There was a summer I watched so many videos titled things like "5 Rules Every Man Should Know" that YouTube started recommending me cologne and also, inexplicably, protein powder. I took notes. I am not proud of this, but I took actual notes, in a notebook, like I was studying for a final exam in Being a Guy.

The rules were always the same, just reshuffled. Stand up straight. Speak slower. Buy a leather jacket, but the right leather jacket, the one that says I read but not too much. Make eye contact for exactly long enough to seem confident but not so long you seem unhinged. I practiced this in the bathroom mirror and scared myself a little.

I bought the jacket. I want to be honest about that. It was from a thrift store and it smelled like somebody else's cigarettes for the first two weeks, which I told myself was "character." I wore it to a bar and ordered a whiskey I didn't actually like, neat, because a video had told me ice was for people who hadn't figured themselves out yet. I have never figured myself out. I just drank bad whiskey warm and called it progress.

The talking was its own curriculum. Lower your voice half an octave. Don't ask too many questions, it makes you seem needy. Let silences sit, let them stretch, let the woman across from you fill them if she wants to. I did this once on a date and she asked if I was feeling okay, because apparently a man practicing "comfortable silence" looks a lot like a man having a small medical event.

Here's the part that's hard to write without sounding like a sitcom: none of it worked, obviously, because it was never actually about jackets or eye contact or whiskey. It worked exactly as well as a costume works, which is to say, for about as long as nobody looks too closely. The real shift happened later and much less photogenically — the week my dad got sick and I had to call three different hospitals and hold my mother's hand in a waiting room that smelled like hand sanitizer and old coffee. Nobody had made a video about that. There was no rule for how to stand in that room. I just stood in it.

I still have the jacket. I wear it sometimes, not because it says anything about me anymore, just because it's warm and it fits and I like how the pockets sit. I talk at whatever speed the sentence wants to come out at. I ask too many questions because I am, it turns out, needy, and also curious, and those are apparently the same thing wearing different clothes.

I don't know how to style myself as a man. I've mostly given up trying. I know how to sit with someone in a hard room. I know how to laugh too loud at my own jokes. I know I liked her more when she asked if I was okay than I ever liked the silence I was performing. That might be the whole rulebook, honestly. One rule. Stop performing long enough for someone to actually ask.