Why 'Tolerance' of Men

It's not about surrender

👋 Hi! ☝️ Check out the audio recording of this essay. People tell me it’s lovely.

Not the same as putting up with bullshit

My actual bedroom for two years in college. It was always this neat.

One of my college roommates, we’ll call him Peter, had a room adjacent to mine. To get to my room, I had to cross through his. And he had a girlfriend. He also had a couple of guitars, a drum kit, a closet full of sweet thrift-store clothing, a cat, and a propensity to not clean.

Peter would, on occasion, smoke a big bowl of weed and clean said room. On such occasions, he would also finally clean the kitty litter box and pick up the cat shit around the box.

Those were glorious days, when I could access my room without a hitch. I don’t know who hated this situation more, though. I think it was me, but not because of the mess. It felt like such an invasion of his space. Peter smoked enough weed not to care about much other than the Green Bay Packers games.

Anyway, Peter tolerated these minor infractions in his life for reasons I won’t pretend to understand. Ironically, by doing so, he unwittingly started me down a path of defining tolerance for myself, something we’ll come back to.

What Peter was doing, I wouldn’t categorize as tolerance at all. I call that putting up with bullshit, as I wrote about in a recent essay on my other Substack.

Putting up with bullshit is a resignation with something that’s otherwise intolerable by most standards, especially your own. Doing so actually is hurting you in some way.

Tolerance, on the other hand, I think of like the Buddha would.

Tolerance is the conscious choice to allow something to be without the need to change it because, when you really consider it, it has no effect on your life.

• Your uncle misuses a word (often)

• That new guy wears political t-shirts

• Mike eats and talks at the same time

Tolerance is not about saying, “I like this.” It’s more like, “This doesn’t need me to fix it.” It’s also not about being a Mr. Nice Guy.

It’s about freedom from burden, like an untrod field in the spring. Wider scope of tolerance = More freedom, expressed in the form of freedom from the need to react or do something every time something aversive arises.

This is what all men want. (Women want it too, I’m sure, but I’m talking to the men.) Greater freedom includes developing wisdom around tolerance.

This is tolerance

Mother (left), my Aunt Helen, and Jan at one of the parties around our wedding.

As someone who lives abroad and has been sober for twelve years, I get plenty of practice tolerating others and being tolerated by others. My life sometimes feels like a training ground for this, because there’s nowhere for me to hide.

The men I tend to work with also have training grounds, the commute to work, social media, and the dinner table, but they don’t necessarily leverage those opportunities to train.

Fact: Someone who holds views different from your own can eat at the table in your home, and you can enjoy your time eating with them.

It’s true. The two of you can discuss roughly a gazillion topics that don’t involve the one where you disagree, and you can enjoy that time as if it were time spent with a good friend. In fact, you may have a good friend who fits this category.

Let me illustrate this with a little story from my own mother’s life. Before I do, let’s acknowledge that I’m using a story about my mother to illustrate a point for men. I see the irony, but please. Being raised by a woman was chock-full of lessons about being a better man.

Mother kept a lifelong childhood friend with different views from her: Jan.

On matters of politics, which encompasses every subject in American lives now, they might as well be bitter enemies. Despite this, they have chosen to spend their time talking about other topics. Oh, sure. They’ve been known to take potshots at each other on social media, but in the real world, they only ever speak of everything else.

This is a beautiful demonstration of loving intentions.

Tolerance is a first step toward love, or at least a step away from hatred, which is itself an expression of intolerance. After tolerance, there are other steps one can take, like understanding, acceptance, and reverence, but moving toward love often begins with tolerance.

Even if we’re concerned about folks tolerating too much, a world more highly indexed for tolerance is a world tilted away from hatred. As such, Mother and Jan discovered, movement toward love beats movement toward hatred.

Jan’s death last year was not an easy one for Mother, not that any of them are, but those two were keepers of each other's secrets. They each knew where the proverbial bodies were buried.

A life lived without tolerance never fully unfolds to include sacred relationships like that one. They are as difficult as they are worth the effort.

The invitation for men

Me, being barely tolerable

This is about freedom from hatred. It’s also the burden of battles we don’t need to fight. As men, we often fight battles that are not ours. Often enough, we don’t feel great about the outcomes.

For men, the invitation is this:

Learn to tolerate that which we can, that which (upon inspection) isn’t causing us harm, not really.

This invitation extends outward and inward because what we find, when we really look at the matter, is that tolerance of self is just as valuable, if not more so. We men don’t just struggle to tolerate others. We struggle to tolerate ourselves.

Self is the true source of our intolerance.

☝️I’ll come back to this in another essay because it’s worth more than a hot take, and I don’t want to make this one too long. That said, it’s true that if one can master tolerance of self, tolerance of others is a cake walk.

For now, let’s tease apart putting up with bullshit and tolerance. These are examples that work for me. Y.M.M.V.

Bullshit that I won’t put up with: Someone who is either committing or threatening violence, or being abusive with language.

What I’ll tolerate: Someone who holds different religious beliefs, voted for a political candidate I don’t like, or uses words I don’t like.

Each of us has to decide what falls into which category. You get to define your own boundaries. For me, I like to imagine I can tolerate (meaning ignore or walk away from) language. That’s nothing to say of verbal abuse in the context of power dynamics, where one cannot walk away. Again, we each have to define our boundaries.

Ultimately, the challenge behind this invitation is to be very discerning about what’s tolerable and what’s putting up with bullshit. The long-range goal, one we may never arrive at, is to keep pushing the boundaries of tolerable until we find ourselves in a state where we tend more to respond than react to most everything.

For example, acute pain demands a rapid response. Most everything else can wait because it’s non-threatening. I want my window of tolerance to be as open as a spring field.

If what men truly want is a path to freedom, that field has got to be on the map. It’s not so much a destination, but closer to the path we want to carve.

To live in a world where we tolerate everything but the acute, and respond in good time to the concerning but non-threatening, that’s a kind of freedom worth wanting.

That field might be more than a feature. It may be the whole map.

Thanks for reading.

~Damon

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Discussion Prompt: What annoyance could you learn to tolerate in your life, and what might it be like for you to do so?

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