Dear Men: You Make Life Wonderful

Dear Men:

As you built the world throughout each civilization, empire, dynasty and century—everything that you undertook was for the comfort, protection, and pleasure of Women.

Women were the lifeblood and foundation of your lives, so you endeavored to reverence women in the most honorable ways possible, showing your love by hunting for shelter, water, and food; in defending your homes from nearby danger; by going into battle and on crusades to protect your families and your country; and through working long hours so that you would have the money to provide. All you longed for in return was respect, kindness, and a warm soft place to fall.

For thousands of years humanity spun on the balance of yin and yang, until a faction of women decided that men were oppressive, authoritarian, and wrong and that everything had better change—and yet despite the fact that you have acclimated many times over many decades, it has never once been good enough for them.

Lately, our planet has become overcast by this faction of women whose animosity strives to censure your masculinity using the news and social media to promote their venomous books, articles, adverts, editorials, commentaries, critiques, exposés, tomes, and opinion pieces proclaiming that this world would be a much better place without you; that women don’t need you anymore, and that you are an unwanted and intolerable mess—even as you're expected to hold up the world while silently taking the blame.

But nothing stated about men by this miserable faction of women is authentic.

Without men, female life would be dull and cheerless and subsequently less.

I want you to see that your existence is what makes this such a wonderful world, and that the magnificence of your masculinity justifies everything that a truly feminine woman is.

Thank you for toiling through 16 hour days in the drudgery and labor of all the frightening, hazardous, filthy and treacherous jobs that require a true grit which only masculinity can invoke: rescuing lost boys from inside flooded caves, running into exploding infernos and buildings, uploading thousands of bricks and steel girders to critical heights, hanging live wires from impossible altitudes, cutting down vast woods of timber, mining coal four miles beneath the Earth’s surface, hauling rubbish and furniture and equipment and machines, then getting up every day to do it all over again.

Thank you for soldiering through centuries of war, for policing the world, for going full-on to save lives, for protecting your country's coastlines and boarders, for rescuing animals and children and Women from fates worse than death—and for witnessing many unbearable things and yet still carrying on.

Thank you for those long, lonely months you spend at sea manning oil stations, fishing for food, and laboring on ships heaving massive crates full of pillows and furniture and pretty girlie things on and off-board vessels at multiple world ports, just so women have lovely things to buy from the shops.

Thank you for stepping up and raising children that you didn’t make, and for never stopping to fight for your own child in an unjust court-system which always puts the mother first.

Thank you for all the times that you were verbally abused, kicked, punched, bit, hit, and slapped by a woman when you never once fought back.

Thank you for choosing to "ghost" a woman because you just weren’t into her, but you didn’t want to say the words you knew would hurt her.

Thank you for all the times you've sat and listened, and for the many times you changed your plans to be with a woman when you’d rather have been out at the pubs or away camping with your mates.

Thank you for the thousands of dollars you’ve spent on Valentine’s Day because you didn’t want to disappoint the woman in your life.

You, men, are everything that makes this life worthwhile—and I am so thankful that you exist.

Your hand on the small of my back as you lead me into a room, the scratch of your beard as your lips kiss my neck, the intoxication of your cologne, the warmth and the weight of your body on mine.

You are worth every drop of love inside my heart, every tear I’ve cried, every time that I tried.

You are the pain at my core when you left home to grow up and live your own life.

You are my sorrow on Father’s Day because you are no longer here.

You are my protection, my champion, my sweetest dream, my one true thing, and my only reason to believe in the possibility just one more time.

In this wretched world of death, war, loss, destruction, regrets, set-backs, wrong turns, disappointments, frustrations, hindrances and disenchantments—the very thought of you gives me hope.

You are my hope.

My ever-enduring, my ever-reaching, and my everlasting hope.

Nannette LaRee Hernandez