Why Boys and Men Are Floundering, According to Relationship Therapist Terry Real
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Today, I'm talking to marriage and family therapist, Terry Real. Dan, this is what I think you mean to be saying right now. Fucking bullshit. No matter what I do for you, it's never enough. This is Terry reenacting one of his marriage counseling sessions. And, uh, yeah, he said yeah. Yeah.

Terry has just asked one of his clients, named Daniel, about the feelings he has during what have become typical but explosive arguments with his wife. Terry asks, if the feelings could talk, what would they say? And Daniel says back, kind of meekly, I try really hard. I try to be a good person. But Terry thinks there's a deeper feeling there that Daniel's not letting onto. So he says it back to him, only stronger. Fucking bullshit.

I amplify emotion, particularly in men. They feel them initially very faintly, but the feelings aren't faint. It's just they're not used to honoring them. It's a bit unconventional, but this is something Terry does often. He holds up a kind of emotional mirror to the men that he works with, trying to get them in touch with what's underneath.

I'm loving Dan and telling the truth to him in the same breath. You deserve better than this. You're a good guy. Let's get you out of this. Terry is well known for this direct, confrontational, but still quite loving approach. In this conversation, Daniel actually wrote about it for the New York Times Magazine in a piece called How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me.

And Daniel learned that because, unlike a lot of couples therapists, Terry takes sides, tries to get to the truth of what's going on, what's behind a couple's behavior. I started off, my beat were couples on the brink of divorce that no one has been able to help. These women would drag these guys in, and I would lean in and tell them,

She's right. You're wrong. This is what's going to happen if you don't shape up. This is what you could get if you do. You're a good guy. This is terrible behavior. Let me reach in and help you, man. I mean, you can do better than this. And the men would say, okay. And the women would just fold over and start to cry. Okay.

They had dragged this poor sucker. The record so far was eight therapists and not one person backed up the woman and confronted the man. Not one. We're taught not to in therapy school. Not only are we not taught how to, we're actively taught that you don't do that. You don't tell truth to power under patriarchy.

Terry's been doing this for more than 40 years. He calls his approach relational life therapy, and he's written several best-selling books about it. And that whole time, he's kept a particular focus on men. Because for Terry, the things he sees men struggle with, from the most mild problems to the most extreme behaviors, it all stems from something fundamentally broken about the way our culture defines masculinity. ♪

So today, Terry Real tells me what he's learned about masculinity that drove him to break the rules of therapy. He'll tell me how his own childhood showed him that our current models of masculinity don't work and what it will take to build new ones. And during our conversation, we talked a lot about what it means to be a man right now. Because to Terry, despite his 40 years with hundreds if not thousands of clients, he says his mission of reaching men has never felt more urgent. Stay with us.

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Terry Real, welcome to Modern Love. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.

Terry, you are, I think it's fair to say, an institution in your industry. You've been a marriage and family therapist for how long? For 40 years? Yeah. That's a lot. What's the exact number? Is it 40 exactly? 42. About two years more than my marriage. Okay. Let's not round down. Let's say you've been a marriage and family therapist for 42 years.

How do couples end up in front of you? I have to be honest, I don't really feel like a guy would be calling you up and being like, hi, I need help with my marriage. So how do people end up in your office? Yeah, I like to say my books appear under pillows all over America. Here, honey, if you want a little action tonight, read this book.

So, yeah, no, a lot of the men that I see are what I call wife-mandated referrals. And I don't mean to be marginalizing same-sex marriages. But the men I see, here's a quote from Terry Real. Shame-based people have pain. Grandiose-based people have trouble. They're not in pain. The people around them are in pain.

And they come to see me when the trouble gets so great.

that either the people around them are dragging their butts into seeing me or the crisis has opened up and they're desperately trying to save their relationship. That's mostly how it goes. And as I know from reading your work, shame-based people in a relationship are often women in a relationship and then the grandiose-based people are often men. Is that right? Often. You know, two out of three. Look,

Here's a maybe more nuanced. And this too is broad generality, so take it with a grain of salt. But women in our culture is changing with feminism. But traditionally, women in our culture lead from the one down accommodating shame position and have covert grandiosity.

