For years I searched for fathers. I found brothers instead.
That was the problem.
I wanted to call my father today. To hear those four magic words every child wants to hear: I'm proud of you.
But I didn't.
I sat in silence and let the ache sit where it always sits.
It was another moment that I would celebrate without him. I struggled to imagine a world where it wasn't so, where I could call him at a moment's notice and celebrate a win or ask for guidance.
The idea felt like an inaccessible treasure. A gift I was not meant to have.
It wasn't always like this. Until 14, he was in my life, guiding me toward what he believed in: prepare for The End, stay healthy, and never get married.
I listened closely, but as I got older and refused to follow his preparatory path, a rift grew between us. His absence became a defining feature of my life. I began trying to find a replacement through online figures, professors, and other fathers who would teach me what it meant to be a man.
It worked in a way. I excelled in school, built a business, traveled the world, stayed in shape, and explored spirituality through meditation.
I achieved one vision of success: the nomadic, entrepreneurial, spiritually-curious bachelor.
Then, I met a woman, and I quickly discovered the ways in which the man I'd built myself into wasn't enough.
Finances, attraction, competence—it all mattered, but it wasn't the core. Anna demanded a steady love that I had never seen modeled.
I wanted to be a good partner, but I wasn't sure what that meant. I was also afraid of losing her, the painful end of my previous relationship still on my heart.
So, soon after we began dating, I joined a men's group: a community of men on the quest to become better boyfriends, husbands, fathers, and sons. It was real work: we shared vulnerable truths, kept each other accountable, gave tough feedback. We talked about integrated masculinity—being strong and soft, disciplined and emotionally open.
And I cherished it. It felt like the beginning of something sacred.
But as I sat before 60 men in a cabin surrounded by thick Canadian forest for my first weekend retreat, I made a confession: I don't know why I'm here.
Life had been full: I was working a good job and engaged to be married. I didn't have any big problems, and sensed that I was pushing myself out of habit—the old self-improvement reflex—rather than responding to something true.
At the same time, something else had been growing quietly in the background: Orthodox Christianity.
A pull I felt during liturgy. Questions I couldn't stop asking. The sense that this reached somewhere self-improvement didn't.
Men's work felt well-intentioned but self-constructed. Orthodoxy felt deeper, older, more grounded.
The morning of my baptism, I woke consumed by dread. A black shroud seemed to pull me into the earth. I could barely walk to confession.
Then: cold water, three times under. And finally, breath.
A month later, on my 24th birthday, I told the group I was leaving.
The reaction was mixed. Some supported me, while others felt they had been used and left behind. The leader's words stung most: "I hope you learn to get something more than usefulness out of the things you commit to."
He might have been right. I had joined when I needed them, left when I didn't. Maybe that's what I'd been doing all along—treating everything like a tool. Use until no longer useful.
The Church was teaching me something different: not utility, but love. Not extraction, but formation. Not what I could get, but what I could become.
Men's work gave me brothers. The Church gave me a Father.
I didn't see it clearly at the time, but looking back, that's what was missing. Men's work was brothers trying to reconstruct what we'd never received—a kind of church we built ourselves. Sincere, courageous, but rootless.
We could challenge and support each other, but we were all limited by our own humanity. None of us could offer what only a father can give.
The Church offered something we couldn't construct: fathers who had been formed by centuries of tradition. Saints, elders, spiritual fathers whose steadiness came from God, not charisma. A path toward manhood that didn't depend on our inventiveness.
And for the first time, I could rest. I didn't have to build myself alone.
In the months after marriage, something began to loosen.
The frantic need for my father's approval grew quieter. The resentment softened. I stopped expecting him to be God—which freed him, and freed me. He's simply a man, broken and beloved like anyone else.
But I also stopped trying to stand alone. No man is meant to. We need someone above us. Someone wiser, steadier, unfallen.
Marriage demanded that I step out of boyhood. Baptism gave me fathers to show me how.
I'm still a son, but not a boy.
I still wanted to call my father today. I still ached to hear his voice say those four words.
But I didn't spiral. I didn't collapse into the older story: that I'm fatherless, that I have to do this alone, that his absence means I'm incomplete.
I felt the ache. Let it pass. And went on.
I'm still a son. Still aching for my father's voice.
But I'm no longer waiting for it to make me whole.
With love,
Ryan