The Armor You're Still Wearing

It’s easy to wear armor.

And after your heart has been broken, it’s not wrong to put it on.
In fact, sometimes it’s necessary.

Armor protects, stabilizes and helps you survive the initial shock.

But here’s the truth I avoided for a long time:

Armor will never give you the love you deserve.

Because the same thing that protects you
also blocks you from receiving love.

Armor can be right for a season.
A few months.
Sometimes even years, especially if you never learned how to feel safely growing up.

I wore mine for a long time.
And I don’t regret that.

What I regret is how long I pretended it wasn’t still there.

Because even now—after all the work, the awareness, the practices—
there are moments I still feel the pull to harden.

When intimacy asks me to stay present instead of composed.
When truth would create friction.
When being open feels riskier than being controlled.

That reflex didn’t disappear when I “healed.”
It just got quieter.

I see this same pattern in so many men.

Not men who are cold.
Not men who don’t care.

But men who learned, very early that feeling too much came at a cost.

So they armor themselves:

• Not to be cruel, but to stay safe

• Not to dominate, but to survive

And underneath it all is a belief that makes painful sense:

“If I drop my armor, something bad will happen.”

That belief didn’t come from weakness.
It came from experience.

And it doesn’t need to be fought.

It needs to be met.

One of the core pieces of work I do, both with men and with myself is this:

Every feeling is allowed.
Every fear is accepted.
Every part of you is seen.

Not fixed.
Not rushed.
Not overridden.

We don’t evolve by rejecting parts of ourselves.
We evolve by integrating them.

And integration starts with a simple, uncomfortable truth:

Naming where the armor still shows up.

Not where it used to show up.
Where it shows up now.

Dropping my armor wasn’t poetic.

It wasn’t some cinematic moment of courage.

It was brutal.

A few months after opening my heart, it broke again and it shattered me.

I remember going quiet.
Pulling inward.
Wanting to disappear rather than feel.

That night, sitting alone in the wreckage, I realized something that changed me:

Pain isn’t a failure of openness.
Pain is the cost of a real life.

Not a sign you did something wrong.
A sign you chose depth over numbness.

The only path to the best relationships you can have
is through feeling.

Not understanding.
Not communicating better.

Feeling.

The grief.
The ache.
The tightness in your chest when you want to shut down but don’t.

And those waves will come again and again.

This isn’t work meant to be done alone.

You can do it alone, but isolation is one of armor’s favorite hiding places.

Pain needs witnesses.

When you speak what hurts out loud, not polished, not solved,
something begins to loosen.

It moves.
It softens.
And it quietly gives other men permission to stop pretending too.

So here’s the invitation I want to leave you with, not as someone who's figured it out, but as a man still in it.

Where does your armor show up now?

Not in theory.
Not in the past.

In the moments when you go quiet.
When you choose control over honesty.
When you feel your heart closing and tell yourself it’s “fine.”

And what is that armor costing you today?

For me, it cost years.

Years of connection I could have entered sooner.
Conversations I avoided because they felt dangerous.
Depth I postponed because distance felt safer.

And here’s the truth most men learn late:

You don’t learn relationships outside of relationships.

And if you're in one right now and your partner says things like:

"I don't feel you."
"I want more from you."
"I wish your heart was more open."

That's not a communication issue.

That’s armor doing its job.

And every job has a price.

If this stirred something, reply and tell me one honest place your armor is still active.

I read every response.

And sometimes, naming it plainly is the first moment you stop living half-open.