This anecdote stunned me when I encountered it in the celebrated Edmund Morris biography of Roosevelt: today, such behavior would be considered rank betrayal of the wife, or even child abuse, given the expectations placed on fathers since women entered the workforce.

The story came to mind recently, when I encountered the convoluted arguments of clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe in her recent book, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives. Saxbe presents new research on the neuroscience of paternity that provides some insights into “dad brain” — a euphemism for the stress, fatigue, and depression often brought on by early parenting. But she argues that the condition is good for men and families, a conclusion that her data does not support. 

I read the book in hopes of curing my own case of “dad brain.” Since becoming a father five years ago, I have often felt that my brain is turning to mush. But my hopes were disappointed. 

Saxbe is the head of the NeuroEndocrinology of Social Ties Lab at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She researches the brain science of paternity, with a focus on fathers’ involvement in “hands-on” childcare, performing observational, longitudinal studies measuring various aspects of fathers’ brain activity and hormones before and after the birth of their first child. On average, she has found, a man loses “about 1% of his prenatal brain volume” when he becomes a father. Testosterone levels, too, “naturally drop to support their parenting role.” The effect sizes often increase with the volume of childcare. This is true of testosterone, gray-matter shrinkage in the cortex, activity in the amygdala, changes in oxytocin levels, and the daily downward trajectory of cortisol. 

Saxbe argues that “the downsized paternal brain” reflects “more readiness to parent,” and that these changes are positive. When men turn up their childcare “dial,” she contends, everyone benefits: “It’s not just children who gain an advantage from hands-on dads. These fathers reduce their partners’ stress. They enjoy better marriages….”

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Unfortunately, the book suffers from a foundational contradiction. The author claims that fathers are innately “wired to participate in care,” because their brains and bodies respond to babies in ways that “prime nurturing and sensitive caretaking behaviors.” But most of these supposed adaptations only “come online when fathers invest time and practice into parenthood” — that is, when they agree to abide by the prescription that fathers should participate in childcare. 

If fathers “need parental experience in order to trigger adaptation” in the brain and helpful changes such as increases of oxytocin, this does not technically support the interpretation that fathers are “wired” or even “primed” for hands-on caretaking. If that were the case, there should be evidence of brain changes before, during, and after the birth of a first child, but before the father submits to the practice. This is precisely what we find with mothers, who lose nearly 5% of their gray-matter volume during pregnancy, before they have engaged in caregiving. 

The argument, more accurately, is that fathers can adapt to childcare, to some degree, when they have to.  

Saxbe believes they should have to. And her own language betrays both her biases and the incoherence of her position. She writes, “I’ve heard the claim that parenting doesn’t come naturally to men because they lack the biology for it…. But new research can help us shift that narrative by showing us that great parents are made, not born.” If we’re “shifting the narrative,” that means parenting doesn’t come “naturally” to men: it’s constructed. The transformation, as her own data suggest, requires paternal submission to norms and expectations they prefer to avoid — not to mention acceptance of public-messaging campaigns in the form of parenting books.

This bias leads to a great deal of circular reasoning. For example, Saxbe points out that fathers who had “a greater sense of meaning” showed lower stress and found more satisfaction after their child arrived, so she suggests that struggling fathers find “meaning in the everyday toil of parenting.” Because many fathers “fear” that by doing childcare, they will break “an unspoken code of masculinity,” she lauds one psychologist who asks fathers to bring their child into his office as “a form of exposure.” Finally, she reasons that “time, practice, and experience help shape the brain,” and reports that “fathers who took paid leave showed smaller increases in stress and sleep problems after their baby’s birth” — the cure for not wanting to do childcare is more childcare. 

In other words, if a father gets brain damage and depression from doing the unnatural work of hands-on childcare, he should find meaning in his suffering, go to a therapist who treats masculinity as a phobia, and keep doing childcare until the brain damage and testosterone decline makes him forget what vigor ever felt like. If none of the above works, he might consider an inpatient stay at the University of Southern California Re-Education Camp. 

Would fathers and families be better off if the man steered clear of the kiddie stuff? Perhaps staying away from infants, in favor of securing economic resources and warding off external threats? Saxbe never asks this foundational question.

