Control Was Never Strength

Men, I am going to spend this whole piece telling you that you need to lead. Lead your relationship. Lead your life. Take a position, know what you stand for, hold the ground, go first. And in the same breath I am going to tell you that you control almost nothing. You do not control her. You do not control the outcome. You do not even control yourself.

Both of those are true at the same time. Learning to hold both of them at once is the skill that separates a man who is actually leading from a man who is only forcing and calling it leadership. Most men have never held both. They pick one. They either grab for control and tell themselves that is strength, or they let go of control and tell themselves that is peace. Neither one is what I am pointing at, and the difference between what I am pointing at and its two counterfeits is the entire subject of this piece.

Take your time with this one. If you are in a relationship, read it with your partner and have some honest conversations about what comes up. I mean that. This is not a quick idea. It is a paradox, and a paradox has to be sat with before it opens.

Three ways a man falls apart

When a man cannot hold the paradox, he collapses it. He resolves the tension by picking a side, and the side he picks tends to harden into one of three shapes. I have been all three of them at different points in my life, so I am not describing men I have read about. I am describing men I have been.

The first is the man who forces. He is gripped. He is attached to an outcome, and he needs things to be a certain way before he can feel okay. Buried inside that need is the thing he will not look at, which is that he does not feel okay with the way things actually are. So the only move available to him is to push. To manage, to tighten, to drive, to make reality behave so he never has to feel what he feels when it doesn't.

This man looks strong. He looks like he is driving for results, and the world tends to reward him for it. He may become very successful in business. He may have a very strong body. He may be admired and looked up to for his accomplishments that he has achieved through force.

But he is not strong.

He is more afraid than almost anyone in the room, because he cannot let a single thing be. And here is a hard reality for any man who has felt pushy or needy or desperate for things to be different. Things are exactly the way they are. Right now, in this moment, everything is precisely what it is, and it got that way because of a long chain of other things that happened exactly the way they happened. All of it is a fact. The man who forces looks at that fact and sees a problem, and then he goes to war with it. This is the fight response, aimed at life itself.

The second is the man who flees. He is often the nice guy. The easygoing one, the low-maintenance one, the one who does not need to control anything because everything is cool, man, he just goes with the flow. He looks more relaxed than the forcing man. He looks like he has let go. But letting go of the wheel is not the same as surrender, and underneath the ease is a man who believes that touching reality means being crushed by it, so he simply avoids the contact. The calm is a costume. This is the avoidant man, and I get messages from hundreds of women every month asking me what to do about him. The answer starts with understanding what he is actually doing, which is fleeing a reality he is convinced he cannot handle.

The third is the man who freezes. He is not fighting and he is not exactly running. He has checked out. Everything feels like too much, so he finds an escape valve and disappears into it. He buries himself in work and calls it providing. He has a couple of drinks before bed, and it started with one, and then it was two, and then it was three. He scrolls. He plays games. He tells himself he is unwinding, and he is really avoiding, because somewhere along the way his own life started to feel unwinnable and going dark felt easier than feeling it. 

Three different strategies, one single root. None of these men can tolerate reality the way it is. One fights it, one runs from it, one numbs himself against it. And not one of them is present. Not one of them can lead anything, because leading anything requires starting from what is real, and all three of them have organized their entire lives around not making contact with what is real.

He does it to himself first

Here is the part that changes where the work actually happens. Before a man ever does any of this to his partner, he does it to himself.

Whatever you are doing out in the world, you are doing on the inside first. The man who forces the world to be different is forcing himself just as hard. I promise you he drives himself, grinds himself, overrides his own exhaustion, ignores his own body, and sets goals that are never enough, so that the moment he reaches one it dissolves and becomes another. He is at war with his own reality, and because that is his relationship to himself, it is inevitably his relationship to her.

The man who flees has abandoned himself. He does not trust himself. He has suppressed his own wants so thoroughly that he could not tell you what they are. This was me for years. If you had asked me whether I preferred a burger or chicken, I would have frozen. I would have asked the server what other people usually order. I had fled so far from my own inner life that I no longer had access to it, and from the outside I looked like the most easygoing man you could meet.

