In the first two parts of this series, we explored how men and masculine presenting people are socialized through trauma — taught to fear vulnerability and disown emotional intimacy — and how this leads to embodied trauma responses in adult relationships. We also explored how women, especially cis women, but also anyone who would be partnered to people who have internalized masculine gender socialization, are left emotionally starved and overburdened by the imbalance that results.

Now we ask the deeper question:Why do so many masculine presenting people choose power over connection — even when it costs them love, intimacy, and emotional fulfillment?

[A note on gender inclusivity - Everything I’ve written here about men and boys can apply to cis-men, transmen, nonbinary people, and anyone who internalized masculine gender socialization. It can also apply to people others identified as men or boys, but they themselves didn’t feel they were men or boys. … Everything I’ve written here about women can apply to cis-women, transwomen, nonbinary people, and anyone who internalized feminine gender socialization. It can also apply to people others identified as women and girls, but they themselves didn’t feel they were women and girls.]

Power Feels Safer Than Vulnerability — If You’ve Been Shamed for Being Soft

When we talk about masculine people and power, we’re not just talking about violence or domination. We’re also talking about:

• Control over emotional space and discourse

• Control over how and when feelings are named or shared

• Control over who gets to be “too much” and who gets to shut down

• Control over the narrative of masculinity in public

This isn't always intentional. It's often adefense mechanism. A form ofemotional armoringlearned early in life, when softness was punished and strength meant surviving.

As Resmaa Menakem writes, trauma lives in the body. And when people who have internalized masculine socialization experience moments of emotional closeness, their nervous systems often read it asa threat— not because they don’t want love, but becauselove requires openness, and openness once meant pain.

So when confronted with tenderness, many people:

• Fight (deflect, argue, belittle)

• Flight (withdraw, ghost, avoid)

• Freeze (shut down, go numb)

These are not flaws of character.They aretrauma responseswired into the body through decades of social conditioning (aka, complex-PTSD).

Connection Requires Surrender — And Patriarchy Tells Us That Surrender is Death

Patriarchy doesn't just offer people who have internalized masculine socialization privilege — it demands that they sacrifice parts of themselves in exchange.

It teaches:

“To be a “man”, you must never need. Never yield. Never feel.”

This is a lie that isolates masculine people from their full humanity. But it's a seductive lie, because it offers protection — the illusion of invulnerability.

Connection, by contrast, requires:

• Admitting you don’t know

• Risking rejection

• Letting someone else impact you, and feeling the vulnerable feelings that may come from that

• Taking responsibility for your impact, and feeling the feelings that may come with that

And all of thisterrifies the traumatized nervous systemof a masculine person raised to believe that needing someone means being weak, and yielding means being less of a “man”.

So many masculine people — consciously or not — choose power over intimacy. And they often don’t realize they’re doing it. All they know is that emotional closeness makes them feel anxious, defensive, or lost. So they reach for what feels familiar and safe: control.

But Power Is a Poor Substitute for Love

Here’s the paradox:The very thing masculine people have been taught to fear — vulnerability — is the key to the connection they crave.

So instead, many pursue:

• Respect instead of intimacy, and connection

• Authority instead of attunement, and authentic consent

• Sex without emotional presence

• Safety in public image, while dying privately of loneliness

And it’s not just their partners who suffer.They suffer.Even when masculine people “win” at power, theyloseat love.

Healing Requires Community — Not Just Therapy

Therapy is great and often essential. We must encourage people to do their individual healing work. But, we cannot completely individualize our way out of a collective wound. The trauma of masculinity is not just personal — it’ssystemic, and so healing must berelational and cultural.

That means:

• Spaces where masculine people are invited to feel — without being shamed or mocked, by anyone, by especially by other masculine people

• Somatic work (as Menakem emphasizes) that helps masculine people regulate their nervous systems and sit with discomfort without fleeing

• Relationship paradigms that reward emotional reciprocity and interdependence — not dominance and stoicism

• Encouraging masculine people to buildplatonic emotional intimacywith other masculine people and with people of all gender expressions — not just rely on romantic partners as their only source of connection

And it means women and feminine presenting people also needsupport and liberation— not just advice on how to "get through to him." They deserve relationships that don’t require them to be emotional translators, trauma holders, or resilience machines.

This Is All of Our Work

Whether we are men, women, trans, nonbinary, queer, or otherwise — we are all affected by the emotional severing created by patriarchal gender roles.This isn’t just about fixing men and other masculine people. It’s aboutreclaiming wholeness for all of us.

Because until we reframe what we’ve called “normal masculinity” and identified it for what it is —complex trauma, we’ll keep wondering why so many relationships feel like battlegrounds instead of sanctuaries.

And until we build cultures where closeness is honored over control, where emotional safety is shared, and where healing is collective — we will keep mistaking loneliness for independence, and control for love.

💬 Final Invitation

What do you think? How does this post and this series make you feel? What is your life experience with these issues? Please share in the comments. It’s only by having conversations about these issues can we invite cultural change. And, if this topic resonates with you — if you see these patterns in your relationships, your family, your community — you are not alone.

We are in the midst of a great cultural shift.And this shift starts with one quiet, radical question:What if I chose connection — even when it scares me?

Thanks for reading. If this article resonates with you, please share it. To step outside these systems is to invite the healing all of humanity needs.