Still Waiting for His Approval? The Hidden Cost of Seeking Validation From Other Men

Have you ever stopped to consider how much of your life you've spent trying to gain the approval of other men?

Think about it.

Your father. Your teachers. The boys you grew up with. The men you admired. Your first boyfriend. Your lovers. Your colleagues. Your bosses.

Different people, different stages of life, but perhaps a surprisingly familiar feeling: wanting to be accepted, recognised, respected and considered good enough.

For some gay men, this desire for male approval can become a recurring theme throughout their lives.

And perhaps the most interesting part is that we don't always recognise it.

We might call it ambition. We might call it wanting to be attractive. We might call it wanting a successful relationship or wanting to be respected professionally.

But underneath some of these behaviours, there may be a much more personal question:

Am I good enough in the eyes of the men whose approval matters to me?

It can start much earlier than we realise

Growing up, many boys look to their fathers for reassurance, recognition and a sense of belonging.

They want to make their fathers proud. They want to feel accepted. They want to know that they're doing a good job.

But what happens when a boy begins to realise that some of the things that make him different might not fit his father's expectations?

Perhaps he isn't interested in the same sports. Perhaps his mannerisms are different. Perhaps he doesn't identify with conventional ideas of masculinity.

Or perhaps he simply senses that being openly gay might change the way his father sees him.

Neither study establishes that every gay man has unresolved issues with his father — a claim nobody could support. They tell us that the father-son relationship is one of the places these patterns can take root.

What happens when the approval we wanted as boys becomes something we continue searching for as adults?

The pressure to be accepted by other men

For some gay men, masculinity can become more than a personal expression of identity. It can become something they feel they need to demonstrate.

Being masculine enough. Looking masculine enough. Speaking a certain way. Having the right body. Being perceived as one of the desirable men.

Fifty-six per cent is not a fringe experience.

Consider what that means.

We can spend enormous amounts of energy trying to fit an image of what we believe other men find acceptable.

We might suppress parts of our personality, hide our vulnerabilities, change how we communicate or distance ourselves from men who express themselves differently.

And perhaps we don't even realise we're doing it.

We're simply trying to belong.

But at what point does the desire to be accepted by other men start interfering with our ability to accept ourselves?

When the search for approval follows us into relationships

This is where the pattern can become particularly difficult.

We grow up wanting acceptance from the men around us, and then we enter romantic relationships where the opinions and behaviours of other men can carry enormous emotional weight.

We want to be desired. We want to be chosen. We want to feel important to someone.

There's nothing inherently wrong with wanting these things. Healthy relationships involve mutual affection, reassurance and appreciation.

The difficulty arises when our sense of worth becomes dependent on receiving them.

For example:

We might become anxious when someone doesn't respond to a message.

We might interpret a partner's lack of affection as evidence that we're no longer desirable.

We might tolerate poor treatment because losing someone's attention feels worse than staying in an unhealthy relationship.

Or we might continually seek reassurance that we're attractive, wanted or good enough.

These examine actual relationships between men, not general relationship satisfaction. That matters, because two men bring the same question to each other: am I accepted as I am?

Perhaps there's something worth considering here.

When we rely heavily on another man's approval to feel secure, we can inadvertently give that person enormous influence over how we feel about ourselves.

We might start confusing being wanted with being worthy.

And those are two very different things.

The approval of men in positions of authority

It's not just our fathers or romantic partners.

Think about the male teachers, coaches, managers and bosses we've encountered throughout our lives.

These are people who often hold positions of influence over our development, opportunities and sense of belonging.

For a young gay man, having a supportive teacher can make a significant difference to how safe and accepted he feels at school — particularly if acceptance at home or among his peers is in short supply.

Later, a young man may find himself carefully managing his identity around a male boss, worrying about how being gay might affect his professional credibility or acceptance.

These studies show that affirmation and supportive authority figures matter. They don't establish that gay men universally seek approval from teachers or bosses. That broader connection is an argument worth exploring — not a finding we should pretend has been proven.

But there's a distinction worth exploring.

There's a difference between appreciating a supportive boss and feeling that your worth as a man depends on whether that boss approves of you.

There's a difference between respecting your father and spending your adult life trying to prove that you're the son he wanted.

There's a difference between enjoying the affection of a partner and needing his attention to feel valuable.

The first is a healthy part of human connection.

The second can become an exhausting way to live.

Why the early approval mattered so much

There's a reason this runs so deep — and it isn't sentimentality.

Research on family acceptance and rejection has found that what happened in adolescence doesn't stay in adolescence. It shows up in adult health.

So when a man wants his father's approval at forty, that isn't weakness.

It's an old hunger, still running — because the original version of it mattered enormously.

When does seeking approval start costing us our identity?

Perhaps the most damaging consequence of constantly seeking external validation is that we can gradually lose sight of what we actually want.

We start making decisions based on how other people might respond.

We choose relationships based on whether someone makes us feel desirable.

We pursue careers partly to demonstrate our success.

We change our appearance to fit somebody else's ideal.

We hide our emotions because we believe vulnerability might make us less attractive or less respected.

And eventually, we can become so focused on being the person other people want that we lose touch with the person we actually are.

This isn't necessarily something that happens consciously.

It can develop through years of trying to navigate environments where acceptance hasn't always felt guaranteed.

The important thing is not to blame ourselves for developing these patterns.

It's to recognise them.

You don't need to stop wanting approval. You need to stop depending on it.

Let's be realistic.

We are social creatures. We want to be liked, appreciated, respected and loved.

Wanting approval isn't a character flaw.

And seeking reassurance from someone we care about isn't inherently unhealthy.

The goal isn't to become someone who doesn't care what anybody thinks.

The goal is to develop enough self-awareness and self-respect that other people's opinions no longer determine our entire sense of worth.

You can appreciate your father's opinion without needing his approval to validate your life.

You can respect your boss without measuring your value through his recognition.

You can love another man without making his attraction to you the foundation of your self-esteem.

You can enjoy being desired without needing to be desired by everyone.

And you can be masculine, feminine, somewhere in between or entirely uninterested in those labels without needing to justify yourself to other men.

Perhaps the real work is learning to recognise when we're making choices because they genuinely reflect who we are, and when we're making them because we're hoping someone else will finally tell us we're enough.

Because there's a significant difference between wanting to be loved and needing someone else's approval to feel worthy of love.

And maybe the question we should all be asking ourselves is this:

How much of the person you've become is actually who you want to be, and how much of it is who you thought other men wanted you to be?

You don't have to spend the rest of your life auditioning for acceptance.

At some point, you get to stop trying to prove yourself.

You get to decide who you are, what matters to you and how you want to live.

And perhaps that's when you finally begin to experience something you've been searching for all along.

Not the approval of another man.

But your own.