Many men spend their twenties and thirties quietly looking for an older man to see them.
Not a mentor, exactly. Not a boss. Something they can’t name at the time.
They take on extra projects to be near them. They pay attention to what they say, in a way that isn’t quite proportional to what they’re saying. They carry small encounters with them for years.
Some get something from it. Most get nothing, or get it briefly. None would admit, then or now, that they were auditioning these men for a role their actual fathers had not been able to play.
The pattern is so common it’s almost predictable. And it reveals something about what happens when a particular kind of attention is missing from a man’s early life.
They don’t know they’re auditioning anyone
None of them would use that word. They don’t know what they’re doing, which is part of why it keeps happening.
If you’d asked them at twenty-eight why they hung around after the meeting to keep talking to the head of the department, they’d have said they admired his work. If you’d asked at thirty-three why they spent half a Saturday helping their friend’s father fix something in his garage that didn’t really need fixing, they’d have said they liked the guy.
Research on paternal influence reviewed six categories of empirical studies and concluded that fathers’ love is as strong a predictor of adult psychological outcomes as mothers’ love, and in some studies, a stronger one.
The absence of it, by extension, is a real thing. It sits inside you and looks for an opening.
They don’t know it’s sitting inside them. They don’t know that what feels like admiration for their boss, or interest in their friend’s dad, or willingness to drive a writing teacher to the airport, is a version of the same hunger.
They just keep finding themselves near older men, paying close attention, hoping they’ll say something specific to them.
Every older man they meet is a possible candidate
In retrospect, the breadth of who qualifies is what’s startling.
Their bosses, obviously. Especially the ones who take an interest. But also: their friends’ fathers, whom they visit on weekends and stay talking to at the kitchen table after their friends have wandered off.
Their coaches, even if they aren’t athletes. The man who runs the youth program at their parents’ church. The husband of the woman who hired them at their first real job. Their wives’ fathers, who hold a particular charge because they have something they need them to hand them.
They don’t have a type, exactly, but they know one when they meet one. He’s usually older—fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years older. He’s done the thing they’re trying to do, or some version of it.
He has the bearing of a man who’s settled into his life.
They register him within thirty seconds of meeting him, and they register him in a way they don’t register men their own age.
Sometimes they never see the man again. It doesn’t matter. They carry the encounter with them for years.
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They’re trying to be seen, not mentored
It looks like mentorship. They think it’s mentorship.
They’re ambitious young men, and what they say they want is guidance, advice, professional capital, an in. They audition for it the way ambitious young men have always auditioned for it—working harder than required, staying late, asking smart questions, and performing competence.
But underneath the performance, they aren’t really trying to learn the work. They’re trying to be seen by the man doing it.
There’s a particular kind of attention an older man can give to a younger one—a steady, evaluating, finally approving attention—and they’re starving for it.
The clearest sign is what they do with the advice when they get it. They don’t always use it. Sometimes they file it. Sometimes they ignore it.
What they keep isn’t the advice. What they keep is the moment the man looked up and said their name, and meant it, and seemed to see something.
The advice was the pretext for the looking.
They can’t ask their own fathers
This is the part nobody wants to talk about, including with each other.
Research on natural mentors found that emerging adults with non-parental adults from their existing social networks who served a mentoring role reported significantly fewer psychological symptoms and less substance use than those without.
The protective pathway ran through coping ability and sense of purpose. Younger men, when they could find an older one, were getting something psychologically real from him.
What they couldn’t get was the same thing from their own fathers. They weren’t terrible men. Most of them showed up. Some of them showed up well.
But the specific thing they were looking for—the steady evaluating attention, the seeing, the saying of their names with weight—they couldn’t deliver that.
Some couldn’t because they didn’t know how, never having received it themselves. Some were emotionally walled off in a way that had been there their whole childhoods. A few were already gone, or as good as gone, by the time they knew they needed it.
What none of them could do was go to their own fathers and say what they needed. The conversation wasn’t available.
Going to a stranger felt easier. Going to a stranger felt possible. Going to their own fathers was off the table, for reasons they couldn’t have explained and didn’t try to.
They feel the grief years after they stopped
The auditions stop in their late thirties, by and large. Not on purpose. They just get busy.
They have children, careers that need them, marriages that need work, and parents who start getting sick. The older men recede. They stop noticing them.
Most stop looking before they notice they’ve stopped.
Then, somewhere in their forties, the grief shows up. It doesn’t announce itself as grief. It announces itself as a sudden ache after a conversation with a man they hardly know, or a piercing reaction to a small moment in a movie, or an evening on the porch when they can’t, for a few minutes, name what’s wrong.
What’s wrong is that they’re now the age they were looking for, themselves, twenty years ago. What’s wrong is that no one ever came in the way they were hoping.
What’s wrong is that their actual fathers, in most cases, are still themselves, still unable to provide what they couldn’t have asked for then and can’t ask for now.
What’s wrong is that the door, in some quiet, undramatic way, has closed.
The grief isn’t the older men’s fault. It’s not really their fathers’ fault either, not in the way fault usually works.
It’s just there, on the porch, sitting next to them in the dark.
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They’re the “older man” for someone else now
There’s something strange about being on this side of it. And also, in a way they couldn’t have predicted, healing.
When a younger man asks them questions while they’re making dinner, they notice, halfway through, that they’re answering them with more weight than they probably warrant. Not because the questions aren’t real.
Because he’s looking at them the way they used to look at men.
It’s not because they’re particularly wise—they’re not—but because they know what’s actually happening. They can pay attention. They can use his name.
They can register, when he comes back the next morning to ask a follow-up question that they know isn’t really about the follow-up question, what’s really being asked.
They’re not going to fix it for him. He has a whole separate set of conditions they don’t know about. He has his own father, who’s doing what he can or can’t.
They’re a small thing in his life. But they know to take the small things seriously. They know what it costs not to be taken seriously.
Sometimes that’s all they have, and sometimes it turns out to be a real thing to have.
