All I Can Give This World Is Two Chivalrous Men
I’ll be honest, when we first sat down to plan this issue, someone asked why we needed a “Men’s Special” at all. We’ve built entire issues around women, their strength, their stories, and rightly so. But somewhere in that effort, I think we forgot to ask the same questions about the men standing beside them.
It felt fitting that this issue lands in November, globally recognised as Men’s Health Awareness Month. If there was ever a time to finally have this conversation properly, it’s now!
I have two sons, and every time someone tells them to “man up” or that “boys don’t cry,” something in me pushes back. Because I don’t want my boys to grow up believing their pain doesn’t count. I want them to know it’s okay to feel things, to say when something hurts, to ask for help without thinking it makes them less of a man. That belief, that boys matter, that their softness isn’t a flaw to be corrected, is really where this issue started.
As I worked on it, a few conversations stayed with me. Dipankar Ghoshal, founder of For Men India, told us about the nine years he spent fighting a false accusation, and how a system built to protect one gender left little room to protect him. Dr. Vishakha Shivdasani, longevity and metabolic health expert, reminded us that men die by suicide at several times the rate of women, yet seek help far less, often showing up for a cholesterol test but staying silent about months of sleeplessness or a mind that won’t quiet down.
Luke Coutinho, Foundational Medicine and Lifestyle expert, put it simply: men will happily talk about protein, supplements and their gym routine, but ask how they’re sleeping, and it’s a different story altogether, years of stress and suppressed emotion they’ve never once spoken about.
These aren’t isolated stories. They’re a pattern, one we don’t talk about nearly enough, and one that starts earlier than we think, with a little boy being told to stop crying before he’s even old enough to understand why. This issue exists because of that silence. Because a cause isn’t about choosing one gender over another, it’s about making sure both are held, protected, and understood. A strong woman deserves a strong man beside her, not one who’s been quietly breaking for years because nobody thought to ask if he was okay. In these pages, we go where these conversations rarely go. These are the stories we don’t hear enough, so we decided to tell them.
I have two sons. And if there’s one thing I can give this world through them, it’s not ambition or achievement. It’s two chivalrous men, men who know how to be gentle without being weak, who understand that asking for help isn’t surrender, and who will one day stand beside someone equally strong, not above her, not behind her, but beside her.
This issue is for them. And for every man who’s been told, in a hundred quiet ways, that his pain doesn’t count. It does!