Even the Strong

A Love Note to Women

He went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life.

1 Kings 19:4

Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea opens with Lee Chandler fixing a toilet in a Boston apartment building. He’s a janitor. He shovels snow. He unclogs drains. He barely speaks. The tenants complain about him. A woman at a bar tries to talk to him and he walks away. Not rude. Just absent. Like the central part of him left a long time ago and what remains is just enough to hold a wrench and show up.

Casey Affleck plays Lee as a man who’s still technically alive but has stopped expecting anything from being alive. When his brother dies, he drives to Manchester to handle the arrangements. He doesn’t grieve publicly. He moves through logistics. Signs papers. Buys groceries for his nephew. Fixes what needs fixing.

The film never asks you to admire him. It just asks you to watch. A man carrying weight he can’t put down and can’t explain. Lonergan doesn’t give Lee a redemption arc. He gives him a scene near the end where his ex-wife says she knows he’s still in there. And Lee says he can’t beat it. That’s all. No breakthrough. No healing. Just an honest man admitting he’s drowning while still holding the wrench.

The film won two Academy Awards. Critics praised it for its restraint. Most of the commentary focused on grief.

Almost nobody talked about what I saw. A man keeping a covenant nobody asked him to keep. Showing up. Fixing things. Holding it together while the world looked right past him.

This is a love letter. To women. From a man who doesn’t know how to ask for what I’m about to ask for.

We need you.

I know how that sounds. Men aren’t supposed to need. We’re supposed to carry. And we’ve spent two centuries proving we can carry your weight alongside ours. Not because we were forced. Because the causes were right. Because men made a covenant a long time ago that says strength exists to protect, not to dominate. And we’ve kept it.

Here’s what that covenant looked like.

When American men got the vote, it took a few decades before the movement to extend it to women gained real traction. But when it did, men were in the room. Frederick Douglass stood at Seneca Falls in 1848 and said women’s suffrage was inseparable from human dignity. He took heat for it. He didn’t flinch.

When birth control needed a breakthrough, Carl Djerassi synthesized the compound. John Rock, a devout Catholic OB-GYN, spent years fighting his own church to put the pill into the hands of women who wanted control over their own bodies. He lost the fight with Rome. He didn’t regret it.

Women wanted into law, medicine, engineering, finance, the military, the boardroom. Men made space. Some grudgingly. Many gladly. The doors opened because enough men pushed from the inside. We marched alongside you. We wrote the legislation. We voted for it. We built the mentorship programs and the scholarship funds and the Title IX frameworks. We changed hiring practices in our own companies. We sat on panels and said out loud that our daughters deserved every door our sons had.

And we quietly understood when you didn’t want the other jobs. The sewer lines. The mines. The deep-sea welding. The roadside construction in August heat. The 2 AM transformer repair in an ice storm. Ninety-three percent of workplace fatalities are men. That number isn’t a talking point. It’s a life you could verify on any job site in America. The morning shift on a cell tower. The night shift under a city.

We didn’t ask you to share those. We didn’t expect you to. We just did them.

And combat. Every flag-draped coffin carried off a transport from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from outposts in places most Americans can’t find on a map. The overwhelming majority carried men. Boys, some of them. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They made the choice to go. Not because they wanted to die. Because someone told them this is what strong men do. And they believed it. Because the covenant told them so.

And every single day, men keep the covenant in a way nobody talks about. The decision to restrain. To hold the strength back. To not use the body the way the body could be used. The average man is stronger than the average woman. Not a little stronger. A lot stronger. That’s biology, not ideology. And every day, in every frustrated moment, every argument, every crowded train, every unfair verdict, men choose not to use that advantage. Not because they’re saints. Because the covenant says protect, not dominate. The same covenant their fathers made. And their fathers before that.

That covenant built something. Women own more than forty percent of American businesses now. More women vote than men in every election cycle. Women earn sixty percent of bachelor’s degrees, sixty percent of master’s degrees, the majority of doctoral degrees, the majority of medical school and law school admissions. Young women in major cities outearn young men. This isn’t a complaint. This is what we built together. This is what the covenant produced when men kept it and women walked through the doors it opened.

I’m 58 now. I’ve watched something happen that I can’t stay quiet about.

The covenant is breaking.

Not because men are becoming violent. Because men are becoming invisible. And invisible people stop believing the covenant matters.

Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with behavioral disorders, more likely to be suspended, more likely to drop out. They score lower in reading at every age. They’re less likely to apply to college at all. If those numbers belonged to girls, there’d be a federal task force. For boys, there’s mostly silence.

Men die by suicide at four times the rate of women. Four times. Say that number out loud and it sounds impossible. But the data doesn’t lie. They use more violent methods. They give fewer warnings. And they almost never ask for help, because men don’t ask.

One in five men between eighteen and thirty report having no close friends. That number was one in twenty in 1990. Men are seventy percent of the homeless population. They make up the vast majority of the incarcerated. They die five years younger on average, and the gap isn’t closing.

Men’s labor force participation has been declining for decades. In the 1950s, nearly every working-age man had a job or was looking for one. Now millions have stopped looking altogether. Not retired. Not disabled. Just gone. Checked out of a system that checked out on them first.

In family courts, fathers receive primary custody roughly twenty percent of the time. I’ve watched men I know fight for years to see their own children. Good men. Present men. Men who coached the team and packed the lunches and read the books at bedtime. The system looks at them and sees a provider, not a parent.

Somewhere along the way, the builders stopped building for themselves. And nobody turned around to check on the ones still holding the door.

Walker Percy wrote in Lost in the Cosmos that of all the billions of strange objects in the universe, you are beyond doubt the strangest. The self can’t see itself. It orbits its own mystery without ever landing. Percy thought that was the whole problem with being human. You can know everything except the thing you are.

Men can’t see what’s happening to them. They’re sunk in the everydayness of carrying. The early shift. The unclogged drain. The child support check. The four o’clock alarm. They don’t have language for the collapse because the collapse happens in silence. No one marches for it. No one writes think pieces about it. It just accumulates like sediment until the river stops.

Elijah had just delivered the most spectacular victory in the Old Testament. Fire from heaven on Mount Carmel. Four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal proven false in front of the whole nation. God showed up in undeniable power. And the very next chapter, Elijah is running into the desert asking God to take his life.

The strongest prophet in Scripture. The one who didn’t flinch before an entire nation. A man who kept the covenant when nobody else would. He sits under a broom tree and says it’s enough.

God doesn’t lecture him. Doesn’t tell him to man up. Doesn’t quote his own victories back to him. He sends an angel with bread and water. Twice. Feeds him. Lets him sleep. Then says get up. You’ve got further to go.

The remedy for Elijah’s collapse wasn’t theology. It was bread. Presence. Someone showing up without a speech.

Jesus washed the disciples’ feet on the hardest night of his life. The strongest man in any room he ever entered, kneeling with a towel. Power that doesn’t kneel isn’t power. It’s just force. And what men have been doing, quietly, for generations, is kneeling. Choosing restraint over advantage. Keeping the covenant. Every day. For someone else.

I’m not asking for applause. I’m not asking anyone to fix it. I’m asking you to see it.

See the man who drives an hour each way to a job that doesn’t use half of what he knows, because it pays enough to keep the kids in shoes. See the father who lost the custody hearing and still shows up every other weekend with his whole heart in a duffel bag. See the boy in the back of the classroom who can’t sit still and is told something’s wrong with him before anyone asks what’s right.

See Lee Chandler. Fixing the toilet. Shoveling the walk. Still in there. Even when he can’t prove it.

But seeing isn’t enough. Because those men under the broom tree were boys first. Someone raised them. And the way we’re raising boys right now is producing the very statistics I just listed. The covenant isn’t inherited. It’s taught. And right now, we’re not teaching it.

Here’s why. And I need you to hear this part without flinching.

You can’t teach the covenant. That’s not an insult. It’s not your job. It never was.

Fathers teach the covenant. That’s what fathers have done since the beginning. The father is the one who lets the kid climb too high and watches without catching. The father is the one who says get up, you’re fine, try again. The father is the one who roughhouses until someone almost gets hurt and then draws the line, and in that drawing, teaches a boy where the line is. The father puts a kid in a situation that feels dangerous but isn’t, and stands close enough to intervene but far enough away to let the lesson land. That’s how boys learn where strength ends and violence begins. Not from a book. Not from a lecture. From a man who has the strength and shows them how to hold it.

Mothers protect. That instinct is real and good and necessary. But protection alone doesn’t build men. It builds boys who stay boys. A mother’s love says don’t get hurt. A father’s love says you’re going to get hurt, and here’s how you get back up. Both are necessary. Neither one works alone. And when you remove one, you don’t get half a parent. You get a child who never learned the half that matters most for surviving the world.

