My family like’s to play a game called Am I the Asshole while we eat dinner. It’s not as brutal as it sounds, except I have teenagers so maybe it is that brutal. Am I the Asshole is a subreddit where people pose questions. They typically go like this:
“My boyfriend chugged 72 beers in 2 hours. At the end of it, he puked on my rug, and I got mad. Also, he got my best friend pregnant.”
Then the internet comes together and declares “I think you buried the lead here. Are you talking about the puke or the pregnancy? Jesus Christ, leave that guy.”
The point is that most of these posts are pretty clear cut, but on occasion, you get some that are actually a tough call. These are the ones that we discuss at the dinner table because there is a lesson to be had in there.
There are relationship skills that need to be taught.
People often come to the internet to work out their problems, create drama, or show off their assets. Or at least that is what I’m told. But as a father, it gives my wife and me a chance to develop our kid’s relationship skills, and these are the ones that are often ignored by our young and teenage boys. It’s a skill that will serve them throughout their lives but is so downplayed that by the time many of our boys become men, they find themselves lonely or at the very least, unable to gain friends.
Our sons are taught stories of Captain America who takes 100 years to tell a girl that he has feelings for her. The awkward hero who needs no one is a trope that goes as far back as our stories. Even Beowulf is celebrated for killing a demon but not for creating a relationship with his men. And it’s exciting and has drama, and who doesn’t love some great sword-flying drama?
Look at the story of King Arthur. At one point in the legend, everyone ditches each other and goes out on their own. This is the message that our sons are given time and time again. What they are not given are the relationship skills that would serve them when they become adults. This is the mistake we are making with them. And while we seem to encourage these skills with our girls, we do so at the expense of their own agency. Both ways are crap.
So, when we get into a debate of Am I the Asshole, these are the discussions that allow my family to get into how to treat others, to open their minds with empathy, and encourage them to see things from someone else’s perspective.
It’s a start.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot we’re not doing for our sons and our daughters. We teach forgiveness and meekness to our daughters and win at all costs to our sons. We have taken words like empathy and care and made them unsuitable for men, and at the same time, words like leadership and toughness only seem to apply to men. These words are genderless but how we teach those skills are not.
There is a male loneliness epidemic that concerns me for all my kids. I don’t want my son to grow up in a world where he doesn’t think he matters. He needs friends, and to be open to them. Sometimes that’s easy, but as you get older, it is not. I even talk about it on my TikTok channel, taking a break from content such as visiting the Antique Fan Museum. It’s a thing, and yes, you should go.
But to help my son, he needs the relationship skills that many of his peers aren’t being taught. So I open my phone during dinner (don’t come at me about screen time, bro) and we talk about who is an asshole and who is not. It’s in these discussions that my wife and I can teach the lessons that I hope will serve him when he’s older. Because right now in our culture, we are asking our sons to be half of what they are. We are teaching them to hide the most vulnerable parts of themselves and be that lonely, lonely, loner who can save the world but shouldn’t have the friendships that make it worth it.