Three male archetypes—Aggressor, Avoider, Pleaser—all stem from trauma and cultural pressure to perform rather than feel. The speaker argues men are trapped in performance-based love, valued for provision not presence, and calls for breaking the cycle through real emotional intelligence and vulnerability.
what I call the 3 archetypes. So if they're having problems inside a relationship, they fall into one of these 3 categories. And it's not, you know, only this one, but they're primarily in one of these 3. So it's typically the man who's an aggressor. And the aggressor is usually somebody who lashes out. He's impulsive, he has angry outbursts, he has these amygdala hijacks inside his relationships, he's constantly triggered. He's resentful. And usually it's because he was the victim of something earlier in his life. And he learned to use anger as a coping mechanism to protect himself. So he utilizes anger to feel in control. And that's his main struggle. Then you have the avoider, who's more of— he's more dissociative. He's more disconnected, he's more neglectful, and he has very low emotional intelligence. He has a hard time expressing his love and affection for people in his life. He also avoids conflict, so he does not like facing conflict, does not want to face the conflict in his life. And he has a tendency to be like a more dismissive avoidant attachment style. Then you have like the pleaser. Who walks on eggshells. He placates people, tells them what they want to hear. He wears the persona and the mask. He's a yes man. He secretly has feelings of resentment and frustration because he feels like he can't express his needs. And with the avoider, you know, back to the avoider, he used to learn— he learned to use isolation as a way to cope, and dissociation is product of some of the things he's been through. Whereas the pleaser learned to meet other people's needs in an attempt to get his needs met. So it's like, I'll become who you want me to be if you give me what I need from you, which is to feel safe and secure and to feel like I belong and that I'm okay. And, you know, as men, a lot of times we fall into performance-based love. You know, very few men are honored in this society for what their heart can give. You know, true, like, men are really honored in this society for what they can provide. It's so true. How they can perform, yeah, what they can do. And so as men, we naturally fall into performance-based love. So, you know, relationships, a woman will say like, well, you just, you don't understand me. I feel really unseen and unheard. I feel really neglected in this relationship. And in his mind, he's thinking, well, it's like, what are you talking about? Like, I'm providing for the family. I'm providing you guys a great life. I'm doing everything that I'm, I, I'm supposed to be doing. And it's very hard because as men, we perceive love as performance. It's, you know, love is something we had to work for. It's something we had to earn, and it's something that we had to prove we deserved, you know. And if you look at men in this society, if men can't solve problems and if, you know, they can't, you know, if they can't perform, it's like then they're really not, you know, held in high regard, you know. And so it's kind of sad that men get stuck in that trap of performance-based love. Yeah, especially inside a relationship. And those are usually some of the common things. Main ones are emotional intelligence, you know, because as men, like, you know, we're taught that having emotions makes you weak and that, you know, men are just very— in terms of their feelings, they have a tendency to camouflage, suppress, ignore a lot of what goes on inside of them. And it's, it's very hard for them because I think as men, you know, like we see other men get emotional in an unhealthy way where it's more of like the victim type, more victim mentality. Yeah. Self-pity. And we see that and we go, I don't want to do that. You know, that's— I don't admire that. Like, I don't want to do that. But, but rarely do we see men who are fully transparent in their emotions and actually opening up, not because it's easy, but because it's difficult. Not because we're trying to like throw a pity party or anything like that. And I'm not speaking negatively about people that do that, right? Yeah, everybody goes through that. But yeah, you know, like very rarely do we see men fully transparent and vulnerable, open, talking about what's actually going on inside of them from a place of confidence, right? From a place of like, hey, this is going— this is not easy for me, but I'm also looking for solutions. So I call it kind of healthy vulnerability and unhealthy vulnerability. A lot of men, we see unhealthy vulnerability. Yeah, that like self-pity. And then we see the polar opposite extreme, which is like that extremely stoic, overcompensating ego.
