The Daily
‘Modern Love’: Why Boys and Men Are Floundering, According to Therapist Terry Real
Sun, 25 May 2025
A session with Terry Real, a marriage and family therapist, can get uncomfortable. He’s known to mirror and amplify the emotions of his clients, sometimes cursing and nearly yelling, often in an attempt to get men in touch with the emotions they’re not used to honoring.Real says men are often pushed to shut off their expression of vulnerability when they’re young as part of the process of becoming a man. That process, he says, can lead to myriad problems in their relationships. He sees it as his job to pull them back into vulnerability and intimacy, reconfiguring their understanding of masculinity in order to build more wholesome and connected families.In this episode, Real explains why vulnerability is so essential to healthy masculinity and why his work with men feels more urgent than ever. He explains why he thinks our current models of masculinity are broken and what it will take to build new ones.This episode was inspired by a New York Times Magazine piece, “How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me” by Daniel Oppenheimer.For more Modern Love, search for the show wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Wednesday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the purpose of the Modern Love podcast?
Hey, it's Michael. A quick reminder, as we said last weekend, we're going to be changing some things up here on Sundays to bring you something a little bit different, but something we think you're going to appreciate. And that is modern love. Every Sunday for the next few weeks, you're going to hear episodes from our phenomenal colleagues who make that show.
If you don't know the show, every week, host Anna Martin and that team explores the world of our relationships. How we fall in love, how we fall out of love, sex, betrayal. the trouble spots in relationships. They're stories inspired by the long-running NYT column called Modern Love, and we think it helps make sense of this other essential part of our lives.
So we hope you'll spend time with these episodes. They are great. And as always, we'll see you right back here on Monday morning for The Daily. Take a listen.
Hey, it's Anna. Just a quick warning, there's a bit more swearing in this episode than usual. So if you're listening with kids, maybe wait until later? From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin.
Chapter 2: What should listeners expect in this episode?
This is Modern Love.
Today, I'm talking to marriage and family therapist Terry Real.
Dan, this is what I think you mean to be saying right now. Fucking bullshit. No matter what I do for you, it's never enough.
Chapter 3: Who is Terry Real and what is his approach to therapy?
This is Terry reenacting one of his marriage counseling sessions.
And yeah, he said yeah.
Terry has just asked one of his clients, named Daniel, about the feelings he has during what have become typical but explosive arguments with his wife. Terry asks, if the feelings could talk, what would they say? And Daniel says back, kind of meekly, I try really hard. I try to be a good person. But Terry thinks there's a deeper feeling there that Daniel's not letting onto.
So he says it back to him, only stronger. Fucking bullshit.
I amplify emotion, particularly in men. They feel them initially very faintly, but the feelings aren't faint. It's just they're not used to honoring them.
It's a bit unconventional, but this is something Terry does often. He holds up a kind of emotional mirror to the men that he works with, trying to get them in touch with what's underneath.
I'm loving Dan and telling the truth to him in the same breath. You deserve better than this. You're a good guy. Let's get you out of this.
Terry is well known for this direct, confrontational, but still quite loving approach. In this conversation, Daniel actually wrote about it for the New York Times Magazine in a piece called How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me.
And Daniel learned that because, unlike a lot of couples therapists, Terry takes sides, tries to get to the truth of what's going on, what's behind a couple's behavior.
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Chapter 4: Why is vulnerability important for men?
I started off... My beat were couples on the brink of divorce that no one has been able to help. These women would drag these guys in, and I would lean in and tell them. She's right. You're wrong. This is what's going to happen if you don't shape up. This is what you could get if you do. You're a good guy. This is terrible behavior. Let me reach in and help you, man.
I mean, you can do better than this. And the men would say, okay. And the women would just fold over and start to cry. They had dragged this poor sucker. The record so far was eight therapists and not one person backed up the woman and confronted the man. Not one. We're taught not to in therapy school. Not only are we not taught how to, we're actively taught that you don't do that.
You don't tell truth to power under patriarchy.
Terry's been doing this for more than 40 years. He calls his approach relational life therapy, and he's written several best-selling books about it. And that whole time, he's kept a particular focus on men.
Because for Terry, the things he sees men struggle with, from the most mild problems to the most extreme behaviors, it all stems from something fundamentally broken about the way our culture defines masculinity. So today, Terry Real tells me what he's learned about masculinity that drove him to break the rules of therapy.
He'll tell me how his own childhood showed him that our current models of masculinity don't work and what it will take to build new ones. And during our conversation, we talked a lot about what it means to be a man right now. Because to Terry, despite his 40 years with hundreds if not thousands of clients, he says his mission of reaching men has never felt more urgent. Stay with us.
Terry Real, welcome to Modern Love.
Thank you. It's wonderful to be here.
Terry, you are, I think it's fair to say, an institution in your industry. You've been a marriage and family therapist for how long? For 40 years?
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Chapter 5: How does childhood experience shape masculinity?
That's a way of following. So, no, of course we're all vulnerable, but trying to live up to that superhuman code leads every man vulnerable to anxiety and shame that they then don't admit because that would be weak. So the whole thing is just a mess. And the work I do, I say I feel like a surgeon reattaching nerves.
You write about that process in, I think it's your first book, which was about male depression. That book is really fascinating. You write how male depression, as you describe it, often comes from these unacknowledged feelings and is often the root cause of many problems in marriages, in families. Right.