Ample data from many fields indicate that fathers are rather wired to avoid hands-on infant care. The book admits in passing that only 5% to 10% of mammal species feature males who care for their young. It also concedes that fathers today contribute more to childcare than “even the most hands-on hunter-gatherer dad.” In the American anthropologist John Whiting’s study of 136 preindustrial cultures, Saxbe notes, the typical arrangement in about half of the cases is that mom and baby sleep together, and dad sleeps elsewhere. Looking elsewhere, I found that the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample of 186 societies shows “regularly close” contact between fathers and infants in only 3 of 154 cultures, about 2%.

Where Saxbe does consider men who work outside the home and avoid all childcare, she frames it as an eccentric privilege exclusive to “billionaires,” never acknowledging that this has been the historical norm for all men, including working-class men. The British social historian Tim Fisher’s 2006 study of working-class British fathers from 1900 to 1939, for example, observed that hands-on care of babies was not expected of fathers at any time in this period.

One of the most inconvenient facts for Saxbe is that, while paternal involvement with childcare has only a weak effect on real outcomes for the child or family — for example, in two large British samples, how frequently fathers changed babies’ diapers and fed them in the first year of life was not correlated with children’s later behavioral problems at ages 3, 9, or 11 — it has a measurable negative effect on income. In 1993, Norway mandated four weeks of paid leave for fathers, which increased the number of men taking leave to 40%, up from 4%, but had only a small effect on children’s test scores at age 16. It did, however, reduce the later earnings of fathers who took the leave, and possibly their partner’s earnings, too. 

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The trade-off between paternal childcare and paternal effort in the economy is thus far from obvious. Compounded over time, it is possible that a family’s lost earnings from paternal childcare outweigh the benefits, especially given that when his child is an infant, most of a father’s wage growth is yet to come. 

There is also the issue that the parents’ personal interests are often in conflict. Saxbe found that mothers recovered better after work when their partners did more of the housework. For the partner, of course, “more housework” represents a loss of professional or personal time that won’t be recaptured. This zero-sum dynamic is suggested by Saxbe’s own research, despite that she goes out of her way to deny it — in the book’s introduction, she explicitly says parenting isn’t zero-sum, for example.  

The primary beneficiary of Saxbe’s cultural engineering is the mother, at least those mothers who have been raised on expectations of gender-neutral parenting, at a cost to the father and the family’s economic security. The book demonstrates a clear physiological and psychological trade-off between the husband’s vitality and the wife’s. “Dads who lost more volume in the cortex told us they had worse sleep quality after birth,” Saxbe writes. “They also felt more depressed and anxious, and they had more mental-health problems, even when we adjusted for their mental health during pregnancy…. The same brain adaptations that seemed to track with fathers’ time and bonding with their infants also signaled mental health risks.” The testosterone findings point in the same direction: men with lower T — presumably those who are doing more childcare and have adapted to it better — “struggled more with their mental health.” Higher-T dads — who presumably feel better overall — “found parenting more challenging” and, no surprise, their partners were “more depressed and unhappy in their relationships.”

Dad Brain attempts to rewrite one of the most universally observed tendencies in family formation on the grounds of neuroscientific evidence which itself does not support the book’s argument. The author sometimes seems to be aware of this, and makes thin, post-hoc justifications such as that she is trying to share a fuller range of options for a diversity of modern family types. She allows that in some cultures, dads who aren’t hands-on make sense, because “a father who drags home a tasty goat increases the odds that his child will survive past infancy” (notice the slightly pejorative, cave-man coding), but dismisses it because “our parenting culture expects a hands-on, low-T style of fatherhood.” 

If “our parenting culture” — defined by the female-majority family sciences — expects a high level of involvement from fathers, then neuroscientific data ought to be tortured into a public advocacy campaign promoting paternal involvement. This is the book’s true reasoning. I found it useful in reverse: it taught me just how important it is for fathers to avoid hands-on infant care at all cost. And if we wonder why our society no longer produces Theodore Roosevelts, Dad Brain has accidentally given us the answer.