Whereas men lead from the one-up superior position and have covert shame. And with women, they're depressed. They're depressed. With men, they're depressed. No, they're not. Right. They're drinking. They stuff it down. Yeah. Yeah. And you don't see the pain. You see the flight in the medication or grandiosity that avoids the pain. Right.

And so many of the difficulties we think of as quote-unquote typically male, substance abuse, rage, affairs, I'm not saying all of them are fueled by depression, but many of them are. And underneath the depression is trauma.

And the way we traditionally, quote-unquote, turn boys into men is we teach them to disconnect. Disconnect from vulnerability, disconnect from their feelings, disconnect from others. The toxic individualism, yeah. Yeah, we call that learning to be independent. And the consequence of a disconnected boy is a disconnected man. Mm-hmm.

We're not invulnerable. We're human. I tell the guys I work with, pretending to escape your own vulnerability is like trying to outrun your rectum. I actually read that line in your book, and I was hoping you'd say it out loud because it's just too good. Outrun your rectum. Perfect. Put that on a shirt, unless you have.

It has a way of following. So, no, of course we're all vulnerable, but trying to live up to that superhuman code leads every man vulnerable to anxiety and shame that they then don't admit because that would be weak. So the whole thing is just a mess.

And the work I do, I say I feel like a surgeon reattaching nerves. You write about that process in, I think it's your first book, which was about male depression. That book is really fascinating. You write how male depression, as you describe it, often comes from these unacknowledged feelings and is often the root cause of many problems in marriages, in families, in

I want to talk more about that, but first I want to know more about why you decided to focus a lot of your practice on working with men specifically. And just to start at the beginning, when you were growing up, what did you think it meant to be a man? I thought what it meant to be a man was to be raging and dominating and abusive like my father. And I wanted no part of it.

My father used to beat me, I mean. He'd piss my father off and he'd get out a pretty thick belt and whack the shit out of you. And one of the things I've realized 30 years after the fact was, unfortunately, my vulnerability or sensitivity was a trigger for my father. If he saw me being vulnerable or sensitive, he would go into a rage.

just when I needed him most. But he was very contemptuous of weakness and vulnerability. So he would never talk about his childhood. I knew it was very difficult. He lost his mother when he was eight. His father and he and his brother lived through the Depression in America. His father was kind of the black sheep of the family. Couldn't find work. They moved in with another relative.

The relative was mean to my dad. And I got my dad to tell me, gosh, I was close to 30, that when he was, what, 11-ish, his father brought he and his brother, younger brother, into the garage and turned on the car and told him to go to sleep. And my father knew that.

that there was something wrong. And he went back and forth with his dad and finally physically fought him. And he says his shoe cracked the window. And he and his brother got out. And then he was banished the next day. When he told you this story...

Did that change anything about how you saw your father? Did it shift something in your understanding? Did it make you understand something about him? Yes, of course. It softened my heart, and I felt bad for him, and I understood immediately. And he said, my father was a passive man, my father was a weak man. Your father said that about his father. That's right. And so he became the anti-fascist.

And the anti-that was a macho asshole. But I could understand why he would be contemptuous of what he deemed as weakness. Because it reminded him of his own father? Because his father's weakness threatened to kill him. It was murderous. The way that you...

Opened up space, as it were, encouraged your father to share. Was that sort of the beginnings of Terry Real's approach to therapy with men? Like, did you seed anything in?

in that conversation that we now see in your practice today? That's a beautiful question. We don't have to go into a lot of detail, but for two years, Belinda and I and my kids and... Belinda's your wife, yeah. Yeah, a great family therapist in her own right, I want to say. We were followed by a documentarian, and there's a docuseries that's coming out about us. And one of the beginning scenes of the, astoundingly enough,

I was 34 years old, not married yet to Belinda. And my parents came for a week of family therapy with me. Wow. Whoa. And we filmed it. And the film survived. And what you see, and I hadn't seen it for 40 years. Wait, were you, was someone doing family therapy on you, your mom, and your dad? Or were you doing family therapy on the three of you? No, someone was doing family therapy with us. Gotcha. Yeah.