The man who freezes has lost contact with his own experience entirely, because at some point his own life felt like too much to feel. And a man who is that far from his own reality cannot come anywhere near hers.

This is why the work does not start in the relationship. It starts in your interior. I have said this more times than I can count. Stop trying to fix problems in your relationship. The relationship with her is downstream of your relationship with yourself, always, and it will begin to sort itself out the moment you turn your attention to the place the trouble actually lives. You cannot give her something you cannot give yourself. You cannot be present to her while you are at war with what is inside you. You cannot lead her out of a place you have never once stood in yourself.

So the question is not how to change her. The question is where, inside your own life, you are forcing, fleeing, or freezing. And the answer to that question is the beginning of everything.

What is underneath all of it

If you trace the forcing and the fleeing and the freezing all the way down, past the behavior and past the story a man tells about the behavior, you reach the same thing every time.

Fear.

The man managing his partner's tone and her moods is trying to run his own nervous system through her behavior. She needs to act a certain way so that he can feel a certain way. And he is doing the identical thing to his own inner world, overriding and numbing and driving, trying to make the inside behave so he does not have to feel it. External control and internal control are the same move. Both are fear trying to hide from itself.

Fear is good at hiding. It hides behind responsibility. It hides behind discipline, behind high standards, behind the admirable sounding language of just trying your best. All of those can be real virtues. But when the engine underneath them is fear, the way they express themselves is control. And the specific fears are old ones. The fear of being left. The fear of not being good enough. The fear of being unloved, of being alone, of being revealed as a man whose love does not earn its keep. That is what is running the machine. That is why we grip and numb and run, because if we ever sat still, the feelings we have spent a lifetime outrunning would finally catch up to us. Stillness is where they land. So we make sure we are never still.

Now think about this plainly for a moment. If your entire relationship to reality is pressure, either the pressure you are applying or the pressure you feel life applying to you, then what is actually there for her? What is it like to live beside a man who is never okay? It does not matter how much money that man makes or how much the world respects him. She is a feeling being, and she feels it. She knows something is off even when she cannot name it. A man who is never okay is not safe to lean on, and he is not attractive to lean toward.

Surrender is not what you think it is

If we want to hold the paradox, if we want to lead and also accept that we do not control reality, we have to be precise about a word that men consistently misunderstand. That word is surrender.

Surrender is not giving in. It is not saying whatever, fine, have it your way. The energy of giving up leaves you resentful, because you have not actually let go of anything. Your attention is still hooked on the thing you wanted or the thing you were avoiding. Saying okay, whatever, is just planting the seeds of resentment and calling it peace. Giving up is still an argument with reality. It is disagreement that has gone quiet and gone underground.

Surrender is not passivity. It is not making yourself a doormat or letting someone walk over you. 

Surrender is an active state. It is a choice. It is you deciding, on purpose, to allow things to be what they are. It is setting down a war you have been fighting your whole life and losing every single day. Because you have been fighting it. If you have spent your life disapproving of the way things are, you have been losing that war daily, and you probably do not even know you are in it. It does not feel like a war. It feels like being a man with standards, a man who looks at reality and says this could be better. And it could. But the this that could be better is the truth of where things actually are, and surrender is nothing more than accepting that this is where things actually are.

Look at a river. On the surface it yields to everything. It is held by its banks, it bends around every curve the land gives it, it takes the shape of whatever contains it. And given enough time that same yielding river cuts through solid stone. It carved the Grand Canyon. It has power precisely because it flows within what is, and that is the opposite of everything most of us were taught strength means.

To surrender is to set down the sword. To lay your weapons on the ground and say, just for right now, what is, is okay with me. Not okay forever. Not I want it to stay this way. Surrendering to what is does not mean endorsing it for all time. It only means you stop pretending it is not what it is. You accept that it is this way right now, in this moment, and you stop bracing against the fact of it.