The whole episode opens an extraordinary window onto a rare form of life: the schizotypal creative genius.

There are two types of highly successful people in the world: autists and schizos — that is, individuals who find success with autistic traits, and those who find success with schizotypal traits — and much of public life is a secret war between them. To be precise, autistic and schizotypal traits are moderately correlated so often this is a war within the schizo-autist elite. Depending on which side is stronger, individuals  gravitate toward a different domain and use radically different strategies. And each wants to shape public culture in a way that glorifies its  strengths — and plays down the significance of its weaknesses.

One side is winning. If you follow the most fashionable “thought leaders” today — especially entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and pop academics — you’ve probably heard the observation that the most successful and busy people reply to emails faster than less busy people. A certain type of person just loves this fact: Sam Altman, Eric Schmidt, and the aforementioned Cowen all find this talking point enchanting. These are the autists, whose STEM-friendly skills have been elevated in value by the digitalization of the economy, and who are easily able to propagandize their traits via digital media. Autism has never enjoyed so much clout as it does today, relative to the romance of schizophrenia.

This is why l’affair DeWitt was D-Day for the world’s schizo-intellectual class. The writer represents the maligned schizo-elite, the unsung schizo-geniuses, and even the downright wannabes. Her maneuver is a glorious vindication of all the brilliant and sensitive souls whose strengths do not lie in punctiliousness. Helen DeWitt is our General Custer, and this is our Last Stand against the Autistic Elite.

Research on autism-spectrum and schizotypal traits shows two cognitive styles diametrically opposed on certain dimensions. Autistic-like traits suit structured, detail-oriented, rule-based domains. Positive schizotypal traits suit open-ended, imaginative, pattern-associating creative pursuits. One meta-analytic review reports a positive relation between positive schizotypy and creativity. Poets and visual artists show levels of “unusual experiences” — perceptual aberrations, magical thinking, and mild hallucinations — as high as schizophrenia patients, and significantly higher than mathematicians. On the autism side, one large study found higher autistic-trait scores among people in STEM careers.

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Moderate autism can be an advantage for staying on top of large volumes of structured information — rules, protocols, inboxes, codebases, spreadsheets. Strong systemizing and detail-oriented processing helps with quick rule-based decisions and switching between bounded tasks without much emotional friction. An email is just a short, discrete object to be classified and dispatched. 

Moderate schizotypy, by contrast, can be an advantage for artists because reduced latent inhibition means that stimuli other people filter out feel meaningful; trains of thought branch and interconnect more naturally. Because more things have emotional valence, what is administratively trivial for the autist is more taxing and risky for the schizo. Every email is a portal into complicated emotional territory that will need to be traversed, and that traversal might displace a whole day’s work.

DeWitt has been open about her long history of breakdowns and suicide attempts, each tied to the publishing industry’s interference with her work, and has described putting what amount to suicide clauses in her contracts. In an interview with The Believer, she said: “I put clauses in my contracts, and I explain: this clause stands between me and suicide, don’t sign this contract if you are not going to comply with it — and they laugh.” The publishing system is “committed to the disempowerment of the author at every single stage”, she says with apophenic flair (the pattern may or may not be real, but this is characteristically schizoid language). The April blog post that reports the saga is itself a schizoid object, a raw cut-and-paste of email threads in stray fonts and chaotic formatting, accented with uncut personal narrative.

As DeWitt explains it, on 12 February, 2026, she was told by phone that she had won the Windham-Campbell Prize, one of the grandest literary awards in the world, designed explicitly to give an exceptional writer free time with the fewest possible strings attached. Writers can’t apply; nominations are solicited secretly. Initially, DeWitt was thrilled. But there were just a few requirements: the prize asked for one video, to be shot over six to eight hours by a professional crew at her home or at a local studio; plus one podcast; one contribution to The Yale Review; and attendance at a six-day festival.

