My wife asked me what I wanted for dinner last Tuesday, and I said what I always say.

“I don’t mind. Whatever you feel like.”

She didn’t fight me on it. She never does anymore. She just nodded and started pulling things out of the fridge, and I stood there in the kitchen doorway feeling something I couldn’t name. Not guilt exactly. Something quieter. Like a door I’d locked so long ago that I’d forgotten the room behind it existed.

I’m 58 years old. I have said “I don’t mind” or “whatever works” or “you choose” so many thousands of times that it has become the thing people know about me. Marcus is easygoing. Marcus is low-maintenance. Marcus doesn’t care where we eat or what movie we watch or which hotel we book. Marcus is flexible.

But here is the thing I only recently understood, and it arrived not as a revelation but as a slow, sickening recognition: I’m not flexible. I’m not easygoing. I am a man who learned, before he was old enough to tie his shoes, that wanting things was dangerous. And I have been performing indifference ever since.

The boy who stopped asking

I can trace it to specific moments, though it took me decades to understand them as formative rather than ordinary.

I was maybe seven. We were at the grocery store, my mother moving fast the way she always did, the cart already full of whatever was cheapest. I pointed at a box of cereal - the one with the cartoon on it, the one every kid in my class had. I didn’t beg. I just said, “Can we get that one?”

The sigh. That’s what I remember. Not anger. Not a lecture about money. Just the sigh. The way her shoulders dropped half an inch. The way the air in the aisle changed, as if my small request had added weight to a body that was already carrying more than it could hold.

She didn’t say no. She said, “Do you always have to want something?”

I don’t think she meant it as cruelty. I think she was exhausted and stretched thin and parenting alone in all the ways that mattered. But a seven-year-old doesn’t hear context. A seven-year-old hears: your wanting is a problem. Your wanting makes things harder for the people you love.

So I stopped.

Not all at once. It happened the way most childhood adaptations happen - gradually, imperceptibly, until the strategy became the identity. I stopped asking for the cereal. Then I stopped asking for new shoes until the old ones had holes. Then I stopped saying which friend’s house I wanted to go to, which movie I wanted to see, what I wanted for my birthday.

“I don’t mind” became my native language. And here’s the cruelest part: I wasn’t suppressing preferences. I was dismantling the machinery that produced them.

When “easygoing” is a survival strategy

There is a difference between a man who genuinely does not care where the family goes on vacation and a man who trained himself out of caring before he was ten. From the outside, they look identical. Both say “wherever you want.” Both seem agreeable. Both are described by their partners as “so easy to be with.”

But inside, they are living in entirely different countries.

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology examined what researchers called “chronic self-silencing” in men - the habitual suppression of personal needs, preferences, and desires in relational contexts. What they found was striking. Men who scored highest on self-silencing didn’t just hide what they wanted. Over time, they reported genuinely losing access to their own preferences. The act of suppression, repeated thousands of times across decades, didn’t just bury the desire. It eroded the capacity for desire itself.

I read that study and felt something crack open in my chest.

Because that’s exactly it. When my wife asks what I want for dinner, I’m not choosing not to answer. I’m standing in front of an internal shelf that was emptied out forty years ago, and I genuinely cannot find anything on it. The preferences aren’t hidden. They were never allowed to form.

Psychologist Terrence Real, who has spent decades working with men on emotional suppression, describes this pattern as “the loss of the wanting self.” He argues that boys in particular are trained out of desire through a specific mechanism: not punishment, but disappointment. Not “you can’t have that” but the sighing, the eye-rolling, the subtle withdrawal of warmth that teaches a child his needs are an imposition on the people he loves most.

The punishment for wanting isn’t pain. It’s the quiet withdrawal of connection. And for a child, that’s worse.

The man who cannot choose a restaurant

My wife, Laura, brought it up about six months ago. Not as an accusation. As something closer to grief.

We were in the car, trying to decide where to eat. She listed four options. I said “whatever you want” before she’d finished the third one. And she pulled the car over - not dramatically, just gently to the curb - and said, “Marcus. I’ve been married to you for thirty-one years. And I don’t know what your favorite restaurant is. I don’t know what food you actually want when no one else is in the room. And it scares me that you might not know either.”

I wanted to tell her she was wrong. That I was just easy to please. That it didn’t matter. But the words wouldn’t come, because somewhere underneath the “I don’t mind” there was a truth I hadn’t looked at: she was right. I genuinely did not know.

