Unrushing

I’ve started calling myself a soft man, half as a joke and half because I mean it. I cry at the end of good books. I’d rather spend a Saturday reading on the balcony than doing most other things. I like flowers in my apartment. None of this feels like a deficiency to me, but I know for a lot of guys it would. 

There’s a phrase going around, the “soft boy” or “soft man” era, and I think it’s worth unpacking a little because I don’t think most people are using it right. It’s not really about being feminine. It’s not about being less of a man. It’s more like a pushback against a very specific, very loud idea of what a man is supposed to be, an idea that’s been getting louder again lately. 

The macho thing has gotten weird 

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but somewhere in the last few years being a man online turned into a performance. Cold plunges, mouth tape, some guy screaming about discipline at 5am, everyone optimizing their testosterone like it’s a stock. There’s a whole economy built around convincing men that softness of any kind, rest, gentleness, uncertainty, is basically a personal failure. That if you’re not grinding, you’re losing. 

And look, some of that stuff is fine on its own. I’m not against a cold shower ( I actually love a cold plunge!) But the underlying message bothers me. It’s this idea that there’s one correct way to be a man, and it involves a lot of aggression dressed up as ambition. Anything softer than that gets treated like a symptom to fix. 

I grew up around that message too, in a quieter, less internety version of it. Don’t cry. Toughen up. Stop overthinking it. I spent a lot of years trying to be a certain kind of man that never actually fit me, and it took a while to notice I was uncomfortable the whole time. 

What soft actually means here 

Soft doesn’t mean weak. I want to be clear about that because it’s the first thing people assume. Being a soft man, at least the way I live it, means I don’t feel the need to prove anything to anyone anymore. It means I’ll admit when something hurt my feelings instead of turning it into anger, because anger was always more acceptable for men to show than sadness was. It means my hobbies are reading and yoga and slow travel instead of anything that requires proving something. 

None of that makes me less capable of handling hard things. If anything I think it’s made me stronger. I’m not spending energy defending an image of myself. I’m not scared that liking quiet things makes me less of a man, because I stopped believing that a man has to constantly prove his manhood in the first place. That belief is exhausting to carry around, and I carried it for a long time without noticing the weight. 

It’s not a rejection of masculinity 

I’m still a man. I still want a lot of the things men have always wanted, purpose, connection, to build something, to be someone people can rely on. I just don’t think any of that requires being hard all the time. Some of the strongest men I know are gentle. Some of the men obsessed with looking strong are the most fragile people I’ve met, because their whole identity depends on nobody ever seeing them any other way. 

Why I claim it 

I call myself a soft man because I think the label is useful right now. Not because I need a category, but because there’s a version of masculinity being sold hard online, and it helps to have a visible alternative. If a few more guys read this and feel less weird about liking books over the gym, or crying at a movie, or wanting a slow life instead of a grinding one, that’s enough for me. 

I’m not trying to convince anyone that macho is bad. Some men genuinely are that way and it’s honest for them. What I’m against is the idea that it’s the only honest way to be a man. It isn’t. I’ve found more of myself in softness than I ever did trying to be hard, and I don’t think I’m the only one. 

Maybe being a soft man isn’t a new kind of masculinity at all. 

Maybe it’s simply what masculinity looks like once you stop performing it for everyone else. 

And if that’s true, then perhaps the bravest thing a man can do isn’t become harder. 

It’s become more himself.