I’M A DIFFICULT MAN. (But not as difficult as I used to be.)

I confused emotional unavailability with depth for a very long time. Thought the fact I was complicated somehow made me profound. Like my inability to answer a straightforward emotional question without staring into the middle distance and sighing heavily was evidence of hidden intelligence instead of unresolved bullshit. Women would say things like, “You’re hard to read.” And instead of hearing, “You're emotionally exhausting,” I heard, “You are a mysterious intellectual panther.” Which is how a lot of men accidentally become insufferable. I wasn’t aggressive in the obvious ways. That would’ve been simpler. I was thoughtful. Sometimes self-aware. And capable of discussing childhood wounds over expensive wine while simultaneously creating fresh ones in real time through emotional inconsistency. I had books beside the bed. Opinions about consciousness. A spiritual phase dramatic enough to convince me that buying linen pants and wearing mala beads counted as emotional growth. Meanwhile a woman could be crying two feet away from me and I’d suddenly become fascinated by making tea. That’s the thing about difficult men. We often look calm externally because we’re doing all the screaming internally. You ask us what we feel and suddenly we need fresh air, a podcast, a sandwich, two business days, a brief constitutional walk, and some deeply urgent administrative task like reorganising charging cables before we can access a single human emotion without looking like we’re being interrogated by federal police. I once spent 45 minutes explaining to a woman why I struggled with vulnerability instead of simply saying, “I’m scared you’ll stop loving me if you really see me.” That’s "difficult man" behaviour. Olympic-level emotional parkour performed to avoid one honest sentence. And fuck me, we romanticise ourselves. We think we’re the misunderstood artist. The deep thinker. The poet. The lone wolf. Mate, sometimes you’re just emotionally fucking unavailable. The difficulty didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a boy who learned early that love was conditional. That approval had to be earned. That the safest way to survive was to become whatever was needed of him. So I became charming. Spectacularly, exhaustingly charming. I covered shame with confidence I didn’t always feel. Told people what they wanted to hear. Flattered people (women) to keep them close, even if I had no intention of being with them romantically. Smiled in places where I was quietly drowning. And all the while, I saved the anger for the people close enough to cop it. I was a pressure cooker with a faulty valve. And when the charm failed, when the suppressed anger came out sideways, it arrived as sarcasm. Sharp. Surgical. And often genuinely cruel. The sort of comments that find the exact thing somebody is most uncertain about and puts a joke-shaped knife in it. Then before they can react, I'd say: “Relax, I’m joking.” That’s not humour. That’s passive aggressive behaviour with a bullshit punchline attached. It's the emotional equivalent of stabbing someone with a cocktail fork then acting offended they’ve made the evening awkward by bleeding on the tablecloth. I was good at it. Still am sometimes, when I’m tired or ashamed or not paying attention. Here’s the thing about men who grow up charming their way out of danger while real feelings accumulate somewhere underneath the floorboards. The anger doesn’t disappear. It just goes underground. And underground anger is far more destructive than the loud kind because it comes out in nastiness, sudden coldness, or emotional withholding. Often, I'll disappear emotionally while technically remaining in the room. Or I'll make my wife feel foolish for sometimes needing reassurance, even though I too want to receive it sometimes. I’ve done all of it. And the real tragedy is this ... I genuinely thought I was a good man. Because I compared myself to worse men. I wasn’t blatantly cheating. Wasn’t violent. Wasn’t screaming in kitchens with whisky on my breath and holes in the plasterboard (ok, there was that one time in my 30s). Meanwhile, the woman beside me was starving emotionally while I sat there feeling morally superior because technically I hadn’t committed a crime. That’s the mindfuck of modern masculinity. A man can love a woman and still make life feel emotionally unsafe beside him. Not through violence or through obvious betrayal. It's through his absence, defensiveness and half-presence. The thousand tiny moments when somebody reaches toward you and finds your distraction instead. I know the exact moment I understood this. A woman in my past, someone I genuinely loved, told me she'd stopped telling me things because of my reaction. She'd stopped including me on the small things. The things she'd worried about. The things that had made her laugh that day. The ordinary movement of her inner life. She'd stopped because my responses had trained her to. My