And what you see is after 10 minutes, I sideline the therapist, who's pretty irrelevant, actually. And I move in to my dad and mom. I am doing relational life therapy with my parents at 34. You see it. What are you seeing yourself doing? One of the core principles of RLT is what we call joining through the truth.

confronting people, but in a way that's precise and loving so that they can hear it.

One of the things that therapy school says about grandiose people in general and men in particular is, you know, don't tell truth to power. I believe my field colludes with patriarchy and protecting perpetrators. We have done a great job of helping people for 50 years come up from shame camps.

But we've been ridiculously ineffective at helping people come down from grandiosity. And I knew that I had to do that. So there was a moment with my dad. He started crying. I get it. Forgive me. He talked about his mother who died. He talked about his exile. And he started crying. And he said...

I haven't felt any of this. I haven't thought about this my whole life until you started probing, Terry. And as he was crying, I put my hand on his shoulder and I said, you cry, old man. Every tear you cry is a tear I don't have to. That was pretty wise at 34. Watching yourself say those words...

now 30 years later? Yes. Do they have new meaning to you? Yes. Can you tell me about that? Here's my most famous quote. It's the height of pretension to quote yourself, but I will. You can do it. Thank you. Family pathology. Family pathology. Rolls from generation to generation like a fire in the woods burning.

taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames. That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children to follow. And you were doing that in this moment. You were facing the flames. Or your father was facing the flames. Or both of you were. We both were. It was a rare moment. We both were.

That's a remarkable scene you just shared, and I really appreciate you telling us about it. And it is remarkable. I mean, you say it's wise for 34. This is the beginning of your practice. Like, you were just starting to develop this approach to working with men. And I find it pretty remarkable that one of the first men you practiced this on, or did this with, rather, was your own father. That feels apt and healing and quite difficult.

Apt and healing and difficult. I'll tell you this. I am the son of a depressed, angry father. He was the son of a depressed, angry father. I have two boys, 35, 37. Neither of them say that, and neither will their children. And that is the greatest accomplishment of my life. Can I ask you, Terry, as you developed and honed in on this story

approach to therapy and developed this focus. Is it right to call it a focus on men, a specialty? Is it right to call it a focus? Sure, yeah. No, I consider myself a relationship expert and an expert on male psychology. As you developed this focus on male psychology, did

You've talked a bit about the sort of larger therapeutic community, but how did your colleagues respond? I feel like it's just, you know, speaking for me, I feel like it's easy to look at men, especially white men, and say comparatively this group of people has way more privilege, as you've noted, than other groups in society. So did anyone say like, you know, did you ever get pushback on that focus? That sort of, I don't know, privileging as it were of that group?

Am I mansplaining? No, I more so just mean, like, did anyone say, like, why focus on this group of people who already has so much power? Although what I'm hearing you say is because this group of people has so much power, that's why I'm interested in focusing on them. Well, yes and no. I mean, power...

Yes. Miserableness also. I think one of the revolutionary things I said, and I really want to give a shout out to some beautiful early feminist psychologists, the folks at the Stone Center, Jean Baker Miller, but most of all, Carol Gilligan, my dear friend, who are man-loving feminists. And

They as well. I was really and to some degree am one of the few male voices saying patriarchy is a system that does damage to everybody. Hmm.

Yes, men are on top and women are on the bottom. But if that's your idea of what's on the top, you know, not to whatever, but there was a, I won't say who, but there was an expert on TV talking about aspirational masculinity and how all these young men are looking at Elon Musk.

Yeah, sure. Richest man in the world to send people to Mars. Fantastic. You want to be married to that guy? Most people don't. And if that's what you want to aspire to, I don't want to get too close to you. Well, you're bringing up something that I wanted to ask you about, which is like,

I'm really curious your perspective on what masculinity means right now. We talked about your early understandings of it, and this is a concept, certainly. I feel like human society has wrestled with since maybe the dawn of human society. It does feel to me, though, that we are at a kind of flashpoint moment.

culturally, at least in the United States, where men who hold on to traditional values of masculinity are lashing out, they're reasserting those values, they're sending to power in some cases. What are you seeing in the year 2025? What is going on with men? Big question, Terry, but I feel like you're the person to ask this to. Yeah.

