“What Men Really Want”

by Rev. Dr. James Kubal-Komoto

Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church

Des Moines, Washington

October 8, 2006

 

Men like fixing things.

When I was growing up, my father was always fixing things. Screen doors off their hinges and garage doors off their tracks. Broken sub-pumps and stuck windows. Clogged sinks and corroded carburetor. My job was always the same. Hold the flashlight and hand tools from the tool box to the hands that reached out from under the sink or from under the car. This was part of my apprenticeship into manhood. I learned about tightening and un-tightening things. "Lefty Lucy, Righty Tighty," my father taught me. I learned the difference between a flathead and a Philips screwdriver. And I learned that there were very few things in this world that can not be fixed at least temporarily with duct tape.

Most of all, I was learning something about being a man in our society. Men see a problem. We get our tools. We tinker. We fiddle. We tinker again, and if all else fails, we go for the duct tape, telling ourselves, "It’ll hold for a while."

Whether this tendency toward looking at life like a screen door off it hinges is hardwired into men or a matter of socialization is something of which I am unsure. I lean toward the latter explanation. I don’t remember my father making my sister hold the flashlight. I also do not want to suggest that men are better at fixing things than women. The tendency of men to always want to fix things, to find solutions to problems, is often totally unrelated to our ability to fix them.

While Hiromi and I were still living in the Chicago suburbs, one day we were driving in the car, and we suddenly discovered that the passenger-side electric window wouldn’t go back up. We were only about a mile from my father’s house, so I suggested we stop by there.

Please no!" my wife implored, recommending instead that we drive straight to a repair shop, but I convinced her that it wouldn’t do any harm for my father and me at least to take a look at the problem. At his house, he and I got out his tools, managed to get the inside-passenger-door panel off, and discovered the cause of the problem. We had no idea how to fix it, but we understood what it was. Problem was we also didn’t know how to get the panel back on, so we ended up all driving over to a repair shop after all, the panel held in place with duct tape.

The biggest problems resulting from men’s urge to fix everything is not that men take on problems beyond our expertise - - though this gets us into lots of trouble sometimes too. It’s that we often end up treating other people like we do broken screen doors, as a problem to be fixed.

Being in an international, cross-cultural marriage, each day is a new opportunity for my Hiromi and me to misunderstand each other. Sometimes it has to do with her being Japanese and me being American. Sometimes it has to do with me being a man and her being a woman. And sometimes it has to do with us simply being two different people. And just when I think I have all of these differences and what they mean figured out, something else comes up that completely surprises me.

After 10 years of marriage, we are getting better at understanding each another, however, much better than in our first year of marriage. During our first year of marriage, Hiromi would tell me about a problem. I would sit patiently and listen. I would think carefully, and then say, "Well, why don’t you try this?"

She would shake her head and say, "No, you don’t understand."

She would talk more and I would listen more, and I would think carefully again, and then say, "Well, then, why don’t you try this?"

"No, you don’t understand," she would say, getting angry. "You’re not listening to me!"

"I am listening," I would say, also getting angry, "but I don’t understand why you even talk to me if you’re not interested in what I say!"

Men’s unwillingness to stop being Mr. Fix-It not only causes problems in men’s relationship with women, but in men’s relationship with other men.

I once belonged to a men’s group.

When a man in the group shared a problem, there was sometimes a tremendous urge among other men in the group, myself included, to offer solutions to fix it.

"Why don’t you try this?" one man would say.

“No, why don’t you try that?" another would say.

“No that won’t work. You should do this," another man would say.

After exchanges like this, we would sometimes try to have a discussion about what each man valued about the group, and what inevitably happened was that each man said that the reason he valued the group was not because it was a good place to get advice, but because it’s was place where other men would simply listen to him.

Let me add some balance to everything I’ve said so far, because I don’t want to give the impression that men are the only people in the world who become Mr. Fix-it. Women also become Mr. Fix-It. However, women, I believe, are not interested in fixing the same things as men. The women to whom I am closest in life, at least, are not interested in trying to fix my problems in life. They are interested in trying to fix me.

Since marrying, my wife, my mother-in-law, and my mother have formed a committee whose goals include fixing the myriad of defects from which they believe I suffer. These include my inability to eat without spilling food on myself, my inability to dress fashionably without assistance, and my tendency to forget details about anything important without regular reminders.

I once received a phone call from my mother. It was late here on the West Coast, so it was very late in the Midwest, so when I heard her voice on the other end of the phone, I was slightly worried.

“Is everything okay?" I asked.

"Well, I just wanted to make sure that you knew postage was going up starting tomorrow. I didn’t want you to send any bills out and have them come back."

"Thanks, mom," I said, teeth clenched.

To their chagrin, their efforts to fix me, like my solutions to my wife’s problems, often go un-appreciated.