addictive ability to distract the second something emotional was presented. The pivot to logic. The joke that arrived precisely when she needed something else entirely. She hadn't made a decision to stop. Her nervous system had just learned that bringing herself to me wasn't worth what it cost her. She left me. I was shocked then. But on reflection, I realise that I lost her in a thousand moments that I abandoned her. And I barely noticed until she was gone. For whatever reason, women will often mistake difficult men like me for deep men because emotional unavailability creates intensity, longing and obsession. Every moment of closeness starts feeling more meaningful because it arrives so fucking rarely. A difficult man can hand you half a breadcrumb emotionally and suddenly it feels like a twin-flame moment. Meanwhile the difficult man mistakes being desired for being known. Which is tragic really, because those are not even remotely the same thing. That was me for years. Women loved my humour, and intensity. My visible damage carefully wrapped in confidence. But loving me and living with me were very different experiences. Because difficult men are often much easier to admire than they are to build a peaceful life beside. We call ourselves independent when we actually mean: "I fuck up and panic when people need me consistently.” We call ourselves private when we actually mean: “Emotional honesty still feels dangerously vulnerable to me.” We call ourselves complicated because it sounds more romantic than frightened. A woman can spend years trying to bend herself to fit with a difficult man. Lowering her needs. Choosing her timing carefully. Accepting emotional scraps and calling it maturity. Until eventually she says fuck it and stops asking entirely. And because difficult men are occasionally breathtakingly intelligent in completely pointless directions, we mistake her emotional exhaustion for harmony. We think, “Wow. No arguments lately, the relationship’s really maturing.” ... Meanwhile she’s stopped bringing herself to me entirely by then, and I'm sitting there like a fucking Labradoodle in a burning kitchen thinking, “Nice. It feels peaceful in here tonight. It's great, we’re not arguing anymore.” Meanwhile, she emotionally left the relationship some time around Easter and is now just waiting for reality to catch up with her nervous system. The thing nobody tells you about difficult men , and I’m talking to both the women who love them and the men who are them, is that the difficulty is usually the most loyal thing about them. It’s the part that never learned to leave. The sarcasm, the stubbornness, the emotional shield, the distance. All survival mechanisms that once protected somebody who genuinely needed protecting. You see, the work isn’t in eliminating the difficulty. It’s understanding what it’s protecting. Because underneath nearly every difficult man is somebody who wanted, more than almost anything, to be safe enough to be soft. Who wanted to be fully known without being destroyed by the knowing. Who wanted to love without the act but had worn it so long he couldn’t tell where the performance ended and he began. I still cast myself doing it. I still get defensive. I still disappear. I still become deeply fascinated by meaningless tasks the second emotional intimacy appears ... Y'know, things like , rearranging spice racks, checking football scores and Googling whether penguins have knees. Anything except sitting still long enough to feel something uncomfortable all the way through. But hey, I come back sooner now. And for a man like me, that’s actually fucking enormous. The older I get, the less interested I am in being a difficult man. Honestly, I think I exhausted myself trying to be one. All that performance and pretence when really I just didn’t know how to say: “I’m hurt. I’m scared. I need you. I was wrong.” I’m a more honest man now too. Less impressive at dinner parties perhaps. Sam's heard me say all of this, and that's not nothing. Because for the version of me that existed 12 years ago, that's basically a fucking miracle. She'd probably tell you that’s progress. And honestly? So would I. Being interesting is fantastic right up until somebody actually has to live with you. Being safe to love is considerably more impressive than being difficult to understand. I'm working on it. I'm writing this because I want to make something clear. I'm not writing this from the other side. There is no other side. There's just the ongoing, humbling, frequently uncomfortable practice of being a man who's decided to keep looking at himself honestly even when the reflection is unflattering. I 'm also writing this to remember how far I've come, and how far I still have to go. I write because the distance between who I was and who I'm becoming is only visible when I stop moving long enough to look back. And I write it because I still need the reminder. Not that I'm difficult. That I don't have to stay that way. © Zen Prem 2026