When A Man Starts Seeing Someone

One of these days, when you’re watching Arsenal Football Club torture its fans with hope, enjoying a drink with your friends … tell them you’ve started seeing someone. Who is she? Where did you meet? How did this happen? So, what will happen to your current family? Are you ready to abandon it all? You’ll be asked all this.

Sitting your wife or girlfriend down and saying, “I’m seeing someone” will similarly elicit a shock reaction. To some, it comes out of the blue that while everything seems to be going so well for you and your business, career or pursuits, you decide to start seeing someone. 

Society will judge you quite harshly for it. A man cannot wake up one day to make a connection with someone new. But it’s time we accepted it as modern man’s way of navigating self-doubt, career stagnation, grief, and our minds being a car park for emotional wrecks.

We have to accept that men seeing someone is a normal, modern response to trauma, loss or simply workplace stress. 

Seeing a therapist is quite like a man’s weekly chat with his barman. Except it is focused on solutions rather than venting and laughing the pain away with football jokes and gossip about Zambian politics.

It’s a decisive move to fix what’s eating you beneath the nice car you drive, beautiful wife and children or high-flying career.

And we seem to sleepwalk through it all.

I mean, how long will you be told “it’s rough” or “it’s darkest before dawn” or “life yakosako chabe mwe” every time you talk about loss, grief, stress and fear? 

“Everything happens for a reason” is not a solution. It’s a dismissive thing to hear when you’re struggling to cope with the loss of your child, job, marriage or parent.

But that’s what men get when they’re brave enough to share their struggles. They’re strong enough to weather the storm using recycled street philosophies—something you can get off the Internet and hope it sticks.

We’re happy to pay good money to a lawyer to structure a contract for us. An accountant to do our books. A mechanic to get the car running smoothly. A doctor to examine our prostate.