DeWitt writes in her blog post that she had just emerged from years of chaos surrounding the publication of Your Name Here, her 2025 metafictional masterpiece about an artist dealing with the hostile publishing world. At the moment of the call, she was in a reader-lent apartment in Amsterdam deliberately chosen for its lack of wifi, and had only a low-data SIM card in her phone. Thus cut off from the world, at last, she could write. Answering the prize committee meant roaming Amsterdam in search of a free wifi signal, and the “minor strings” soon became — to a schizotypal mind — a blizzard of emails, logistics, Google forms and irritation. Over two weeks, DeWitt tried to negotiate with the prize committee, but the core demands remained mandatory. On 24 February, she formally declined: “If I simply stop now I can use the whole of 2026 and 2027 for writing without interruption; after the last few years, I desperately need this.”

Some will think that DeWitt is a prima donna, others that she is a madwoman. But it turns out that there is a real tradeoff between artistic accomplishment and the rational functionalism required by the powers and principalities of this world.

What DeWitt helps us see is that she really can’t give interviews, do phone calls, or reply to emails — or anything else at all — because any functional requirement in the world competes for the scarce mental space she needs to do her work at the level she aims to do it. Once disturbed, the schizoid mind loses control of the downstream routines most people handle on autopilot. As she wrote to the prize committee, “a flood of words coming in at the ear displaces voices, structure, paradigms, game analysis, the work taking shape in the head…. if I keep pushing to deal with practicalities while the mind is in this state, the next stage is losing passport, cards, keys. Finding myself locked out in the street with no way to contact anyone who could help.”

What looks to outside observers like a small number of simple requirements is, in the mind of a schizotypal novelist of serious ambition, genuinely and impossibly onerous. Each media obligation involves emails and phone calls, which themselves, in our day and age, require a bewildering series of digital steps and interfaces. Each email and phone call — including the emails and phone calls to schedule the emails and phone calls — involves specific questions that need to be decided. For the schizo-genius, one minor requirement is, in fact, an immediately self-expanding surface of taxing mental processes. What’s so remarkable and beautiful about this particular saga is that DeWitt is not telling us about the schizo-genius’s plight; rather, she is demonstrating it in real time.

Most of the internet reaction has understood the issue to be ideological. DeWitt’s critics wrote her off as ungrateful or insane — receiving a huge prize, scoffed one, is “a very odd thing to be complaining about”, Her supporters see the situation as an indictment of the “hyper-professionalism … that privileges self-promotional skill over actual literary work.”

I would argue, instead, that DeWitt’s reasoning isn’t merely sensible, but rational and elite to the highest degree. We simply struggle to appreciate it today because the schizotypal are now relatively underrepresented in high-status conversations after years of economic and cultural adjustment in favor of the autistic.

Artistic success obeys a power-law distribution — a statistical pattern found throughout the creative arts in which outcomes are radically unequal, so that a minuscule fraction of the talent produces almost all of the most significant work. The distribution is “heavy-tailed”: there are many forgettable works, a few competent ones, and an infinitesimal number of masterpieces, but those masterpieces account for almost all of the lasting cultural value. In other words, the gap in value between a masterpiece and a merely competent novel is of far greater magnitude than the gap between a competent novel and a bad one. This implies that returns to quality are convex at the top of the distribution. For the most successful artists competing for the highest levels of greatness, each marginal unit of effort, craft, or vision yields increasing returns. Thus, the more talented you are, the more extreme you should be about avoiding everything that is not the concentrated application of your distinguishing talent. A small concession to distraction can mean the difference between finishing a masterpiece and producing something merely competent, or never finishing at all. Not to mention, six hours of filming isn’t really six hours, but six hours plus weeks of emails and mental preparation, plus the comedown afterward and some not-improbable collapse.

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DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai, published in 2000, is considered by some to be the greatest novel of the 21st century. Weighed against the chance to produce something even better, $175,000 isn’t as much as it seems. For someone who knows she is capable of producing world-class work, it is absolutely necessary that she secure the most complete concentration possible.

In her emails to the prize committee, DeWitt mentioned in passing that she was in good company. Emily Dickinson didn’t leave the family property for two decades. Proust sealed himself in a cork-lined bedroom. Pynchon has never granted a single interview in more than 60 years. Cormac McCarthy famously turned down paid speaking engagements while he and his wife lived off beans. These people made a decision that they were going to cultivate their creative work as their top priority, and then they ignored every other requirement of human life that they could possibly get away with. They let all other skills and capacities atrophy to as close to zero degree as they could survive. That’s presumably one of the major reasons they were capable of achieving greatness.

