Frank Pittman Quotes

#1. The guys who fear becoming
fathers don't understand that fathering
is not something perfect men do, but something
that perfects the man. The end product of child
raising is not the child, but the parent.

Frank Pittman

#2. Bad marriages don't cause infidelity; infidelity causes bad marriages.

Frank Pittman

#3. In the end, there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't, except be a father.

Frank Pittman

#4. As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their masculinity for one another, often overdo it, and sometimes turn to displays of fierce, macho bravado and even violence.

Frank Pittman

#5. The most likely cause of a man's depression is his failure to be the man he thinks he should be

Frank Pittman

#6. Fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man.

Frank Pittman

#7. Why do otherwise sane, competent, strong men, men who can wrestle bears or raid corporations, shrink away in horror at the thought of washing a dish or changing a diaper?

Frank Pittman

#8. At the heart of the matter of masculine excess is a great longing for the love and approval of a father, a man who can tell another man that his masculinity is splendid enough and he can now relax.

Frank Pittman

#9. For most people, a life lived alone, with passing strangers or passing
lovers, is incoherent and ultimately unbearable. Someone must be
there to know what we have done for those we love.

Frank Pittman

#10. Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how tobe men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.

Frank Pittman

#11. To insult a friend implies that you respect his masculinity enough to know he can take it without acting like a crybaby. The swapping of insults, like the fighting between brothers, becomes the seal of the male bonding.

Frank Pittman

#12. Infidelity flows from a belief that women have the power to make you feel like
a man if you only find a woman that thinks you're perfect; if you can only
find a woman that you haven't hurt or disappointed yet.

Frank Pittman

#13. A man doesn't have to have all the answers; children will teach him how to parent them, and in the process will teach him everything he needs to know about life.

Frank Pittman

#14. Nothing is quite so horrifying and paralyzing as to win the Oedipal struggle and to be awarded your mother as the prize.

Frank Pittman

#15. The more things we can laugh about, the more alive we become: The more things we can laugh about together, the more connected we become.

Frank Pittman

#16. Parents have to get over the idea that their children belong just to them; children are a family affair.

Frank Pittman

#17. Parents have subtle ways of humbling you, of reminding you of your origins, perhaps by showing up at the moment of your greatest glory and reminding you where you came from and demonstrating that you still have some of it between your toes.

Frank Pittman

#18. Men who have been raised violently have every reason to believe it is appropriate for them to control others through violence; they feel no compunction over being violent to women, children, and one another.

Frank Pittman

#19. Fidelity is the single most important element in solidly enduring marriages.

Frank Pittman

#20. We know how powerful our mother was when we were little, but is our wife that powerful to us now? Must we relive our great deed of escape from Mama with every other woman in our life?

Frank Pittman

#21. Love is not something people feel, but something people try to express no matter how they feel.

Frank Pittman

#22. There are great advantages to seeing yourself as an accident created by amateur parents as they practiced. You then have been left in an imperfect state and the rest is up to you. Only the most pitifully inept child requires perfection from parents.

Frank Pittman

#23. When it comes to little girls, God the father has nothing on father, the god. It's an awesome responsibility.

Frank Pittman

#24. If fathers who fear fathering and run away from it could only see how little fathering is enough. Mostly, the father just needs to be there.

Frank Pittman

#25. No one, however powerful and successful, can function as an adult if his parents are not satisfied with him.

Frank Pittman

#26. Common courtesy plays a big role in happy marriages. People who are permanently married are polite to one another. They don't want to hurt one another's feelings, and they don't try to make the other one feel humiliated. People who are married for life are extremely kind to one another.

Frank Pittman

#27. Fathering makes a man, whatever his standing in the eyes of the world, feel strong and good and important, just as he makes his child feel loved and valued.

Frank Pittman

#28. Character, not passion keeps marriages together long enough to do their work of raising children into mature, responsible, productive citizens.

Frank Pittman

#29. Marriage isn't supposed to make you happy -
it's supposed to make you married.

Frank Pittman

#30. Happy people learn that happiness, like sweat, is a by-product of activity.

Frank Pittman

#31. Each generation's job is to question what parents accept on faith, to explore possibilities, and adapt the last generation's system of values for a new age.

Frank Pittman

#32. Marriage, like a submarine, is only safe if you get all the way inside.

Frank Pittman

#33. Family love can be a bore, but only when you are hearing it, never when you are relating it to the ones who will be carrying it out for you. A family without a storyteller or two has no way to make sense out of their past and no way to get a sense of themselves.

Frank Pittman

#34. A boy is not free to find a partner of his own as long as he must be the partner to his mother.

Frank Pittman

#35. When the masculine mystique is pulling boys and men out into the world to growl manly noises at one another, the only power with astronger pull on the male psyche is maternally induced guilt. The guilt is quite necessary for our moral development, but it is often uncomfortable.

Frank Pittman

#36. We perversely see mother love as the problem
when it is all we have to sustain us
rather than blaming the fathers who have run out on our mothers and on us. We seem willing to forgive fathers for loving too little even as we still shrink in terror from mothers who love too much.

Frank Pittman

#37. Parents can make us distrust ourselves. To them, we seem always to be works-in-progress.

Frank Pittman

#38. The secret to having a good marriage is to understand that marriage must
be total, it must be permanent, and it must be equal.

Frank Pittman

#39. Fathering is the most masculine thing a man can do

Frank Pittman