But we’ve spent a generation kicking fathers out. The family courts did it structurally. Twenty percent custody. Every other weekend. A child support check and a visitation schedule and the quiet message underneath all of it: you’re the wallet, not the parent. But it isn’t just the courts. It happens in kitchens and living rooms every day. A father lets his son fall off the bike and the mother calls him reckless. A father tells his daughter to handle it herself and the mother steps in to smooth it over. A father raises his voice and gets told he’s being aggressive when he’s being a father. He parents differently than you do and you decide different means wrong.

It doesn’t mean wrong. It means father.

Stop kicking men out of the family because they don’t parent like you. Stop overriding every rough edge, every raised voice, every moment that makes you uncomfortable. That discomfort you feel watching your husband let your son struggle is the covenant being taught. That silence you don’t understand when your son’s father won’t rescue him from a hard situation is a man preparing a boy to live in a world that won’t rescue him either.

And when you push that out of a home, when you override it or gatekeep it or reduce it to every other weekend, you don’t get safer kids. You get kids who never learned the thing only a father teaches. How to stand up after you fall. How to sit with pain without running. How to hold strength without using it. How to keep the covenant.

Every man who can’t name what he’s feeling was once a boy who was never asked. Every man who disappears into silence learned somewhere that silence was the only acceptable response. And every man sitting alone in an apartment wondering why the covenant doesn’t feel worth keeping anymore was once a kid who might have turned out differently if his father had been allowed to raise him.

Your sons need fathers to become men who can keep the covenant. Your daughters need fathers too. A girl raised without a father’s love doesn’t learn what the covenant looks like in a man. She doesn’t learn to recognize steady strength. She doesn’t learn the difference between a man who restrains his power and a man who has none. And she grows up either settling for men who can’t keep the covenant or pushing away men who can, because she never saw what it looked like up close.

Let the fathers in. Stop treating the way men love as a lesser version of the way women love. It isn’t lesser. It’s different. And it’s the part you can’t replace.

The maternal instinct to protect is real and it’s holy and I’m not dismissing it. But there’s a difference between protecting a boy from danger and protecting him from difficulty. The boy who never falls off the bike doesn’t learn to ride it. The boy who’s shielded from every hard feeling grows into a man who can’t hold one.

Helicoptering a boy doesn’t make a man. It makes a taller boy.

Let him scrape his knees. Let him lose the game. Let him sit with the embarrassment of getting it wrong in front of people. That’s not cruelty. That’s formation. Every man you admire for his steadiness went through seasons that nobody rescued him from. That’s where the steadiness came from. Not from comfort. From surviving the absence of it. That’s how a boy learns the covenant. And most of the time, it was a father who stood close enough to watch and far enough away to let it happen.

And stop teaching your sons and daughters to ghost. Stop treating disconnection like a life skill. The word didn’t even exist twenty years ago and now it’s the first move in every conflict. Someone disappoints you, disappear. Someone makes you uncomfortable, vanish. We’ve trained an entire generation to believe that leaving is the same as protecting yourself. It isn’t. It’s just leaving. And the men those boys become will leave too. Leave marriages. Leave friendships. Leave churches. Leave themselves. Because no one ever taught them that staying is a muscle, and muscles only grow under weight.

Community costs something. It always has. You have to sit across from someone who hurt you and say so. You have to show up to the awkward dinner. You have to stay in the room when every instinct says run. Christ didn’t ghost Peter after the denial. He made him breakfast on the beach and asked him three times if he loved him. That’s not avoidance. That’s repair. And repair only happens inside a community that refuses to let discomfort be the last word.

And listen to the men already in your life. Not to fix them. Not to redirect them toward therapy before they’ve finished the sentence. Just listen. The way you’d want to be listened to. Men don’t speak the same way women do about pain. It comes out sideways. It comes out as silence, as withdrawal, as anger that seems disproportionate to the moment. Underneath that silence is a man who hasn’t been asked a real question in months. Maybe years.

Ask it. And then sit with whatever answer comes.

We carried your causes because the covenant demanded it. We still believe it was right. We’d carry them again.

But the broom tree is getting crowded. And the boys in your house right now will either learn to keep the covenant or never know it existed. That depends on whether you let their fathers teach it.

The bread has to come from somewhere.