The requirements of the awards committee were reasonable. It makes sense that the Windham-Campbell prize would require some minimum of promotion to sustain the program. But it’s also reasonable that DeWitt could not meet even those modest demands. In fact, it is only because she is so absurdly, militantly protective of her mental space that this rewarding body decided to give her the prize.

Both parties are obeying their nature, and this is why our official institutions, governed increasingly by the autist type, increasingly struggle to absorb, support, or participate in the most brilliant and interesting cultural tendencies today. Even when the institutional mindset is lucky enough to recognize creative genius, even when it offers the most generous possible terms to support it, in a world in which a tiny fraction of output carries the overwhelming share of lasting value, there is often just no workable agreement between schizo-romance and autist-functionalism. 

Perhaps only the internet can sustain a stable commerce between the two.

The schizos are learning how to advance themselves online. X (formerly Twitter) in particular is the ecosystem where the type thrives. It is no accident that the word “schizo” was popularized there in recent years, proudly, as a self-description. DeWitt’s blog dump, and the X thread that spread it, are characteristic. Bypass the editors entirely, and hand the raw material to the reader. By rejecting $175,000 in favor of peace and quiet, Helen DeWitt has done more, for more people, than she ever could have imagined. She has proved to the world that to become a successful genius, you don’t necessarily have to answer your emails quickly. You don’t even need to know that Amsterdam has Starbucks with free wifi. All you need to do is the work, at any cost.

These authors draw on a rich literary tradition of women venting about parenthood and marriage.  This tradition includes such texts as Dana Spiotta’s 2021 novel, Wayward, the autobiographical work of Deborah Levy, and Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, published in 2012, which Gould calls “the go-to literary divorce bible.” 

Few if any of these women claim to be suffering from evil or abusive husbands, or to be burdened by particularly egregious domestic toil. The sick-of-my-family genre is about having the bravery to blow up a normal domestic life in the name of the woman wanting something different for herself: mental independence and space to think, with time to focus on professional goals. 

Why, then, do we hear so little from struggling fathers on this question? Most of the well-known male authors one might cite — Knausgård, Updike — were unfaithful, divorced, or both. What about the fed-up fathers who are still hanging on? Can we express the anxieties and downsides of fatherhood, the ways in which it crowds out our independence and creativity, instead of blowing up our families for novelistic material? 

The answer is no, as I learned to my chagrin this month, when a chorus of disapprobation greeted a reflection I posted on the X app (formerly Twitter) about just this issue.

It began with my 4-year-old son asking me to play catch in the street. I was drinking my coffee, still waking up, but I said sure. I also posted to social media: “Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic, peak experience.” But I wasn’t enjoying it, as I confessed in my post. I wanted to be drinking my coffee in peace. The truth, I said, is that I just don’t like being around my two little kids, alone, for very long. I asked the internet whether I was a monster, or whether my feeling was within a certain range of normality. 

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The post garnered more than 19 million impressions. Men, many of whom granted that my feeling was normal, accused me of being weak and unmanly for complaining in public. Women said I was pathetic: mothers spend so much more time with children, and yet I could barely endure 10 minutes before needing to complain. I hit back that contemporary mothers have no idea what it is like being a father today, and was called a misogynist. Both genders agreed that I was selfish and immature, focused on petty and short-sighted matters like having my coffee in peace or getting back to my work.

The truth is that fatherly pain is exceptionally taboo for a good reason. Contemporary fatherhood is a much darker place than mothers, maidens, and bachelors are ever supposed to know. And one of its proper responsibilities is keeping everyone else in the dark about male suffering. Despite the modern rhetoric about gender equality, women still require men to be strong and silent, as my social-media firebombing shows. Many fathers are so strong and so silent, I suspect, that women are unaware that they’re enjoying the benefits of the man’s protection, or that they require it in the first place. 

