Becoming a Man

By Mike DeMartini

I’d hit the wall. I was forty-five years old, fifty breathing down my neck, saddled with a wife and a two- year old boy. My choices seemed to be either to run away, or just go on suffering. Doctors responded to my plight by giving me medications that didn’t work. My wife urged me to see a therapist. I fought that suggestion -- after all, real men don’t ask directions, seek help, or go to therapists. They fight, flee, or suffer silently and die. I couldn’t bring myself to leave my son, so I just wanted to be left alone with my misery.

When my wife’s urging became an ultimatum, I grudgingly went to see someone her hairdresser (of all people) had suggested, ‘a guy’s guy.’ The experience left me stunned. One hour with this man, a counselor named Harry Shannon, gave me perspective and an understanding of the root of my depression. It started a spiritual journey to actualize my gender potential, my human potential -- to become a ‘mature masculine’.

At our first meeting, Harry listened for about ten minutes before cutting in on my self-pitying monologue. “Let me get this straight. What you want to do is move to Oregon, have sex with eighteen year olds, and smoke dope all day?”

My face lit up in acknowledgement of such acute perception.

“Bad idea!” scowled Harry.

My problem was really that I just didn’t want to grow up. I was under the influence of the ‘inexorable pull of the infantile.’ I had gleaned my images of personal happiness from a series of failed stereotypes contemporary culture had bombarded me with since childhood -- images summarized by commercials shown during sporting events in which the good life is achieved by drinking a lot of beer, driving a fast car, and sleeping with well-endowed 18-25-year-old women.

These are images the poet Robert Bly, the founder of the modern men’s movement, called ‘worn out’, and said ‘do not work in life’. A long journey to mature masculinity began with the hope, as Bly puts it in the preface to his book Iron John, that, “Such a man is open to new visions of what a man is or could be.”

From that point forward, with Harry as my guide and mentor, I had the promise that with commitment, a new sense of integrity, and the pursuit of the difficult application of some simple and well laid out insights and steps, I could reach my male potential and transcend any previous notion of happiness. This new path demanded a shift from impulse-based behaviors to values-based behaviors. It would force me to connect to the deep-rooted, archetypal elements of the male psyche that transcend race, culture, ethnicity, and time.

The understanding of what it is to be a man, a mature masculine, and how to achieve this can free every man from his dissatisfaction, despair, and the self-destruction to which he is prone -- his dis-ease. The path benefits the individual male, but also those people in his life to whom he is responsible: wife, children, and the society as a whole. All one needs to know is already contained within us. Initiated men -- mentors -- can lead other males to the treasure. We are in complete control of achieving it, and no external obstacles can hinder us from the pursuit.

Harry and I first examined two specific connections I’d already made to the archetypal masculine. One was my exceptional father, who always prioritized his family and gave me much of his quality time. The other was my successful career as a high-school teacher -- a job I never planned to take back when I was a freewheeling, longhaired younger guy. While there may be no empirical evidence that the specific steps necessary to become a man exist, there is a method that works. I have lived this and passed it on to others.

This thirty-year career now includes a course I created from my personal experience, entitled “Becoming a Man.” I have been teaching this course to high-school seniors in an all-male Catholic school for more than six years. What follows encompasses not only my own personal journey, but the elements of that course, which codified these ideas and methods. We males are
all on this journey together. Therefore, the totality of what I call “Becoming a Man” will include not only what I have taught my students, but also what they have taught me.

Mike De Martini has been teaching in private high schools in Los Angeles for the past thirty years. He is currently working on a book tied to his men's studies course, Becoming A Man, as well as giving seminars on the topic, hoping to take the course to the university level. Mike lives in Woodland Hills with his wife and two children, ages ten and five. He can be reached through the editorial email of this site at gregory@familymanonline.com.