What Do Men Want? A Conversation We Can’t Afford to Ignore

On Saturday, I had a conversation with my younger sister. She is a practitioner in the realm of health—mental health, to be precise—and is transitioning into life coaching. She told me her clientele is predominantly women, but she wants to create space for men, for the brothers.

Then she asked me something that caught me off guard.

“What do men need help with?”

Not in the way of therapy, not in the language of trauma. That, she said, is not her lane. She doesn’t want to wade into the emotional entanglements of counseling; she wants to coach, guide, and structure pathways forward. But what do men need?

For a minute, I was stuck.

What do we, as men, actually want?

The Men We Are Given

We live in an era where masculinity is a contested terrain, a word tossed around like a weapon in a street fight. You don’t have to look far to see the caricatures offered to us as blueprints of manhood—the Andrew Tates, the Jordan Petersons, the Ben Shapiros—men who speak in absolutes, who cast the world in the rigid binary of dominance or submission. They tell us we are under attack, that our masculinity is being eroded, that we must harden ourselves, reclaim some imagined throne, man up, and take control.

It is a doctrine of maleness built on suspicion and fear. It teaches us that to be men, we must not feel too deeply, must not second-guess ourselves, and must not cede an inch. We must be strong. We must subjugate. We must win.

But win what?

The Men We Might Become

The instinctual answer that sat at the edge of my tongue when my sister asked her question was simple: we just want to be emotionally articulate.

Not fragile. Not weak. Not soft in the way they tell us to avoid. But able to name and navigate our inner world. To be men who understand that intelligence is not only a matter of strategy and power but also of emotion and grace.

Because maybe if we were raised in a world where men valued emotional fluency, we wouldn’t always think of solutions as weapons. We wouldn’t design guns when we could design books on de-escalation. We wouldn’t reach for control when we could reach for understanding. We wouldn’t think that loving our children meant only preparing them for war. We would play tea party with our daughters and sons and not feel our manhood threatened. We would say “I love you” and not mean possession, not mean conquest, but simply mean I love you.

And yet.

This is not the manhood we were given.

We were given a version of ourselves that demands control, that demands we stand at the head of every table—even the tables set by the women who raised us. And I wonder: at what point does a boy look at his mother, his grandmother, his sister, and decide he is meant to rule them? At what moment does he begin to see the women who nurtured him as subjects and not as sovereigns of their own lives?

Because maybe if we understood when that shift happens, we could understand how to stop it.

The Service We Need

So I sat with my sister’s question, and I wondered: if a service for men were to exist, what would it look like?

Is it just about success? About strategy? About coaching us to become stronger, more efficient, more commanding? Or is it about something deeper? Something that helps us unlearn the violence stitched into our identities? Something that teaches us to lead not only with the mind but also with the heart?

I don’t have an answer.

But if my sister is able to decipher that—if she is able to craft something that does not just make men successful but makes them whole—then maybe she will offer something we have always needed but never known how to ask for.

Because right now, I do not know what men truly want.

But I know what we need.