You cannot lead what you cannot see

You cannot lead something you cannot see. And you cannot see the moment you are in when you are busy running away from it. Whether you are fighting it, fleeing it, or numbing yourself against it, you are distorting it. You are looking at reality and seeing an obstacle, or a threat, or nothing at all because you have turned away. Surrender ends the distortion. It puts you back in contact with the moment, and contact with the moment is the only place leadership can come from.

Watch how this plays out in the thing most of the men I work with actually want, which is more and better sex with their partner. If you are constantly strategizing about how to get her to want you more, you have already skipped past the reality sitting right in front of you. That reality already contains the reason she doesn't. That reason is the exact place you need to engage, and it is the exact place your strategizing is designed to avoid.

I know this because I lived it. Dawn and I were having sex maybe once every month or two, and I was doing everything a forcing man does. Negotiating. Hinting. Buying toys. Trying to spice it up. Trying, always trying, to fix the thing from the outside. And then I slowed down. I stopped trying to force it, and I looked at what was actually there, and I looked at myself.

What I saw was brutal. It was not just that Dawn did not want to have sex with me. No one would have. I was whiny. I was needy. I was two hundred and eighty-five pounds. And that was only the beginning of it. I was empty inside. I did nothing that was fun. I had nothing to talk about except work. I was not an interesting or attractive man in almost any way I could find. That is a hard thing to sit in front of and not look away from.

And it was the most useful thing I ever did, because I could not begin to change any of it until I accepted it. That is surrender. Not resignation, not self-flagellation, just the clear-eyed acceptance of what was true. And from that acceptance, for the first time, real change became possible. I had finally taken an honest assessment of where I was standing, which meant I finally knew where I was standing, which meant I could finally take a step.

Leadership without force

We inherited a broken picture of what leadership is. For most of us it was drawn by fathers, by governments, by religion, by every authority figure who handed down rules we were made to obey or else. That is the imprint. Leadership means moving the world by force. It is no wonder the word feels like control.

Real leadership works differently. Leadership without force means being so present to what is, so genuinely here with reality, that the right next move becomes as obvious as the direction water is going to run. And then taking that move without hesitation. You do not have to sit and script out everything in advance, making plans for how everything is going to go.

That scripting is itself a bracing against a threat you are imagining instead of meeting. When you are actually present, you can handle what arrives when it arrives. You trust that you will know what to allow and what to refuse in the moment it matters, because you will be there in that moment instead of somewhere else rehearsing.

A man who has surrendered walks in trust. He has laid down his armor. He is no longer braced against every possible bad outcome, no longer at war with life, and that trust is available to him precisely because he is in contact with reality instead of fighting it.

So the paradox resolves. Surrender and leadership are not opposites. Surrender is how you reach leadership. You surrender to what is so that you can see what is, and once you can see it you can act, and the acting feeds a deeper surrender, and the deeper surrender clears your sight for the next act. They flow into each other. Our whole brand is named for the symbol of it, the infinity loop that runs out of one side and back through the other without end. Surrender feeds leadership. Leadership feeds surrender.

The practice, in the smallest moments

If you have ever wondered what it means to be a grounded man, a man who feels solid, the answer is this. Learn to let go, and then lead from reality. Regain access to the moment. And do it first with your own life, because you have to know what this feels like inside yourself before you can offer it to anyone else.

So look for the grip. Where do you feel the internal pressure? Where do you feel driven to override your own tiredness and sacrifice yourself for a standard that is never met? Where is the pull to pour the drink at the end of the day? Find those places and bring your awareness to them. You do not have to stop doing the thing yet. That is not the first step. The first step is simply to admit that you are doing it.

I do not feel like I can handle this moment, so I am going to pour a drink.

I do not like the way things are, so I am going to force myself into something different.

I really wanted that, and I gave it up to keep the peace.

You say it to yourself, in silence, without dressing it up. That is where you learn to see the forcing, the fleeing, the numbing, in real time. And then, when you are ready, you start to make a different choice, because nothing in your life changes until you do. The skill sounds almost too small to matter.

