It’s not You, it’s Us: Deconstructing my Fear of Relationships with Men

Trigger warning: some talk of sexual predation

I’ve always been afraid of men, almost without exception.
I remember a day when I was thirteen, and I wanted to walk from our country house to the dollar store, about two miles. My entrepreneurial young self was always devising new ways to earn money, and quick ways to spend it. In those days, self-advocacy wasn’t yet a struggle for me, and I demanded what I wanted without hesitancy. When I received a “no” in the face of my expressed desires, I protested with a vehemence and moral umbrage that teens are expressly capable, so most parental conversations required exhaustive explanations.

My dad told me it “wasn’t safe” and that I “didn’t know what men were thinking” when they drove past and saw me. The way he put it, if I walked down that heavily-trafficked road, I’d never be heard from again.
That particular day, I was wearing a loose-fitting white t-shirt and faded denim mid-90s Levis. It was the summer before I’d sprung my trusty DDs, and I couldn’t understand what about my body made me unsafe.

His message was one of caution: the world isn’t safe, and you shouldn’t feel safe. To his everlasting credit, he didn’t make me feel like that was my fault. Nothing was wrong with me, it was those uncontrollable animals that couldn’t be trusted. Boys. Men. I was altogether lovely, and they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from acting in ways that would hurt me.

(I want to be clear about this: My gratitude towards my parents for keeping me safe from predators cannot be overstated. I’m part of an alarmingly low percentage of humans that wasn’t abused as a child, and I owe that in large part to the protective and fearful nature of my parents. An over-developed fear of male-presenting bodies is a trauma that pales in comparison to potential alternatives.)

The outrage at having my plans thwarted eventually faded, but the fear remained. For most of my life, I didn’t consciously realize how scared I was, not really. Fear is funny in the forms that it can take, shifting its shape to adapt to the situation. Until I was in my twenties, I didn’t make eye contact with men I wasn’t directly addressed by if ever it was avoidable, and I certainly didn’t do the addressing. I never had male friends. I looked on suspicion at any man that sought out interaction or time with me, and even more so if they asked me questions about myself, believing that it was indicative of an underlying motive. As a result of my cold and unyielding demeanor, most of them didn’t try that hard. There were a few notable exceptions: one boy mustered up the courage to express feelings to me via email and make his case for our couple-hood, and another became convinced that I was sending him secret messages by talking loudly in his vicinity about wanting to someday live in a cabin with a family. There were some bosses that used their authority to get much more from me than I would have liked to give, as it goes. But for the most part, when I ignored or deflected male interactions, they just left me alone.

All of this was greatly exacerbated by the toxic purity culture that exists within most Christian circles, and my impression of male bodies as uncontrollable and female bodies as irresistible was reinforced for decades(purity culture will have its own spotlight another day).
I was single, not having gone on a single date, until the age of twenty-four, leading to countless implied and overt speculations about my sexual orientation(another subject I’ll delve into more in the future).

During my first relationship, I violently wept every time we said goodbye, practically begging him not to go the five miles back to his house. I actually lived with my pastor at the time, whose house rules dictated that the guy couldn’t stay with me, leaving us both in a confusing and painful position. At the time, I had no idea where the panic was coming from. Turns out, my fear of men had also left me deeply convinced that I’d be abandoned by them. After all, they were unwieldy and flighty creatures given to any manner of whims or urges.

I’d somehow learned that men were both weaker and stronger than I could ever imagine.

Five years later when I gave romance a second shot, I started having panic attacks when I realized we probably wouldn’t be together forever.

In my experience, fear tends to masquerade as a healthy desire to feel safe. For most of us, that creates defense mechanism that we likely needed for a time. Our minds are always trying to protect us, and this is a very good thing. As we grow and heal, we realize that we don’t need so many protective mechanisms, and those barriers begin to lower enough for us to peek inside at what they’ve been protecting us from.

There is a larger question at play here as well, one that I won’t attempt to answer today: How can anyone live a life unafraid when we’ve been given good reasons to be scared? If I uncover a satisfying answer to this, I’ll surely write a book.

My fears of men and all the ways they might hurt me can’t be fully debunked, but they’ve been redeemed over and over. I’ve been loved so well, by my brother, my dad, my friends. I’m continually learning so much about the gender spectrum that shines light on the absurdity of blanket assumptions, about any person or people group. I’ve even been hurt in some of the ways that I most feared, and realized that I’m not nearly so fragile as I used to believe.

I realize now that my dad thought instilling these beliefs and fears about what it means to be a girl in a man’s world was his attempt to keep me safe. I know now that no one can promise me safety, and that a life bracing myself for the worst isn’t the life I want for myself, or the lesson I want to pass on to anyone that looks up to me.

Maybe instead of preparing one another for the broken version of the world is less powerful than teaching each other how to be ourselves, despite the cost, until we’ve rebuilt it.

Maybe what we’ve been teaching girls about being girls, and girls about being boys, and boys about being boys and girls, in order to survive, is the very thing that has continually reinforced the ideology that built the broken version of our world in the first place.