Dad, I Don’t Love You
Dad…I…I don’t love you.
I paused, searching his sun-leathered face, and landed squarely into his hazel eyes. The moment hung between us, suspended by the tension of what was and what could be. Then a shadow crossed over him, and my body grew instantly icy. He put me down, turned and walked into his study, and sat in the large winged back chair. He sat there in the dark in silence for hours. I remained outside the study door, perched on the hallway carpet, waiting intently for him to emerge.
My mother hovered around him nervously, wringing her hands. Then she marched over to me, grabbed me by the wrist, and dragged me to the kitchen table, “You need to make this right!” she hissed, “Tell him you were just teasing. Tell him you love him. Tell him he is a great father.” Then, pushing me back down the hallway towards the study, “Now!”
What had led me to say such a thing to my father? I had been playing on the floor with my dog, lost in my own world. Suddenly, the back door opened, and it was my father, coming home from months overseas. “Hello!” he called cheerfully. I remember my heart dropping, and that familiar feeling, like a light dimming. This was always the experience—a sad contrast to the weeks of his absence when the household would gently unfurl into an open easiness. And then as soon as he returned, it would snap back closed and dark, like a sea creature when one touches it.
I desperately wanted it to be different. I wanted to feel warm and happy in his company. I wanted to feel closer to him, not afraid of him. I just knew, in all my seven-year-old wisdom, that if I could tell him the truth of what I was feeling, he and I could fix it…together.
I didn’t know that my honesty could fell his ominous six-foot-four frame like a great redwood. I didn’t know that four small words could shatter his spirit into tiny shrapnel, like thin ice giving way beneath a single step.
In that moment, I learned about men’s fragility, and the eggshell-walking strategies I would need to embody to live inside their world. I learned that speaking up and speaking out, even with the intention to bridge or bond, can lead to alienation and ultimately to annihilation. I also learned about the chasm between the masculine and the feminine, and it sparked curiosity about how to heal it.
I love men. I am besotted with my brother. And my son, well, there are no words to describe my utter adoration and respect for him. My deceased stepbrother was my ally and closest confidant. My very first friend in kindergarten was Kevin. He had buck teeth and an eye that went a little sideways. In college, I was a fraternity “little sister”—way more fun than the sorority scene. And I have wonderful, longstanding friendships with men. There is nothing quite like the kind of hang one can do in the good company of guys.
And…
I have suffered at the hands of men.
If you wander the hallways and back alleys of the gender wars, you soon discover the underlying system that created it all—patriarchy. Here's what I know patriarchy to be, not from a textbook, but from a hallway carpet outside a darkened study. Patriarchy is the social soup we all swim in that defines who men are and how the rest of us must organize around that.
Life is far more beautifully complex than any binary can hold. I know this. Many of the people I love exist outside the patriarch’s masculine-feminine binaries entirely, and their experience of gender and power is its own intricate truth. But language requires some banks to flow between, and so for the purposes of this conversation, I am speaking in the broad cultural strokes of masculine and feminine—not because I believe those are the only strokes, but because they are the ones that built the house we are all living in.
Patriarchy also oppresses, silences, and ironically, renders its cherished lieutenants fragile. Even with all the privilege patriarchy confers, I continue to see how brutally it impoverishes the men I love. To indoctrinate them into the system as agents of perpetration, it first robs them, when they are very small boys, of their innate gifts. Research shows that between the ages of four and seven, boys learn to quash their emotional intelligence and sensitivity. Patriarchy clearly defines masculinity and existentially threatens any boy who dares to feel his way outside of those rigid definitions.
I remember the sensitivity of my son when he was small, how tender he was, how psychic and empathetic. How much he tracked the emotional well-being of others and sweetly offered his kindness. I remember how the older boys and men cruelly teased him when he cried. I watched as he and his friends grew into a kind of amnesia, forgetting the porous vulnerability once afforded them—still kind, but more confused.
