When Love Feels Foreign: Why So Many Men Struggle to Give and Receive It

How can you receive what you've never been taught to recognise?

For many Caribbean men, love is complicated, not because they don’t want it but because it feels foreign.

They know how to provide. How to protect. How to perform strength and loyalty. But ask them to sit still and receive love, open, unguarded, vulnerable and that’s where the walls rise. Fast.

It’s not because they’re cold.

It’s not because they’re broken.

It’s because, in truth, they were never taught how.

Where It Begins: The Missing Language of Affection

So many boys are raised in homes where affection is rare, rigid or conditional. You get praised if you pass exams. You get respect if you “man up.” You’re seen as valuable if you earn, achieve or protect.

But what happens when the only form of love you’ve been shown is transactional? What happens when softness is mocked and emotional needs are dismissed?

You grow into a man who knows how to build a house but doesn’t know how to be at home within himself, or with someone else.

Love as Performance vs. Love as Presence

Many men are taught that love is something you prove, not something you receive.

So they perform it:

• Providing money but never opening up

• Showing loyalty but never expressing affection

• Staying in the relationship but remaining emotionally unreachable

To them, love means doing. But they’ve never been told that love also means being seen. Being known. Being held without conditions.

When a partner asks for emotional intimacy, it feels confusing. Confrontational. Even threatening. Because deep down, they never learned how to exist in love, only how to chase it, earn it or lose it.

The Fear Beneath the Surface

There’s often a quiet fear at the heart of a man’s emotional disconnect:

• Fear of being too much

• Fear of not being enough

• Fear that if someone gets too close, they’ll find the wound and walk away

So they push love away before it can disappoint them. Or they sabotage connection because it feels too unfamiliar to be safe. Or they choose partners who don’t challenge them emotionally, not because they don’t care, but because it feels easier to stay numb than to risk being known.

And yet…

Beneath all that armour is usually a silent longing:

To be loved without performance.

To rest.

To feel safe.

To be held without having to earn it.

Relearning Love as a Skill, Not a Weakness

Love isn’t something you either have or don’t.

It’s a language you can learn.

A skill you can develop.

A space you can grow into.

Here’s where that journey begins:

• Acknowledge what you never received - Not to blame your upbringing but to recognise what was missing.

• Start with self-love that’s not based on productivity - You are worthy even when you’re still learning. Even when you’re still healing.

• Let love feel uncomfortable at first - New doesn’t mean wrong. If you weren’t raised with tenderness, receiving it will feel strange. Stay with it.

• Learn to express without fixing - Sometimes being emotionally present is enough. You don’t always have to solve, just show up with your full self.

• Ask for help - Whether through therapy, brotherhood, journalling or conversations, healing happens in connection.

Love Isn’t the Reward - It’s the Practice

Too many men believe they’ll be ready for love “once they’re healed.” But love is part of the healing.

You don’t have to be fully healed to be loved.

You don’t have to get it all right to give love well.

You just have to be willing to try again, with more presence, more patience and more honesty than before.

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Whisper to Your Heart: From the heart of a community that sees you, not just your strength, but your struggle too: “Even if love was once confusing, distant or painful, you are allowed to experience it differently now.” - Nadia Renata | Audacious Evolution

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You Were Always Lovable, Even When You Didn’t Know How to Receive It

If no one ever told you this before, let it land now: You are not hard to love. You may just be learning how to let it in.

Reflection Prompt:

What did love look like in your childhood home?

What did it feel like and what was missing?

And what kind of love are you ready to receive now, without performing for it?

Affirmation: “I am learning to love without fear. I am safe to receive, safe to be seen and safe to be held, just as I am.”

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