But it really is this simple. I really want to pour this drink right now. And I might still pour it. But first I am going to set it down, and I am going to sit here for a moment and feel what it feels like to be in this reality I am uncomfortable with. Stop the avoiding, just for a moment.

Or you feel the pull to grab the laptop and send a few more emails, make a little more money, impress the boss a little more. Before you do, set it down. Admit what is actually happening. I am trying to prove something. I am telling myself I am being a good provider, and underneath that I am forcing, and I wonder why. You might still pick up the laptop and finish the work. But you have started to see the truth of what you are doing, and once you have seen it, you cannot fully unsee it. You are not a victim of these patterns. You are making conscious choices, and you have simply been making excuses for them. Seeing that clearly is the doorway.

Ask what fear is underneath the grip. What am I so uncomfortable with that I reach for the phone instead of looking at my wife, at my kids? Do I feel like I am not good enough? That small pause, that quiet "hmm", is where a response can start to come from presence instead of from reflex. The response might not change right away. That is fine. What changes first is that you begin telling yourself the truth, and only a man who is telling himself the truth can start telling the truth about the world around him.

So what do you do about your relationship? How does this make your marriage better? How does this result in fixing the problems?

You need to let her be how she is for now. When I accepted that Dawn did not want me because I had made myself into a man almost no one would want, I was not declaring it permanent. I was giving myself the ground to change. I did not need to convince her of anything. I was never going to negotiate my way into her attraction to a whiny two-hundred-and-eighty-five-pound man.

She already did not want me, and no argument was going to fix that. So I let her have it. That was the surrender. And then I could ask a different question. Like...what can I do to become a more attractive version of myself? Well, I could go to the gym. And that's what I did. One action at a time. 

That is the moment you climb into the river. You stop standing on the bank trying to shove the water somewhere, and you get in, and you let it carry you while you do your honest best to steer. You know you do not control the outcome. You steer anyway, in the direction you believe is right. Instead of spending my energy trying to convince Dawn to want something she did not want, I spent it making myself into a man worth wanting. Real change, and it started with acceptance. It started with surrender.

The ground was always right there

This is how a man becomes untriggerable. Not by having everything figured out, not by controlling his life, but by no longer needing to control it. A man rooted in reality cannot be knocked off center by her mood, because her mood was never in charge of his center. He is. He cannot be destabilized by not getting what he thought he wanted, because he let go of needing it to land there. When you release your grip on the things you were never holding anyway, life loses its ability to shake you.

And letting go feels like falling. Every part of you will insist that if you stop gripping, if you stop managing and driving and numbing, everything will collapse. If you stop trying to make her different, she will never change. If you stop forcing yourself, she will walk away. It feels like surrender means losing control and then losing everything.

But you never had control. Things are the way they are whether you approve of them or not. And when you finally let go, you do not fall. You discover that the ground was a couple of inches under your feet the entire time. It was never your grip holding you up. Your grip was only ever the source of the pain. Reality was holding itself together on its own, and all your gripping ever did was exhaust you in a fight against something that already simply was.

Everything a man does to feel powerful through control is a house built on sand, because it depends on other people behaving, feeling, and choosing the way he needs them to, and they will not, not because you told them to. The only ground you actually own is what is true right now. That is the only place you can stand, and it is the only place from which you can change anything at all.

You spent your whole life believing strength meant control. It never did. That was always an illusion of strength. The strongest a man will ever be, the most able to lead he will ever be, is the moment he stops fighting what is right in front of him. Inside himself first. Then with his partner, in his work, with his children, everywhere. He accepts what is, plants his feet in it, and asks the only question that has ever moved anything.

What can we do from here?

Reality is the only ground that holds. It is the only place real change is possible. And that is why surrender is not the opposite of leadership. It is what makes leadership possible.

This piece goes with Episode 140 of the Infinite Devotion podcast. If you would rather hear it, you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

If this landed and you want to go deeper, the internal work I am describing here is exactly what I do with men inside Becoming a Dominant Man. You can find everything we offer at infinitedevotion.com/store.