How can this be, in a world in which men and women are supposed to be equals? According to a contemporary ideal, men should be able to speak to women frankly, and shouldn’t need to protect them. But what we have in reality is a very unequal equality: men are expected to help out with domestic work and hands-on childcare to the best of their ability, while they are also expected to maintain all of the traditionally male responsibilities — not least, the responsibility to keep those responsibilities secret.

Consider time spent with children. Studies confirm it has increased dramatically: American fathers spent seven hours per week on childcare, up from about two and a half hours in 1965. Another study found that over the same period, fathers’ average daily childcare time rose to nearly an hour, up from about 16 minutes. That won’t sound like much to women. But given that there hasn’t been any corresponding relaxation of the exclusively male responsibilities, it’s nearly a full work day a week — a significant expansion. 

There’s also the question of what this childcare time is for. Biologically, men are not evolved to care for small children, and historically, men were rarely expected to be around for them. The argument that it’s for ethical reasons or child-development reasons seems a bit too conveniently correlated with women’s entry into the workforce. I find the amorphous nature of the rationale behind the demand especially frustrating, because it presents me with no way of knowing how much time is optimal, or even enough. The requirement becomes uncapped, all-consuming, and impossible to fulfill. 

But haven’t other male responsibilities been relaxed in our equal-rights modernity? We tell anxious fathers to worry less about money and focus on quality time with kids. But surveys find that in more than 50% of dual-income households (and in 90% of the wealthiest), husbands are regarded as the family’s “financial expert.” And even when wives earn more, men still carry the moral weight of ultimate financial responsibility. If creeping destitution or spiraling debt were to conquer, for instance, nobody would have any doubt about which of the two parents is most guilty. 

Thus, in many crucial ways, the “dual-income household” is a myth and doesn’t solve the economic anxieties of men; indeed, it makes them worse. Many women earn little more than the cost of childcare, which makes the woman’s work mostly for her personal edification or satisfaction. The man enjoys no such luxury. He’s also, whether his wife earns a lot or little, always calculating, behind the scenes, what he is going to do if and when she wants to stop working. Even if she said, before parenthood, that she planned to work until retirement, the husband knows it will fall to him to keep the family fiscally whole if she changes her mind. 

If I don’t prepare for that, I live every day at risk of disgrace. If I’m preparing, however, it might seem I don’t believe in my wife, or I might seem “not present” with my kids. Not to mention, if a man’s wife earns as much as he does, she may become accustomed to a standard of living that may not be sustainable once she taps out — but how can he say any of these things? This makes the burden of fatherhood much more difficult than it used to be, psychologically and  practically.  

Breadwinning, also, has become complicated in ways that have hardly been noticed, let alone understood. 

In terms of bringing in the money, most legacy institutions have declined in standards and vitality. Jobs don’t look the same as they once did, and they’re less secure. Many fathers today must become entrepreneurs, either by necessity because they can’t get stable employment; or to maintain standards or integrity in their vocation; or to protect themselves economically as a side hustle, in case their legacy institution goes sideways next year. We’re working more — much more — but getting less credit for it, and the childcare demands have increased, too. 

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On a deeper level, securing an honorable vocation that does justice to a man’s gifts has always been a major requirement of a successful male life. The structures that made this possible have been so liquidated by modernity that it barely sounds like a reasonable aspiration anymore  — but we still yearn for it and hold ourselves to the standard. 

How much money is enough to have conducted yourself with distinction? We have no idea. Just recently, the writer Michael Green published an article arguing that $100,000 a year should now be considered the real poverty line, or perhaps it was even $140,000, once you update the old methodology for today’s costs. The argument was flawed, but it went viral, suggesting that  people really no longer know the difference between rich and poor. I might read up and form an accurate model of the economy, but if my mother, wife, father-in-law, and peer group aren’t reading the same material, then I can’t know whether I earn or possess enough money to be content. You can say that a father should use his own judgment, but for a good father, the only judgment is: I would kill myself to do right by my family, so if there is no shared standard, then I’ll just kill myself trying, just to make sure.

