Becoming a Man

Dating Disaster to Find True Love

I was so shy as a child that I found it difficult to connect. I often hid behind a mask – my nervous smile. My teachers would daily instruct me to wipe the smirk off my face. It took me years of practice to smile again, and even then with an awkwardness that's still hard to hide. For many years a long silence followed me. Not because I had nothing to say but because I was already saying it. Nobody was listening. Today I write from the depths of that silence, filling the space as best I can with my most reflective thoughts.

And every time I sit with it long enough, that silence brings me back to the same ache: the quiet, invisible burden that I carry and the wide gap between how it feels and how it is understood. That weight is love and knowledge filtered through the curtain of Asperger's syndrome: loving humanity and knowing what's going on in the world yet appreciating that there's not much I can do about any of it. Maybe, and possibly more importantly, it's also what I've forgotten about myself since the age of eight, when the passing of my father cut me adrift from the deep-rooted tenderness I had taken for granted. After the mourning, love then became the quest.

That's not a grievance. More a sigh of fragility as I face up to life. I've seen it often, in my friends, in myself, and in strangers who will never admit it. The way a man's life, especially in the beginning, is fashioned around two questions: How do I become worthy? What will it take for me to love and be loved?

I didn't need to be told that I'm not enough. My world exclaimed it in a thousand little ways. I just knew. Somewhere between being a boy and entering manhood, I looked around and realised that everything I wanted – respect, love, attention, peace – had to be earned. That's the deal. No one hands these things to you. No one sits you down and says, "You're enough, just as you are." Instead, life teaches you the bleak language of transaction: do this, be that, win this, hide that. And maybe, if you're lucky, you'll be loved.

And when, eventually, a woman strayed into my life, it wasn't even about her, not entirely at least. It was about what she represented. She became more than a person. She became the embodiment of all that I was chasing: beauty, acceptance, peace, and validation. In her gaze, I'd found a mirror that told me I mattered.

That turned out to be a forlorn hope. Because it gave someone else the key to my self-worth. And when she turned away, not once or twice but three times, it didn't just sting. It crushed something inside me. Not just the fantasy of romance but the illusion that being "good enough" for her would guarantee my being loved.

I suspect most men aren't afraid of women. If they are like me, they're just afraid of being seen and found lacking. That's why rejection doesn't just bruise; it brands with fire. It tells a man he isn't what he thought he was. And the world, especially for men, isn't very forgiving about that. Vulnerability doesn't get medals. It gets laughed at. Or ignored. Or quietly pitied.

And so I learnt to cover it up. With unwarranted conceit, as pointed out to me on so many occasions by my readers. With overcompensation. With silence. With ambition. With money. With perfectly curated stories about where I fit in. But here's the twist, and I think most women miss this, not deliberately or out of cruelty, but because the story has never been truthfully told: most men aren't trying to conquer the world. They're just trying to be "good enough" for her. Certainly that was the case for me.

The girl next door. The young woman across the street. The one in the real estate office. The one I wrote music for in the dark. The one who made me feel something beyond everyday existence. And then comes the heartbreak. The crash. The realisation that the ideal isn't real. That to love any real woman, you have to kill the fantasy of the perfect one. And that's a kind of death. Because that ideal is what kept me going all these years. That's what made me crawl out of bed and keep showing up when no one was watching.

But it turns out that she isn't perfect. She's human. She cries to see her cat in pain, sends brief texts when she's scared, prefers the company of other women, stays tight-lipped rather than revealing another private side to herself, and doubts herself in the mirror. She isn't a dream. She's sincere. And if you want to love her, really love her, you have to meet her there, on equal ground. Not as a saviour. Not as a judge. But as someone who's just as flawed as you are.

That's when the real work begins. When the boy dies. When the man begins. Not the macho version, not the loud one, not the angry one, not the one who wears his ego like a bulletproof vest. But the unobtrusive one. The grounded one. The one who can sit in his pain without lashing out. The one who's willing to betray his delusions in order to find something genuine.

In the silence that has followed me since childhood, I've come to understand that becoming a man isn't about vanquishing that silence but learning to speak from within it. My father's absence created a void in which tenderness was supposed to have flourished. Without his guidance, I constructed a scaffold of high expectations around myself, believing that if I could just achieve enough, I would finally be worthy of love.

But the mask I wore – that nervous smile, that unwarranted conceit – only distanced me further from what I truly sought. Through the lens of Asperger’s, I observed human connection as if watching through a prism, understanding its mechanics but struggling to participate authentically. I kept reaching for love as validation rather than connection, as proof of my worth rather than an expression of who I am.

The women in my life became symbols rather than people – representations of acceptance I couldn't give myself. Each rejection confirmed what I already suspected: that I wasn't good enough. Not because they said so, but because I had already decided it. I had surrendered the key to my self-worth long before they arrived on the scene.

What I've slowly learnt is that manhood isn't defined by how successfully you can perform it for others. It's found in the courage to remove the performance altogether. To stand in that childhood silence and finally speak your truth, however awkward or imperfect. To acknowledge that the tenderness I lost when my father left me wasn't something to be earned back through achievement but a birthright I needed to reclaim for myself.

My Asperger’s isn't a curtain separating me from the world. It's a different way of seeing and interpreting it, a different way of being in the world. My silence isn't emptiness; it's where my most authentic self has been waiting. And love isn't a negotiation where I prove my worth – it's the space where two imperfect people choose to see each other clearly and hold each other in mutual respect.

Becoming a man, I've found, isn't about escaping vulnerability but embracing it. It's about accepting that my nervous smile, my years of silence, and my longing for connection – these aren't weaknesses to overcome but essential parts of who I am. The boy I was didn't need to die for the man to emerge whole. He needed to be heard, to be integrated, and to be loved.

And perhaps that's what I've been seeking all along – not to be seen as 'enough' by someone else, but to finally believe it myself. To sit with my own silence and find that it speaks volumes. To recognise that in all my searching for love, what I truly needed was to come home to myself.