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Demystifying the Man Cave
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Demystifying the Man Cave
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listening.jpgA reader asks why her man only comes out of his man cave for food and sex and it got the whole Gloss team to thinking… just what the hell is the man cave all about – what’s going on in the recesses of the male mind? What do you do if your man seems to be on another planet that doesn’t involve you? Wordspy.com defines the mancave as: “n. An area of a house, such as a basement, workshop, or garage, where a man can be alone with his power tools and projects.” We would also hazard a guess that any space in a house where there is a couch, a TV and/or a gaming console can also act as a mancave should your man not be able to retreat to a basement or garage – apartment dwelling men have had to make do with a new ‘mancave’.

The Man explains a little more on the mancave theory...


Ah, the mancave, revered and loathed in equal measure.  Both a valuable area of solitude for psychological restoration, and an excuse for not being bothered to be nice, the mancave is a tool that can be misused and lied about as easily as female moodswings.  The mancave is, to make a slightly unpleasant analogy, the man’s “time of the month.”

However… Just because your man has retreated to his cave and doesn’t seem to want to come out does not mean you should do that girl thing where you're immediately assuming it’s your fault! In all honesty, there can be so much going on in a guy's (or anyone's) head, that you can't automatically assume that his problems are anything to do with you.  Women have a knack for taking every relationship bump onto themselves, but the truth is: it’s not all about you. Work, family, health, money, ageing or just a general existential malaise… there could be a lot going on in your man’s head as he absent-mindedly sips from his beer bottle while blankly staring at golf on the sports channel.

There is some worth to the ‘mancave’ theory – it’s true that guys process emotions and experiences and problems internally before externalising it, whereas it tends to be the other way for women (these are gross generalisations of course).  And guys do sometimes need "time-out." 

But the key is the word "process", which implies that it’s something that starts and finishes. If it’s more an ongoing state, then you may have an issue.  If it’s a matter of temperament, i.e. it’s just the way the guy is, then I'm sure you'll be aware of that for as long as you've known him.  If it’s something that's started a while back and is persisting, then there could be something going on.

So, your man could just be having a bit of a downer.  Maybe his job sucks (this is a common one), or he's not getting enough protein, or he's worried about his parents, or any number of things.  Or maybe he just truly likes his time to himself.

If it’s something more, then that's another story.  Depression is a topic that is not often talked about and particularly can be swept under the carpet by men. In my opinion, most of the time, men get depressed because they go internally to process an emotion or a problem, but then get stuck.  I think that this is because we still don't teach boys how to deal with emotions, and as boys grow into men, we still don't know how, and we get depressed or angry (basically the same thing, but anger is outward-directed and depression is inward-directed).  Compounding this, not only do we not know how to deal with it, but we feel bad for even feeling certain things in the first place, which just compounds the issue with guilt and shame. 

So the key is to figure out whether it’s a specific problem (in which case, you could either offer to help or let him figure it out himself), or if it’s just a bad week or even month (and if so, just let it run its course) or if it’s a persisting thing.  If it is a persisting thing, I suppose the next thing you'd want to know is what's causing it.  I don't really know how to figure that out without asking the person and having them being honest. 

The tricky thing for you is, that when guy is like this, anything well meaning his partner could try and do could be perceived as ‘nagging’.  That particular eccentricity of men works like this: man gets depressed, woman voices concern over man getting depressed, man feels guilt for causing woman upset, man gets angry that he’s made to feel guilty.  Fun, huh?
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