A few months ago, I learned that my chief creative officer’s partner was struggling with new fatherhood. Not in a crisis way. In the quiet way that most new dads struggle. Feeling alone in it. Not quite sure where to put what they were feeling. Not sure who to tell. Their daughter was six months old.
I recognized it immediately. My son MJ had just turned a year old. I knew exactly what it felt like to carry something I didn’t have a name for yet, with no one around who was in the same place.
I asked Rebecca if she would pass along my number. I also sent her a podcast episode. One that had cracked something open for me when I was first working through my own experience of fatherhood with my coach, Dan Doty. I left it at that. No pressure. Just an open door.
Rob texted me a few days later. He was warm, a little cautious, and grateful. We agreed to do a monthly Zoom. No agenda. Just connection.
Then three weeks went by and neither of us followed up.
I almost didn’t send what came next. It felt like too much. Like I was pushing.
I sent it anyway:
“I’m not letting you off the hook because that would be letting me off the hook too, and then neither one of us gets the benefit of connecting with each other.”
He wrote back within the hour. We got on a call that week.
WHAT WE ACTUALLY TALK ABOUT
The first call was getting to know each other. Rob and I are different in almost every external way. Different cities. Different work. Different hobbies. Different operating systems for moving through the world.
Somewhere in that first hour, something shifted. It has kept shifting since.
I had assumed, going in, that two men with such different lives would have different internal experiences of fatherhood. Different fears. Different reference points. Different ways of seeing themselves in the role.
That’s not what I found. Underneath the geography and the work and the daily routines, we were having the same experience. The same joys. The same doubts. The same quiet moments of wondering if we are enough for the people depending on us.
I’ve been thinking about why that text worked. The one where I told Rob I wasn’t letting him off the hook.
Most of us frame accountability as something we hold other people to. A standard, a deadline, a commitment they made that we’re tracking. That’s one version of it.
What I was doing in that text was something else. I wasn’t holding Rob accountable. I was being honest about what I needed. Following up on him was an act of following through on myself. If I let it go, I was the one who lost something.
That reframe matters. The things we need most are real connection, honest conversation, spaces where we can say the thing we normally keep to ourselves. They are also exactly the things we keep almost letting ourselves off the hook from pursuing.
We get busy. We assume the other person has probably moved on. We tell ourselves we don’t want to impose. And slowly, quietly, we talk ourselves out of the thing that would have helped us most.
I see this in leaders all the time. The peer relationship they meant to invest in. The conversation they kept meaning to have. The support they needed but never asked for because asking felt like admitting something.
Nobody follows up. Both people lose.
AN OPEN DOOR
Rob and I talk regularly now. What started as a monthly Zoom has become something I actually look forward to. A place where I can say the things I’d normally keep to myself, with someone who isn’t going to flinch at them.
I’m rooting for him. And I feel he’s rooting for me.
Most men don’t have that. Not because it isn’t available. Because we keep almost asking for it and then deciding not to.
Two men is a good start. It isn’t enough.
If you’re a father reading this, and there’s someone you’ve been almost reaching out to, another dad, a friend, the guy you keep meaning to text, send the message. Not the casual one. The honest one. The one that says you’d actually like to talk.
And if you don’t have that person yet, hit reply and tell me. I’m interested in what it would look like to grow this beyond the two of us.
We don’t move through the hardest parts of life by figuring them out alone. We move through them by finding someone else who is willing to be honest about the same terrain.
What’s the thing you’ve been almost letting yourself off the hook from?