You know, not to be grandiose myself, but I want to take ownership. I am the person to ask this to, and I'll tell you why. There are no models. There are no models of healthy relational masculinity. None. Yeah. And, you know, boys and men are floundering. Everybody knows that. But

Look, someone described my work as women have had a revolution and now men have to deal with it. The response to the challenge that women are presenting to men in their marriages, in the job market, in education, has largely been blowback, a resurgence of the most

traditional and frankly unappealing aspects of traditional patriarchy, just dominance and bullying. That ain't it. And so I don't want women to stand down from their demands. I want men to stand up and meet them. What women are asking for from men is,

is relationality, is learning to be intimate, is opening up your heart and sharing your feelings, being vulnerable, being soft when your partner's vulnerable, being responsible. These are all wonderful things for guys. Stop whining and let me teach you how to do it. And the conundrum for men is,

is what you learned about what it means to be a strong man as a boy guarantees you'll be seen as a lousy husband as a man. You cannot be invulnerable and intimate at the same time. So when I help men move into openheartedness, connection, the expression of feeling, compassion, responsibility, giving,

I am, and I named this, I'm explicitly reconfiguring masculinity with them.

I mean, you're talking about these models of masculinity, and I'm thinking about the models that are out there right now, especially kind of ascendant ones that are very different from what you're laying out. I'm thinking specifically about the manosphere, as it's called. These are podcasts, YouTube channels, online forums, influencers that are really pushing traditional masculinity. Do you ever see that kind of stuff? And what do you feel when you do see it?

You want my mature therapeutic self or you want my New Jersey self? You can give me your New Jersey self. I want to throttle them. And what would the therapeutic self say? People with simple ideas will not have a hard time getting an audience. But these are...

carnival barkers who are leading our young men down the path of suicide. You know the TV show Adolescence, right? Yeah, it's big right now. And all the press it got. You cannot reassert your masculinity through dominance and bullying and violence. That is not...

the answer. It's just not. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, Terry reels hope for the future and what he thinks it will take for men to get there. Terry, I'm curious whether this mission of reaching men feels more urgent to you now than it has before. Oh my God. I mean,

I would say the house is burning. That's not a metaphor. Our planet is burning. I started off my last book, Us, with the father of family therapy, the great anthropologist Gregory Basin, Margaret Mead's husband, who is truly the creator of family therapy. Basin called Western civilization's philosophical error,

And that's this, that we stand apart from nature. That's individualism. That's what the word individual means. We stand apart from nature. That's what I call toxic individualism. And we control nature. That's patriarchy. And whether the nature we think we can and should control is our bodies or

Our marriages, our kids, our country, the planet. The delusion of dominance is suicidal at this point. I mean, you've written before about some of the progress you've seen men make over the years. You wrote once that millennial men in particular were the most gender progressive generation ever.

maybe ever. And given what we've been talking about, the resurgence of traditional masculinity, the manosphere, I just wonder, like, does that trend feel like it's reversing for you right now? Yes, it does. 100%. It's a backlash. It's a resurgence. And frankly, I think it's sort of the death, it's the last gasp

of a model of power and masculinity that... Look...

Relationality is the card I've got in my back pocket. And that's what we're born for. That's what we're designed for. And that's what will keep us in this planet alive. The dominance model makes for miserable people, miserable marriages, miserable families, and will choke the planet Earth. Man, I mean, but it seems like...

that is the direction that we're headed. I mean, you said that this is kind of the last gasp, but I don't know. It doesn't feel like a last gasp. It feels like perhaps this approach to the world is gaining steam. Well, it is gaining steam in the moment. I believe that an accurate reflection of reality will prevail the dysfunctionality of

of this approach will become more and more clear and people will move into something more mature and nuanced. The issue is, you know, how many generations is that going to take and what kind of shape will we be in? What I work with with the guys I work with is what I call learning to become family men. Mm-hmm.

And what I say is a boy's question of the world is, what do you got for me? It's gratification. What do you got for me? A man's question of the world is, what do you need? What do you need? And being a family man means what's central here is not you and your needs. What's central here is the team and what they need from you. I talk to many of the men I work with about the distinction between gratification and

and what I call relational joy. And gratification is just what you think it is. It's a short-term hit of pleasure, taking a drink, smoking a joint. A pretty girl flirts with you. You make a killing that day in the stock market. Your kid gets an A. Great. I like pleasure in its place.

