1. Why I wrote How to Human

A personal reflection on the questions that led to the book — and why conversations about masculinity often seem to stop at the surface of the problem rather than reaching the deeper developmental patterns underneath it.

Over the past decade, more and more men have begun talking about masculinity.

Men are increasingly aware of the relationship between masculine norms and men’s violence against women. More men can identify the patterns:

• entitlement,

• emotional restriction,

• dominance,

• defensiveness,

• control,

• disconnection.

Many men can now critique masculinity fluently. They can describe the problem. They understand the language. They know the concepts. And yet, much of the time, nothing actually seems to move. The conversation often feels strangely disconnected from change itself.

Men become informed. Men become analytical. Men become highly capable of describing the pattern. But far fewer seem able to translate that understanding into helping other men genuinely shift how they relate to themselves and others.

That was one of the things that led me to write this book. Because increasingly, it felt like the conversation about masculinity was circling around the surface of the problem without fully reaching what was underneath it.

We became very good at naming the expression of the pattern. But much less clear about what was driving the pattern in the first place.

Why do these behaviours emerge so consistently?

Why do they continue even when men consciously reject them?

Why do men often understand the critique intellectually while struggling to embody something different relationally?

Why does awareness alone so often fail to produce change?

The more I thought about these questions, the more it seemed that masculinity itself might not be the deepest level of the issue.

Masculinity matters. Gendered socialisation matters. Violence against women is real and profoundly gendered.

But the conversation about masculinity often seemed to stop at the level of identity, norms, and behaviour. What interested me increasingly was the deeper developmental structure underneath those patterns. Because beneath many of the behaviours associated with harmful masculinity, there seemed to be a more fundamental imbalance:
a narrow focus on individual needs without an equally strong awareness of connection and responsibilities to others.

The more I explored this, the more it seemed that many men were trying to solve the problem of masculinity from within the same underlying perspective that produced it.

We would reconstruct masculinity. Refine masculinity. Create healthier masculinity. More emotionally intelligent masculinity. More vulnerable masculinity.

But often the deeper structure remained largely unchanged.

The self remained central. Other people continued to be experienced more through their impact on the self than as fully separate centres of experience. Relational reality remained difficult to fully perceive and sustain under pressure.

This book was written because I wanted to explore that deeper layer.

I wrote it for ordinary men. Men who feel that something about the way they were taught to relate to the world is incomplete. Men who can sense the limitations of traditional masculinity, but also feel unsatisfied by conversations that endlessly critique masculinity without helping men understand what actually needs to change underneath it. Men who do not simply want better language for describing the pattern, but a way of seeing beyond it.

At its core, this book is an attempt to help make that shift possible. Not by replacing one version of masculinity with another. But by helping men recognise something more fundamental: that human beings exist not only as individuals, but as participants in a larger relational reality.

And that many of the patterns we struggle with – violence, defensiveness, loneliness, disconnection, diminished awareness of impact – emerge when one side of that reality becomes dominant while the other increasingly falls out of view.

The aim of this book is not to tell men how to be better men.

It is to help men see more fully what it means to be human.