious congregation, women who worked for me or alongside me. I saw they didn’t have the advice from an older man about younger men – advice usually given by a loving father. I’ve never felt comfortable giving that advice directly – because I’m not a biological father – and I never will be. But I care about these young women and the decisions they make. I want to find a way to give them the advice about men that I can never give them directly.
This article series contains that advice. These are the things I would teach my daughter about men if I had one. I never will have that daughter – but on these pages I’ll write down the words for her so perhaps they can help another young woman. A man without a daughter trying to help young women with out the father’s advice they needed.
I’ve been watching relationships for over thirty years now. I’ve watched them succeed. I’ve watched them fail in ways that broke people. I’ve watched young women in my own family accept treatment from men that angered me—then watched them have children with those men, binding themselves to that treatment for life. I’ve watched young women in my family be sexually assaulted by male relatives, and then watched as other women in my family blamed the victim instead of the predator. I’ve employed young men in their twenties and thirties who can’t manage basic adult decisions while their parents and society shield them from the consequences of their own choices.
I’ve seen things. That’s my only qualification for writing this. I’m not a psychologist. I’m not a relationship expert with a podcast and a book deal. I’m a man who has paid attention for a long time, who has watched the gap between what our culture tells young women and what young women actually need to know grow wider every year.
What I’ve come to believe is this: modern American culture has demolished healthy manhood in the name of protecting and advancing young women, but it has actually created a world more dangerous for them. We’ve built a society on polite lies about how beauty and attraction between men and women actually work. We tell young women these lies to make them feel safe, and then we act surprised when they walk into situations they were never prepared for. We’ve decided that warning a daughter is the same as blaming her, so we warn her about nothing. We’ve decided that acknowledging male nature is the same as excusing it, so we pretend male nature doesn’t exist. And young women pay the price for our dishonesty.
I should tell you where I’m coming from, because I believe honesty about perspective matters more than pretending to be neutral.
I’m a Christian. I believe in marriage as an institution designed to protect women and children—not as a prison, but as a structure that creates safety when it works the way it’s supposed to. I believe American culture lacks enough good examples of healthy masculinity, and that the absence of those examples has left young men confused and young women unprotected. I believe women possess beautiful and admirable qualities that men lack and can never possess—that femininity is not inferior masculinity, but something distinct and worthy of honor. And I believe that our culture claims to protect young women while often doing them great harm.
These are my biases. They come from experience, from observation, from three decades of watching what happens when people follow the scripts they’re given and when they don’t. But I also recognize that my life and worldview are those of a single human being with an extremely limited view. I can’t see everything. I’ve certainly gotten things wrong. You should understand the perspective I’m writing from, because it shapes what I notice and what I conclude.
I want to be clear about what this series is not.
This is not a volley in the culture wars. I’m not trying to score points for my team against another team. I’m not interested in being right more than I’m interested in being useful.
This is not virtue signaling. I’m not writing this so people will think I’m a good person or so I can demonstrate how much I care about women. I care, but that’s not why I’m writing.
This is not “my worldview is correct and I have all the answers.” I don’t have all the answers. Nobody does. Human relationships are complicated, and anyone who tells you they’ve figured it all out is selling something.
What this series is, instead, is an acknowledgment that this stuff is genuinely hard. There often aren’t easy answers. Tradeoffs have to be made. Figuring out how to navigate the world as a woman—how to understand men, how to protect yourself, how to find someone worthy of your trust, how to recognize the difference between a man who will honor you and one who will use you—leaves scars. Everyone who learns these lessons learns some of them the hard way.
But there are things we aren’t telling our daughters. Things that, if known earlier, might leave fewer scars. That’s what I want to offer. Not perfection. Not a foolproof system. Just some hard-won observations from a man who has watched and listened and wished he could have given these words to a daughter of his own.
If you’re a young woman reading this who has a father who gives you good advice about men—a father who tells you the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, who helps you understand how the world works rather than just how the world should work—then you already have something precious. These articles might still be useful to you, but you have the real thing.
But if you’re a young woman who doesn’t have that—if your father is absent, or silent, or doesn’t know how to talk to you, or never learned these things himself—then I hope these articles give you back, in a very small way, something your life is missing. Something you have a right to. Good advice from a man who cares about what happens to you. A man who wants to see you flourish. A man who isn’t trying to control you or scare you, but who respects you enough to tell you what he sees, even when what he sees is hard to hear.
I can’t be your father. I can’t be anyone’s father. But I can write down what I would have said if I could.
I hope it helps.