I remember the gentleness of my little cousin, his openness to the natural world, and his aching curiosity to linger over a ladybug for hours. I remember how my uncle took him on his first hunting trip, where antelope were rounded into a pen, unable to escape, and shot at close range by beer-drinking rednecks. My cousin wept at the cruelty. He was chided and scorned for being a pussy.
For girls, it happens a little later. Maybe it’s by design, once the boys are absorbed and can get to work on the rest of us. At around 11 years old, girls learn to silence their outspoken honesty. We learn to keep the patriarchy’s secrets, for the price of speaking out, speaking up, and sharing our honest first-hand experience is extremely high. If girls and women want to survive, if they want to be promoted or respected, we must dull our insight. Because the thing about women is that we live with men, so we know what can’t be known if patriarchy is going to persist.
I remember as a child being able to see through the veneers of social interactions. When I would name the truth no one wanted to hear, I was immediately shut down, or worse, spanked and sent to my room. My escalating stress and emotions about the incongruencies all around me were seen as problematic. Over time, my desire to be candid gave way to a desire to be good.
As the internet escalates and amplifies the ages-old tension, we find ourselves tautly strung between the Manosphere and MeToo, magnifying the ultimate expression of our differences. One saying, “Hey, you are hurting me (and shame on you)!” and the other insisting it doesn’t get it, and “Shut the F— up (and die)!”
Louis Thoreaux’s recently released documentary Inside the Manosphere exposes an alarmingly popular online male subculture centered on misogyny, violence, money, and muscle. Its star influencers prey on young men and boys who are vulnerable to their hard lined stance that boys and men “have no value” (women have all the value because they have vaginas and beauty), and so men must claim their place in society with a supremacist fist.
You watch young fans cluster around these charlatans like baby birds, father-starved and gaping for any crumb of acknowledgment—the hunger carved into them before they had words for it. A legacy of trauma unfolding before your eyes.
Critics of the film say it makes a spectacle of the phenomenon, oversimplifying the vast range of the manosphere’s malevolence and downplaying the sheer scale of the harm it causes. However, I would argue that Thoreaux’s iconic deadpan, nerdish delivery, in contrast to his interviewees’ more outrageous behavior, is highly effective in letting his key “manfluencers” hang themselves.
Without saying as much, Thoreaux peels back the veil to reveal the insecurity, trauma and fragility of these men, like Toto pulling back the Wizard’s curtain. We see the little man, desperately pulling the levers, working himself into a lather to uphold a façade. We see the fear this monstrous mask is perpetrating, a dangerous and unspeakable use of power.
In that moment, we are led to hold a painful paradox, the one I’ve been holding my whole life: men are both the perpetrators of harm and its first casualties, and that paradox is not a reason to excuse them, but it may be the only reason to reach them.
But how do we cross that distance?
First, we must stop pretending the two sides are equivalent. Misogyny and misandry are not opposite poles of the same coin. One is power wielded. The other is the response of those it's wielded against. Until we understand that difference, we cannot begin.
Misandry can hurt a man’s feelings. A woman can be mean. She can withdraw from men; she’ll disengage or disparage them as a collective to all her girlfriends. But misogyny gets a woman killed. Misogyny causes a man to stab a woman to death because she ignored his catcalls. Misogyny leads to domestic violence; misogyny removes civil rights.
While cooking on this essay, I was driving home, half-listening to a podcast, when culture critic Monte Mader stopped me cold: “Misandry holds no proximity to power, and when we equate misandry with misogyny, we are equating the value of a woman’s life with the value of a man’s feelings. Instead, if you treat and you cure the disease known as misogyny, misandry disappears because it’s a symptom, it’s not the problem.”
This disease is unnatural. It’s not native to men’s inheritance. So why did it arise in the first place? “You take a whole human being, draw a line down the middle, everything to the right is called ‘masculine’, everything to the left is called ‘feminine’,” says award-winning psychologist and author Carol Gilligan. Then the quote-unquote “masculine” qualities are exalted, while the feminine qualities are devalued, she continues. “The essential relationship between masculine and feminine is contempt. Take that in. This is called western civilization.” And this is where misogyny is born.
