Anna: Hey everyone, it's Anna. All right, before we start the show, I want to talk about Valentine's Day because of course we are already thinking about it over here at Modern Love. We're hoping you can help us out. We want to know the most romantic thing that's ever happened to you. Or if it didn't happen to you, the most romantic thing you've ever seen or witnessed. It could be something grand, a romcom style gesture. Maybe someone stood outside your window with a boom box or ran through the airport to stop you from leaving. Or it could be something small like someone knows you hate olives, so they always pick them off your plate before you dig in. Or someone slips a note in your lunchbox every morning to remind you how much you mean to them. Whatever made you feel that rush of romance from the big moments to the tiny ones, we want to hear about it and we want to know why it was so romantic to you. If you have a story in mind, record a voice memo and email it to us at modernlovepodcast@nytimes.com by February 4th and we might use your story on the show. That's modernlovepodcast@nytimes.com. And once again, your deadline is February 4th. Thanks so much. We can't wait to hear from you.

Anna: From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is Modern Love. So, you might remember a while back we had the writer Sam Graham Felson on the show. He told us all about trying to rekindle his old friendships with other men in his life after he realized that as an adult he felt pretty lonely. That conversation was so full of tenderness and vulnerability and such a surprising reflection on masculinity that honestly I was a little surprised when I saw a new article from Sam pop up all about trying to make his son tough. I was like tough? Tough? Really? That sounds so traditionally masculine. I didn't expect it coming from Sam and I really wanted to know what it meant to him. So today, Sam is back to tell us what happened when he took his 8-year-old son on a cross-country road trip to live the strenuous life, why toughness felt like such an important thing for a son to learn, and what his son taught him in return. Sam Graham Felson, welcome back to Modern Love.

Sam: It's really fun to be back.

Anna: Sam, the last time we had you on the show, you'd written this big New York Times magazine story about friendship between men. Now, you've written another piece for the magazine. The story is called "I Tried to Toughen Up My Son. Things Didn't Go As Planned." There's a lot behind that laugh. We'll get into what happened, but first, I want to know why. Why did you think your son needed to be tough?

Sam: So, my son really reminds me of what I was like as a kid. I was sensitive. I had passionate interests. I guess you could call that nerdy. Unlike my son, I was so desperate to be cool that I forced myself to get good at basketball by spending a million hours shooting layups in my backyard. My son has no interest in sports. In fact, he hates sports so much. The other day he drew a picture of a ray gun. And he was like, "This is called the sports gun. It's a special kind of laser gun that will shoot all the balls in the universe so I'll never have to play sports."

Sam: He wants to be in his world of imagination. He wants to turn over logs and see what insects are underneath them. I remember when I took him to a birthday party at this indoor basketball facility and the other kids were like sick at basketball and my son had never played basketball so he was dribbling the wrong way down the court. And I realize it's like—you asked me about toughness and now I'm just talking about sports. And they are different things. But I think the way in which it's connected is it comes from the feeling that for boys, if you're not good at sports, it's kind of a wrap. You're not going to be cool, you're not going to make friends. What I give a crap about is that I just don't want him to be somebody who gets bullied or even made fun of or just excluded from the group. And if he wants to do theater and nature stuff, great. But I want him to at least develop some toughness and resilience because if he gets picked on for being different, you have to have a really solid sense of confidence. You have to have a solid sense of like if someone tries to push me around like I'm going to stand up for myself and be like, "Yeah, I'm different and [__] off."

Sam: I enrolled him in a karate school. When you're first starting out, it's basically like dance class. Once you get to orange belt, it's the first time where you have to do something scary. You start fighting other kids. But he couldn't do it. He was afraid of getting hit, but he was also afraid of hitting. And it was misery for him. I really tried to encourage him, but he just couldn't do it. So after I dropped like hundreds of dollars on these pads, he dropped out like the next day.

Anna: Did he go to class? Was there a class where they were sparring and he just couldn't do it?

Sam: Yeah. I mean, he wanted to quit right away and I kept pushing him to go back, but he would just kind of stand there. And the other kid would be punching and he would just kind of stand there until the sensei was like, "All right, the other guy won." And I probably even said from the sidelines, "Dude, you got to go on the offensive, too. You can't just stand there like getting hit. You have to hit back. You have to defend yourself." And then he would just do like a very tepid tap type thing and go back to just standing there frozen.

Anna: One thing I want to get into here is the sort of interplay between toughness and violence. Why did you feel like your son needed to be able to fight?

Sam: So this is like the central question for me: can you instill a sense of resilience and toughness and self-confidence in a boy and be against violence? I also abhore violence and yet if you teach your kids martial arts it's not just learning how to block. I still don't have the answers. But what I was trying to figure out is: what is your actual position on violence vis-a-vis raising a son? Do you actually think that it is the right thing to do to tell him that he has to be willing to punch someone in the face if it comes to it? Or do you actually think that it's never okay to harm another human being? If he is the "punch the guy in the nose" guy, there are consequences. And if he is the "turn the other cheek" guy or the runaway guy, which is what I was like as a kid, there's also some serious consequences to that.

Anna: You were the turn the other cheek kid growing up. Paint me a picture of that.