It was once the case that people from different classes and situations would settle into different occupations. Before capitalism, the options were more or less fixed: the cobbler’s son became a cobbler; the duke’s first son a duke. Today, there are no longer shared standards around meaningful work, vocation, or station (except for whatever money and internet clout measure). If you are a professor, does that mean you are a smart, thoughtful anchor of your community? It’s no longer clear. If you have a million followers on TikTok, does that mean you are successful or impressive? You could very well be a working prostitute, the canonically low-status occupation, and be very high-status indeed, depending on how you manage it. 

Under these conditions, the contemporary father can never “arrive.” No matter how successful he is in terms of money or clout, the father must bear the terror that perhaps he did not do justice to his gifts, or that he did not do justice to his family’s name. Whether his mother tells him that she’s “proud” of him means nothing; he judges himself in the agora. Now add to this bundle of anxieties, both material and psychological, the expectation to be ever more present at playtime. It’s maddening. And crushing.

There is another, deeper burden that is rarely spoken. For the man, having children is not itself a source of immediate joy or meaning in the same way that it can be for women. I chose to have children, and I have no regrets. And yet no man ever thinks to himself, “I would love to have two toddlers in the house because the presence of these two creatures would increase my own happiness.” Whereas for the mother, as the Bible, Nietzsche, and Freud alike taught, children are much more immediately meaningful. A man is more motivated by a larger sense of responsibility: to procreate, to give the world a little bit more life than he took from it, and to give his beloved wife something that is significant and meaningful to her. 

There is a meme about how a man, left to his own devices, will default to sleeping on the floor and eating canned beans every day in an unfurnished, one-room apartment. The image is typically invoked to roast the male sex for its barbarous nature, implying how much men need women to organize and beautify their lives. I’ve always thought this to be an outrageous misunderstanding. Instead, consider how much heroic effort the average father expends to provide his wife with things he does not need or desire himself. 

Those who find these observations outrageous, cowardly, selfish, or unrepresentative only display how little  can fathom the darkness of fatherhood today.

If a wife could see or feel her husband’s terror, she would hardly be able to function, let alone be a good wife or mother. We hide it out of love but not purely out of love: for a father to bear his responsibilities every day, he needs his wife to be happy, in part because he needs her to stay calm and be functional. If she falters under her own heavy responsibilities, he could quickly lose control of everything. “Happy wife, happy life” is a laughably sweet euphemism for the infernal fact that if your wife is not happy, there is no reason left to live. 

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This might seem extreme, but when a man builds a family, he voluntarily sets his own happiness to the side, which means the wife’s happiness is the only reliable daily indicator of success and reliable daily reward. So if the wife is unhappy, none of it makes any sense and nothing feels worth doing. As I write this, stoic silence is the only thing keeping millions of families on the right side of the precipice.

Before I got married and had children, I was horrified by the prevalence of fathers who walk out on their families. Today, I am no longer confused by the phenomenon. My own household challenges have thankfully never been so severe, but it is now obvious to me how even the normal challenges of the ordinary husband could lead a man’s life to spiral so far out of control that he breaks and leaves. The gap between my perplexity over this issue as a young man and my current knowledge is a reasonable index of how much darkness fathers hide from the world.

I spend many days and nights churning through these issues in mortal terror. My wife probably has a decent sense of how dark and lonely life sometimes feels for me, but that’s because I’m a little weak and I tell her too much, too often. And then I feel terrible about that, terrified that I might break her happiness and lose everything for the both of us. It is part of my job to protect her from all of this, and I can handle that, most of the time.

Most men do not want sympathy, and I certainly do not. There is no appeal, to my mind, in “rights for men” or any kind of ridiculous “men’s movement.” I only submit for the public record, once again and without fear, that if contemporary fatherhood continues to feel as impossible as it feels to me, it is better for a man to occasionally snap in a small way, rather than snap in the big and silent ways that husbands have too often snapped in the past. And perhaps the weaker, average fathers, such as myself, will take a few hits — or 19 million of them — for the team, so that the really great fathers can carry on, dutifully, in silence.

I would rather be scorned for revealing my weaknesses honestly, while holding myself and my family together, than be applauded for making art out of its destruction. Buzzy celebration simply for snapping is another one of the rewards fathers must be prepared to forgo.