But why is it that our offers to help one another, our offers to fix what is broken in the lives of people we love, well-intentioned and loving as they are, often go un-appreciated? Why is it that these offers of help even cause us to sometimes become frustrated and angry with one another? The answer I want to suggest is that this is not what we need most from one another, it’s not what men or women need from one another or need from one another most. But then what is it that we need and want?

The minister Stephen Doughty tells a story about serving as a student summer minister at a small New England Church and finding out that his grandmother, to whom he was very close, had just had a stroke.

When Doughty received the news he got into his car and drove off to ask the chairman of the congregation if he might have some time away.

The chairman of the congregation was a carpenter, and when Doughty found him, he was busy building on an addition to a summer home of another member of the congregation.

When Doughty got out of his car, he called the other man’s name.

"‘Ed,” he called out.

“The sun was bright and shone on his white hair,” Doughty says, “Normally, he would have turned, smiled, given a few more licks with the hammer, or finished sawing a board...[Instead] he looked directly at me. Then, without hesitation, he put down the hammer, laid aside his tool belt, and walked directly toward me...On hearing the tone of my voice, and after a single look at my face, he laid down his tools so he could be completely there...for me."

I think this is what we most need from one another, in times of crisis and everyday. To be completely there for one another. We need to be like Ed and once in a while we need to put down our tools for fixing the world and one another.

What my wife needs most from me is not my clever insights or suggested solutions to her problems, but my listening and understanding. What I need most from her is not her help choosing a tie or even her recommendation that a staple gun is not the best the best way to mend that hole that has worn through the pocket of my khaki pants, but her acceptance of who I am despite my many flaws.

In his book The Active Life, Parker Palmer says that twice in his life he experienced deep depression. "Both times various friends tried to rescue me with well-intended encouragement and advice," he said. "In the midst of my depression I had a friend who took a different tack. Every afternoon around four o’clock he came to me, sat me in a chair, removed my shoes, and massaged me feet. He hardly said a word, but he was there, he was with me. He was a lifeline for me, a link to the human community and thus to my own humanity. He had no need to ‘fix’ me. He knew the meaning of compassion."

Chalice Circles started last week in this church, and in Chalice Circles, there are no foot massages, but in Chalice Circles we also try to practice the same kind of compassion of which Palmer speaks. In Chalice Circles, there’s actually a rule about giving advice unless it’s asked for, because most of the time what we need from one another is six other people saying, “Yeah, I hear you.”

We as members of this religious community of memory and hope are called by the religious tradition in which we stand to be compassionately together with one another. When I attended a Unitarian Universalist church in the Chicago suburbs, sometimes I went to church because I wanted to be inspired. I wanted my empty spirit to be filled again. Sometimes I went to church because I wanted an answer. I wanted to be given the solution to a problem I couldn’t figure out myself. But sometimes I went to church just because I wanted to be present with other people who were struggling like me to make it from Monday to Friday. For that one hour of the week, the presence of those other people sitting around me was a powerful witness that I was not the only one experiencing both the joys and sorrows of being human. And often this was enough to get me around to Sunday again.

Yet in all of these kinds of situations, the urge to become Mr. Fix-It is always strong. Simply being there is a lot tougher than it seems. Simply being there requires us to understand that there are some problems that we by ourselves cannot fix. Simply being there requires that we let go of those feelings about what we are supposed to do as a parent, a spouse, a partner, a friend or an adult child.

Besides providing extra opportunities for us to misunderstand each other, an international marriage is also sometimes difficult because my wife is far away from family. This was especially true earlier in our marriage.

            The first time Hiromi was homesick, I thought my job was to fix the problem. I said, "I’ll buy you a fax machine so you can write letters to your parents everyday." Another time, I said, "I’ll install a Japanese e-mail program on our computer so you can write e-mail and read Japanese newspapers on the Internet." Well, we then had a fax machine and a Japanese e-mail program, but buying these hadn’t fixed the problem. The truth is that I couldn’t fix the problem, but accepting that and accepting that not being able to fix the problem did not make me a lousy husband was  been difficult.

When I was a hospital chaplain in Chicago, I often encountered the parents of chronically sick children who ask themselves similar questions. "How can I be a good mother or a good father if I can’t do anything for my sick child?" Simply being there requires us to let go of what we think we are supposed to be doing.

Simply being there also requires us to resist the urge to run away that stems from our own anxiety in witnessing another person’s pain. When we are completely there for another person, when we are not trying to fix the other person, we are being compassionate, and to be compassionate or to have compassion, literally means "to feel with" or "to suffer with" so when we are completely there for another person we are also opening ourselves up to that person’s pain. This does not mean we take on the other person’s pain as our very own, but that we witness to it. We do not do even this easily. If we cannot fix the problem, our urge is then to deny the problem or run away.

Simply being there in that middle ground is hard. Simply being there also requires us to realize how a compassionate presence by itself is valuable. In a society that places so much emphasis on the fix, the solution, the answer, we often forget this.