MENtal Fitness: Let’s talk!

From eleven floors up, the world always looks a little softer than it feels. The city hums, traffic breathes, and somewhere down there men are fighting battles no one warned them about—quiet battles, private battles, the kind that don’t leave marks you can point to. And from the very first breath of watching him, loving him, you already know: you’re going to have to hold him gently, even on the days he forgets how to hold himself.

Because grief doesn’t always look like funerals. Sometimes it looks like a man standing too still in the kitchen. Sometimes it looks like the way he shuts a drawer a little too carefully. Sometimes it’s the quiet sigh before he says he’s fine. Sometimes it’s the silence that sits between his words like a third presence neither of you invited in.

And right from the start—long before he breaks, long before you ask what’s wrong—you’re already becoming the soft place he doesn’t yet know he needs. Not because you’re trying to save him. Not because you’re trying to fix his life or patch the holes life punched through him. But because loving a man who is carrying something heavy means offering steadiness in a world that keeps asking him to be steel.

You make the room safer just by being in it. You become the calm center of the storm before he even realizes he’s standing in one.

And while he’s losing things—people, dreams, direction, the job that once gave him pride, the love that came before you, the friend who knew everything, the version of himself he thought he’d become—you’re learning to love him in the quiet spaces between the losses.

You don’t wait until his knees buckle. You stay close from the first moment you sense the shift. You trace the small changes, the way his shoulders sit differently, the pause before he answers, the way his gaze lingers on nothing in particular. And you let him know, without pressure or demand:

I’m here,

even in the parts you don’t talk about.

Because supporting a man isn’t something you pick up halfway through his grief. It’s something you weave into the everyday. It’s in the way you listen—not to respond but to understand the language he doesn’t speak out loud. It’s in the way you lean into him on the couch, a silent reminder that he doesn’t have to be the strong one every single moment of every single day. It’s in the way you hold space for him to breathe, not perform.

Your softness doesn’t erase his storms—it keeps him from being swallowed by them.

And yes, he’ll try to carry everything himself. Men are taught to do that. They’re trained in silence long before they ever learn vulnerability. So when he battles grief, or disappointment, or the loss of someone he loved, or the job that defined him, or the wound he hides under humor, he won’t always know how to let you in.

That’s where your strength comes in. Not loud. Not forceful. Just present.

You learn to recognize the moments he needs tenderness more than advice. Encouragement more than solutions. Touch more than language. You know when to step forward and when to simply sit beside him, letting your presence be the lighthouse even when the fog gets thick.

Because that’s what you are—his lighthouse. The steady glow he can navigate by, even when he’s drifting through a night he never asked for. And loving a man through his storms doesn’t mean anchoring him to you. It means reminding him he still has direction, he still has worth, he still has a shore to return to.

So from beginning to end—from the first whispered “I’m fine,” to the nights he collapses into your arms without a single explanation—you are both softness and strength. Both haven and horizon.

You don’t fix his storms, but you keep him from forgetting where the light is.

And maybe that’s what it really means to love a man in this world:

to stand steady, soft, luminous—

a safe landing, a quiet strength—

and let him know, in every breath and every moment—

You don’t have to weather this alone.

I’m right here,

and I’m not going anywhere.