I want to talk more about that, but first I want to know more about why you decided to focus a lot of your practice on working with men specifically. And just to start at the beginning, when you were growing up, what did you think it meant to be a man?
I thought what it meant to be a man was to be raging and dominating and abusive like my father. And I wanted no part of it. My father used to beat me. I mean, he'd piss my father off and he'd get out a pretty thick belt and whack the shit out of you. And one of the things I've realized 30 years after the fact was, unfortunately, my vulnerability or sensitivity was a trigger for my father.
If he saw me being vulnerable or sensitive, he would go into a rage. just when I needed him most. But he was very contemptuous of weakness and vulnerability. So he would never talk about his childhood. I knew it was very difficult. He lost his mother when he was eight. His father and he and his brother lived through the Depression in America.
His father was kind of the black sheep of the family, couldn't find work. They moved in with another relative. The relative was mean to my dad. And I got my dad to tell me, gosh, I was close to 30, that when he was, what, 11-ish, his father brought he and his brother, younger brother, into the garage and turned on the car and told him to go to sleep. And my father knew that.
that there was something wrong. And he went back and forth with his dad and finally physically fought him. And he says his shoe cracked the window, and he and his brother got out. And then he was banished the next day.
When he told you this story... Did that change anything about how you saw your father? Did it shift something in your understanding? Did it make you understand something about him?
Yes, of course. It softened my heart, and I felt bad for him, and I understood immediately. And he said, my father was a passive man, my father was a weak man.
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Chapter 6: What are the common issues men face in relationships?
Because it reminded him of his own father?
Because his father's weakness threatened to kill him. It was murderous.
The way that you opened up space, as it were, encouraged your father to share, was that sort of the beginnings of Terry Real's approach to therapy with men? Like, did you seed anything in that conversation that we now see in your practice today?
That's a beautiful question. We don't have to go into a lot of detail, but For two years, Belinda and I and my kids and— Belinda's your wife, yeah. Yeah, a great family therapist in her own right, I want to say. We were followed by a documentarian, and there's a docu-series that's coming out about us.
And one of the beginning scenes of the—astoundingly enough, I was 34 years old, not married yet to Belinda, and my parents came for a week of family therapy— Wow.
Whoa.
And we filmed it. And the film survived. And what you see, and I hadn't seen it for 40 years.
Wait, were you, was someone doing family therapy on you, your mom, and your dad, or were you doing family therapy on the three of you?
No, someone was doing family therapy with us. Gotcha. Yeah. And what you see is after 10 minutes, I sideline the therapist, who's pretty irrelevant, actually. And I move in to my dad and mom. I am doing relational life therapy with my parents at 34. You see it.
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Chapter 7: How does Terry Real's therapy differ from traditional methods?
Yes.
Do they have new meaning to you?
Yes.
Can you tell me about that?
Here's my most famous quote. It's the height of pretension to quote yourself, but I will. You can do it. Thank you. Family pathology, family pathology, rolls from generation to generation. like a fire in the woods, taking down everything in its path until one person in one generation has the courage to turn and face the flames.
That person brings peace to their ancestors and spares the children to follow.
And you were doing that in this moment. You were facing the flames, or your father was facing the flames, or both of you were.
We both were. It was a rare moment. We both were.
That's a remarkable scene you just shared, and I really appreciate you telling us about it. And it is remarkable. I mean, you say it's wise for 34. This is the beginning of your practice. Like, you were just starting to develop this approach to working with men. And I find it pretty remarkable that one of the first men
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Chapter 8: What insights has Terry gained from his own family dynamics?
As you developed this focus on male psychology, you've talked a bit about the sort of larger therapeutic community, but how did your colleagues respond? I feel like it's just, you know, speaking for me, I feel like it's easy to look at Men, especially white men, and say comparatively this group of people has way more privilege, as you've noted, than other groups in society.
So did anyone say like, you know, did you ever get pushback on that focus? That sort of, I don't know, privileging as it were of that experience?
Am I mansplaining? No.
No, I more so just mean, like, did anyone say, like, why focus on this group of people who already has so much power? Although what I'm hearing you say is because this group of people has so much power, that's why I'm interested in focusing on them.
Well, yes and no. I mean, power... Yes, miserableness also. I think one of the revolutionary things I said, and I really want to give a shout out to some beautiful early feminist psychologists, the folks at the Stone Center, Jean Baker Miller, but most of all, Carol Gilligan, my dear friend. who are man-loving feminists.
I was really, and to some degree am, one of the few male voices saying, patriarchy is a system that does damage to everybody. Mm-hmm.
Yes, men are on top and women are on the bottom, but if that's your idea of what's on the top, you know, not to whatever, but there was a, I won't say who, but there was an expert on TV talking about aspirational masculinity and how all these young men are looking at Elon Musk. Yeah, sure. Richest man in the world to send people to Mars. Fantastic. You want to be married to that guy?
Most people don't. And... If that's what you want to aspire to, I don't want to get too close to you.
Well, you're bringing up something that I wanted to ask you about, which is like, I'm really curious your perspective on what masculinity means right now. We talked about your early understandings of it, and this is a concept, certainly, I feel like. human society has wrestled with since maybe the dawn of human society.
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