How do we cure misogyny? The way back lies in the gifts that each boy and girl was forced to relinquish. Men need to reach back into themselves and reclaim their emotional intelligence and sensitivity. Women need to discover and reclaim their outspoken honesty.
Since that first seminal struggle with my father, I've spent years learning how to bring that honesty forward without it becoming a weapon or a wound. I've sat across from men I loved, heart hammering, words fumbling, and said the true thing anyway. Sometimes they left the room. Sometimes they’ve fired me. Sometimes they’ve screamed or worse.
But sometimes something cracks open between us. I remember risking tough feedback with a male colleague, naming directly how his behavior was undermining women on his team. I said the true thing. I watched the words impact him. I held my breath, that darkened study close in my memory. I watched him want to defend himself, and choose not to. And then it happened…his shoulders dropped, his eyes softened, and he said, “You’re right, thank you.”
As a woman, I am learning that my candor is not only a road to greater intimacy in my relationships with men, but is also my greatest social justice tool. It’s better than any vote, letter to my Senator, or protest (and I do all three). It shows up in daily conversations, moments in the grocery store line, and family gatherings. But—and this is essential—it has to be done with love. Love is the absolute key.
I am learning how to, in spite of the resentment and frustration that I can sometimes feel, reach through that layer of reaction, and instead abide in that genuine love I have not only for the man in front of me, but men in general. And I must reach through a bizarre compulsion to protect them from my truth. I must challenge myself not to upregulate. Because this protection is not love. It’s collusion and enablement.
My honesty as a woman breaks with an ages-old agreement of female silence. It signals a system that I will no longer keep the secrets of the patriarchy. As women, if we stop keeping the secrets, the patriarchy will start to crumble. This is good, not just for women, but for all genders across the spectrum.
The thing about women is that we live with men. We know “what can’t be known” if patriarchy is going to persist. Hence, we are the ones to hold up the mirror. James Baldwin said, "If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things that you do not see." And so “My friend, it’s in your interest to give this up.” This is our stretch, as women.
We are not calling men out; we are calling them in.
But the price for speaking out is dear. Women, overall, are afraid to speak to their partners, husbands, brothers, or colleagues because no matter how cleanly, kindly, or vulnerably they deliver their message, men still interpret the honesty as a threat. They might lash out and attack. They might shut down. They could endlessly litigate and interrogate. They might leave the room and stonewall or punish. Or, like my father, they might disintegrate into a pile of ash before your eyes.
This revolution to end the patriarchy takes two.
So here’s where the men’s role lies: allow yourself to be unmasked. Allow yourself to be revealed as human. Challenge that part in you that wants to compulsively defend yourself when a woman takes the risk to be honest with you. Because here is the secret—to a psychology constructed on lies (what it means to be “a man”) —the loving dismantling spoken by a woman through her candor, no matter how it is spoken, will feel mean. It will feel threatening. It will feel like annihilation. But the reason it feels that way is because it is annihilating a false ego. Her honesty is love in action.
What’s on the other side of undoing is love, connection, a great marriage, not passing patriarchy on to your children, your team trusting you more, and meaning.
When men move into sensitive vulnerability, and women move into truthfulness, both reclaiming their inherent gifts, it bypasses the collective trauma humans have suffered at the hands of the patriarchy for thousands of years. That sea creature, finally unfurling. Finally opening into the easiness of what we could be, together.
If this essay spoke to you we invite you to save the date and join us November 11-13, 2026 at Buffalo Spirit Ranch for a co-ed retreat, Rewilding: Reclaiming your self-agency in a world that wants to tame you. Learn more by reaching out to us at connect@equusinspired.com
Kelly Wendorf is an ICF Master Certified executive and personal coach, published author, spiritual mentor, disruptor, and socially responsible entrepreneur. As founder of EQUUS® she specializes in the liberation of robust leadership capacities in those who are most qualified — the empathetic, the conscientious, the accountable, the generous, and the kind. Did you like this essay? Kelly is available for a wide range of services including Coaching, Workshops, The EQUUS Experience®, Retreats, Keynote Speaking and more. Kelly is the Author of Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for Living and Leading.