Relational joy, which I have to teach so many of the men I work with, even what it is. Relational joy is a deeper down pleasure that comes just from being in the relationship and being connected. And sometimes it's gratifying. Sometimes it's a pain in the neck. You know, I tell a story of my beautiful Alexander, now 35.

when he was little, I was giving him a timeout and we didn't have locks. And so I was holding his bedroom door shut. I mean, this guy was like maybe two foot three. And that door on the other side trying to get over, I mean, it was like poultry. There were, lightning was coming out of that. I mean, the earth. You were holding the door

door shut because he was inside because he needs to be in timeout and you didn't have a lock on the door. I can see this scene. That little guy is trying to get it open and I'm telling you, it's all... So a part of me wanted to just throw him... Truly, I talk about normal hatred in families. A part of me wanted to just throw him through the window. I was so mad. Yet the deeper down part was like, you mighty little spirit, you. Wow. You're going to do great. And...

What so many of the men in our culture don't understand is the simple joy of being and connection. Terry, I have just a couple more questions for you. Here's a big one. Why should men listen to what you have to say? Men should listen to what I'm saying because it's in your interest to. You will be happier.

Your marriage will be happier. You will change the legacy that you pass on to your children. And listen, I know how important that is to you out there, whoever's listening, that guy. The American dream, everybody talks about what is the American dream? The American dream is the dream that our children will have it better than we did.

When we think about that, we almost always think about that in terms of material success. But I want you to think about your children having a better legacy than you had. I think ma'am will listen. You know, the thing is that I'm right. The thing is that I'm right. I mean, I love it. Terry, you've mentioned education.

Your wife, Belinda, who's also a family therapist. Brilliant, brilliant therapist, yes. Can I ask you, like, a thing I find really remarkable and frankly soothing about talking to you is you have an answer and usually like a phrase or you've written a book as an answer to so many of my questions. But of course, you know, no one has all of the answers and we are constantly working on ourselves. And I guess really to close, like, what is something that you are working on now

in yourself and in your marriage to Belinda. Yeah, this is hilarious. So there, you know, in families, they're famous stories. And here's one that it was true then. And I'm still working on it now. And my kids were teenagers. They're in their thirties now. They both joined hands and kind of bounced up to me and said, dad,

Are you aware of the fact that when we confront you with something we're critical about, that you're dismissive of us? And I looked at them, and this is absolutely true, and I looked at them and I said, that's ridiculous. LAUGHTER

I don't do that. Stop it. Yeah. So let's just leave it there. That is so sweet. Terry Real, thank you so much for this conversation. It gave me a lot to think about and I'm grateful. I am very grateful. It's been a blast talking to you. I really appreciate it. Terry Real, everyone. Thank you.

Look, I feel like there's still so much left to say about all of this. So Terry is actually going to come back in a few weeks to talk to us all about fatherhood. You know, we've been asking for your stories about your dad for our Father's Day episode, and we are definitely still accepting those stories. But if you are a dad or are about to be a dad or are dad adjacent in some way, we'd love to hear your questions for Terry.

He's agreed to give our listeners his advice on fatherhood, like how to parent in a world filled with all sorts of mixed messages about how men should be, or maybe how to repair a mistake you made as a dad. Perhaps you feel like you're doing great, but there's this one part of being a father that's hard to figure out.

Send us your questions and Terry will do his best to offer advice. You can record them as a voice memo and send them to modernlovepodcast at nytimes.com. That's modernlovepodcast at nytimes.com. We've got some tips for submitting in our show notes. Thanks, and we can't wait to hear from you.

This episode was produced by Davis Land. It was edited by our executive producer, Jen Poyant. Production management by Christina Josa. The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music in this episode by Diane Wong, Pat McCusker, and Dan Powell. This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez, with studio support from Maddie Macielo and Nick Pittman.

Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Lisa Tobin, Wendy Dorr, Emily Lang, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda. And to our video team, Brooke Minters, Felice Leone, Michael Cordero, and Sawyer Roque. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects. If you'd like to submit an essay or a tiny love story to the New York Times, we'll have the instructions in our show notes. I'm Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.