Sam: When I was younger, when there was a scary thing, I would run away or I would just avoid the situation or I would quit. The moments that fill me with the greatest shame. I remember there were these kids in this like gang called the JP Dog Pound. Me and my buddy Rob were playing basketball with them and one of the kids kept cheating. Rob called him out. And the kid got really riled up and he grabbed Rob and pressed him up against this chain link fence and was basically like "I'm going to beat the [__] out of you." And I just stood there frozen. I didn't do anything to try to defend him and he felt abandoned in that moment. My fear of violence in that moment led to me doing the wrong thing for my friend.

Sam: It extended even beyond that. I was afraid to dance; I was afraid of girls. Not only was I terrified of asking a girl out, but I was afraid to say yes when a girl asked me out because I thought, "Well, I'm a [__], only someone who's really secure in their masculinity can have a girlfriend." It all comes from the idea of being a physical coward. I was in danger of flunking out of my high school because I didn't have the confidence to learn. When something was hard like math, I was just like "I'm not going to be able to get it."

Anna: So, what was your plan to toughen up your son to teach him resilience?

Sam: My son has always had an obsessive personality. His current obsession is national parks. He really fell in love with Teddy Roosevelt, who is kind of seen as the godfather of the national parks. I said, "Let's spend a whole week. I'll let you pick any park." And he was like, "I want to go to the Badlands. I want to go to Teddy Roosevelt National Park." That's in North Dakota. It's a badass place. It's the Wild West. It's a hard land filled with rocks and bison.

Sam: Teddy Roosevelt, like me, like my son, was actually a huge nerd as a little kid and a hugely fearful little kid. He got his ass beat as a little kid. So Teddy Roosevelt now, we think of him as the iconic man. I wanted to have a road trip where I get to explore what it means to be like a man with my son in a place that was this iconic site of masculinity. My dream outcome was: I want to push him to do harder hikes than he's ever done and see if he can deal, because that's the discomfort. That's the resilience.

Sam: Within minutes he's like, "I'm hungry. Let's go back to the visitor center." And then he's also scared because there are wild bison. I kept saying to him, "Come on let's live the strenuous life!" Finally he just kept complaining. I'm like "All right let's call it a day." But then the next day he totally surprised me. He was like "Let's go off trail." He got really into the idea of climbing up these beautiful rock formations called buttes. He insisted on being in the front; he wanted to be the trailblazer.

Anna: What do you think changed from one day to another?

Sam: Every night we were reading parts of the Teddy Roosevelt book and we read a part about when Teddy Roosevelt got beat up as a kid. I'm basically saying to him like Teddy Roosevelt changed. He was not naturally tough. He made himself tougher. At one point, we're on this narrow ridge and the wind started to pick up. I'm starting to get scared but he wasn't scared and he actually turned to me and he's like "Come on we're living the strenuous life, come on dad."

Sam: There were things that were happening on the trip that were complicated. We actually drove through the site of the most infamous massacre in the history of the genocide of Native American people, which was at Wounded Knee. He starts asking questions: "Dad, did the Native Americans do anything to deserve this?" I'm like, "No, they didn't actually." He says to me, "Dad, was Teddy Roosevelt a bad guy or a good guy?" I paused for a long time. Teddy Roosevelt was a massive imperialist. He loved violence. That's the dark side of the masculine guy.

Sam: He watched "Pee-wee's Big Adventure." I just start hearing him cracking up in the back seat. Pee-wee is a really wimpy guy. Definitely the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt energy. He kind of gets by on his wits and he gets by with little tricks, not by punching people in the face. And my son just really vibed with it. He started looking up Pee-wee Herman outfits and wanted to buy a red bow tie.

Anna: Were you worried? Were you worried he'd get beat up if he started wearing the bow tie?

Sam: Yes. In the movie, it's a beautiful fantasy because Pee-wee doesn't really get bullied. He spellbinds everybody with his charisma. But in the real world, wouldn't Pee-wee get his ass beat? Wouldn't people be calling Pee-wee nasty homophobic words?

Sam: On the last night of the trip, I say like, "All right, I want to do like a role playing thing where I'm going to pretend to be a bully and I want you to stand up for yourself." I come up to him. I'm like, "Bro, you're a loser." I gave him a fake shove. It didn't feel good to do that. It was a failed experiment. And then at one point he's like "Wait, I thought of a good way to fight back against the bully. Be a bully again dad."

Sam: I'm like "Hey you're a loser." And he goes, "Well, you know, I'm glad you feel that way. I'd rather be friends with you than fight you. Can I offer you a piece of gum?" I put it in my mouth and then he's like "I have news for you. It's trick gum!"

Sam: I'm very moved by the trick gum because on an unconscious level, he's doing something kind of profound. He's saying "You're way bigger than me and I'm not going to be able to beat you with brawn. I'm going to use my wits to beat you." What he was actually offering was a third way. You can stand up for yourself without physically hurting someone. You can be yourself. It showed me this kid has a kind of inner belief in himself that I actually didn't have as a kid.

Sam: You realize that your job as a parent is to like walk away and just let him do his own thing. Believe in your child and know that they got this. He got his class picture back yesterday. He is the only person in the class picture wearing a suit. I do still worry about him a little bit because he is different. But I just feel like he kind of has this Pee-wee quality of just not giving a [__]. I think that's going to be his superpower.