Not what I wanted for dinner. Not what I wanted for my birthday. Not what I wanted from retirement. Not what kind of life I would build if someone told me I was allowed to want one.

A 2022 study in Frontiers in Psychology explored what the researchers termed “preference atrophy” - the phenomenon in which individuals who chronically defer to others experience a measurable decline in their ability to generate autonomous preferences. Participants who scored high on deference didn’t just delay choosing. Brain imaging showed reduced activation in regions associated with self-referential processing. They weren’t politely letting others go first. They had, at a neural level, lost some of the architecture for knowing what they wanted.

I am not being generous when I let my wife pick the restaurant. I am standing in front of a question I cannot answer.

What gets lost when a boy stops wanting

Here’s what no one tells you about burying your desires at seven or eight or nine. You don’t just lose the specific things you wanted. You lose the practice of wanting. You lose the muscle.

Other boys learned to say “I want the blue one” and “I like this song” and “I’d rather go to the beach,” and those small declarations built, over years, into an identity. A sense of self assembled from ten thousand tiny preferences. I like this. I don’t like that. I want this. I don’t want that.

I skipped all of that. While other boys were building a self out of desires and opinions and tastes, I was building a self out of absence. I became the shape of whatever space was left after everyone else had taken theirs. It’s efficient. It keeps the peace. And it hollows you out so slowly that you don’t notice you’re empty until someone asks you a direct question and you realize you have nothing to say.

Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence talks about self-awareness as the foundation of every other emotional capacity. But self-awareness requires a self to be aware of. And a self requires desires, preferences, opinions - the raw material of identity. When those are removed early enough, what’s left isn’t a person who doesn’t care. It’s a person who was never allowed to discover what caring felt like.

The dinner question, again

I’ve been trying something recently. Small things. When Laura asks what I want for dinner, I don’t answer immediately. I pause. I stand in the discomfort of the question and try to feel something beneath the automatic “I don’t mind.”

It’s harder than it sounds. The first few times I tried, what came up wasn’t a preference. It was panic. A low hum of anxiety, almost physical, as if somewhere in my nervous system a very old alarm was sounding: don’t answer that. Wanting things is how you lose people. Wanting things is how you become a burden.

I told a therapist about this, and she said something that has stayed with me for months. She said, “You’re not indecisive. You’re afraid. And the thing you’re afraid of is that your real self - the one with desires and preferences and needs - is fundamentally too much for the people you love.”

She was right. That is exactly the fear. And it was installed so early and so completely that I confused it for personality.

But last Thursday, Laura asked what I wanted for dinner. And I stood in the kitchen, and I felt the old “I don’t mind” rising in my throat like muscle memory. And for the first time in maybe my entire adult life, I let myself feel past it.

“I’d like pasta,” I said. “That thing you make with the tomatoes and the basil. I really like that one.”

She turned around and looked at me. Not with surprise exactly. With something softer. Like she’d been waiting thirty-one years for me to say something that simple.

It was just pasta. It was just a preference. But my voice shook when I said it, and I think we both understood that what I was really saying was something much larger and much more frightening: I want something. I’m telling you what it is. And I’m trusting you not to sigh.

The quiet act of reclaiming yourself

I’m not going to pretend this is easy, or that one pasta dinner fixed forty years of learned absence. It didn’t.

I still say “I don’t mind” more than I say what I actually want. I still feel a flash of something close to guilt when I state a preference, as if I’m breaking a contract I signed before I could read. I still have days when the question “what do you want” feels less like an invitation and more like standing at the edge of a cliff.

But I’m learning that wanting things is not an imposition. That a preference is not a demand. That a man who says “I’d like the window seat” or “I want to go to the coast” or “I’d rather stay home tonight” is not being difficult. He’s being a person.

If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself - the man who always defers, who always says “you pick,” who has been called easygoing his whole life and has never once felt that the word described anything real about him - I want you to know something.

You are not low-maintenance. You were a boy who figured out, very young, that the cost of wanting things was measured in the comfort of the people around you. And you decided, without anyone ever asking you to make that decision, that their comfort mattered more than your existence.

That was a reasonable strategy for a child. It is a devastating one for a man.

The next time someone asks what you want, try pausing before the automatic answer. Try feeling past the “I don’t mind.” There might be something underneath it - faint, unfamiliar, a little frightening. Something that sounds like your own voice, saying what it actually wants.

Let it speak. It’s been waiting a very long time.