According to Terrance Real, a senior faculty member of the Family Institute of Cambridge and Co-Director of the Harvard University Gender Research Project, young boys are forced to disconnect from their feelings for their mother "for fear of sissifying them", all in the name of being a man. Once in school, boys learn by junior high that even when they have a legitimate reason to cry due to severe injury, they are to deny their feelings or be ridiculed by their peer group. Boys come to realize that feelings are the enemy of manliness and must be continually denied. By high school, boys have learned that the art of being a man is to put up with anything to achieve a given goal.
Sadly, the cost of suppressing emotions is high for men. As therapist and author Marvin Allen observed, "It's like going to the dentist to have your tooth filled. In order to stop the pain of one tooth, the dentist has to numb up the wholeside of the jaw." Thus young men have a reduced capacity for a wide range of emotions that women take for granted.
Mirage men bring this time-tested method of denying their true feelings into the dating world to win their prize. They see courtship and marriage as another time to hide their emotions, just as they did in the playground kickball game, the paper chase in the classroom and in the social ladder competing for friendships. A mirage man will listen to a woman go on and on about herself and her feelings for hours on end if he believes a kiss and more wait on the other side of the conversation. Chameleon-like, he will adopt her values, interests and goals if he thinks they will ultimately result in his short term relational satisfaction.
A good example of this disconnecting behavior is found in former Partridge Family television show star turned talk show host/disc jockey/ reality show star Danny Bonaduce. He boasts that he has been married to his "born-again" Christian wife Gretchen "for five years, and we've known each other for five years and seven hours." According to Danny, "It didn't bother me that I married a stranger in order to get sex from a woman who didn't want to have sex until she was married." Danny used artificial intimacy to plunge into the marriage. He uses approval seeking to maintain it, denying his feelings and ceding all control to his wife. As he phrased it, "I'm not captain of the ship at home. I'm barely first mate."
