Living With My Brother Restored My Faith in Men

I am in the kitchen making my seventh unreasonably large cauldron of tea. My 27-year-old brother walks into the kitchen and, without speaking, begins spinning in little circles. This means he is happy. I also begin spinning in little circles to show I am participating in the happy. 

We stop spinning. I estimate seven full rotations. 

“I did a thing in the work meeting this morning where I said my real opinion on what needs to change in the workflow, and everyone was there, and they were all looking at me, and I did it, anyway,” he says.

“You are the big brave!” I say.

“Conflict is the big scary,” he says, and emits a mid-decibel gargling scream. This seems very reasonable to me. 

He walks over to where I am by the kettle and rests his head on my shoulder. This is the signal to administer head pats, which I provide. It is fairly inconvenient for him because he is 6’3” which makes my shoulder very far away from his head. We persevere. 

“Thaaaanks!” he exclaims merrily, and runs at high speed back into his room, screeching.

This has become a very quotidian scene in my life over the last year since we moved in together. I ended an eleven-year relationship last year which involved moving out of my home, going to therapy, crying a lot, despairing at The State of Men—the usual stuff. Breakups bring with them a quintillion pains, and finding somewhere to live was one of them.

I did not expect living with my brother to offer such a balm to the men-shaped wounds inside my heart.

I will admit that I had some reservations about living with my brother. I am a pretty neurotic, controlling, highly-strung person and I like things to be clean and quiet and orderly. My brother is a big hairy autistic man with ADHD and different priorities and preferences to mine. He is also kind and tender and open-hearted and generous. I also needed somewhere to live. 

In the course of my recovery from the breakup, I faced down some very painful and shame-inducing realities. I acknowledged the significant part I had played in the demise of my relationship, I looked at my desire to control the people around me in order to experience a sense of safety, I opened the barnacle-encrusted box of my deeply rooted avoidance and aloofness. Interwoven throughout this process was the undercurrent of my terror of men. 

I am a survivor of sexual violence and physical violence. I am the eldest daughter of a single mother who was left to parent mostly alone when I was nine, my brother was five, and my sister was just two years old. I have been followed home at night, I have been assaulted while dancing with my friends, and in the broad daylight of the street, I’ve been cat-called, spat at, pushed, intimidated, and harassed by men. To top it all off, I am an academic with a doctorate in sociology. My work looks at how women are using tiny houses to change their experience of patriarchy and capitalism, which means I am in daily contact with the evidence that cis-het men are often disappointing, dangerous, or deadly to women. 

This is not a hopeful backdrop. 

Luckily, I am at least bisexual, so there is some reprieve for me there in the knowledge that I don’t have to date men. But, despite the armor of my bisexuality, I do still have to come into contact with men on the regular. My own dad is a man, for example. Many of my cherished friends are men. I even want to be able to smile cheerfully at men on the street and say “good morning” to them because I am British and live in the North and that’s what we do ‘round ‘ere. 

I did not expect living with my brother to offer such a balm to the men-shaped wounds inside my heart. I am more grateful to him than I can say. 

Last month I came into the kitchen where my little (enormous) brother was and stamped my feet loudly because I was frustrated at not being able to do a squat without pain after I broke my leg three years ago. 

He immediately turned around and stamped his feet back loudly at me. This is his super-cool, non-verbal way of acknowledging and making space for what I am feeling and expressing at the time. 

“Angry!” I shouted, and stamped my feet more. 

“Much angry!” He echoed back to me, and we stamped our feet and flailed around wildly together for a full minute. 

I never did this kind of thing before we lived together. I have been trained by Western culture to prioritize intellectualizing my experiences—analyzing them, talking about them. 

My brother has created a permissive and witnessing space where I can express my feelings physically, in a body-led rather than a head-led way. This is a huge and unexpected gift. 

After this kitchen-flailing episode, he congratulated me. 

“Well done.” He said. “It’s good to see you expressing like that.”

I have never been praised for expressing anger. It was a very generous gift, indeed. 

He also loves hugs and is great at expressing affection. Despite being a big man with the latent physical potential for intimidation or danger, he is a soft, warm, safe man to be around. He is unafraid to ask for help and advice. He does not pretend to know it all. He does not pretend to have no feelings. 

Last week he came to ask me about how to handle something at work. 

“Please can I ask for your advice?” he said, poking his head round my bedroom door.  “Am I missing something here? Is this a normie thing that I am not getting?” 

We read over an email together and problem-solved how to answer it so that everyone felt good.

It’s this lack of ego, the willingness to ask for help, the level of genuine friendship he offers me that has gone such a long way to re-igniting my belief in the goodness of men. Living with my brother has proved to me that men can be the source of nurturing, caring, thoughtful attention and support. He has given me hope for what kind of relationships my future can contain. He has given me hope for men.