There is a particular kind of man I keep coming back to in my writing.
He is not soft in the way the word is sometimes used as an insult — he is not weak, not passive, not without edges. He has often survived things that would have unmade a person with less core. He carries himself with a kind of controlled stillness that people sometimes mistake for coldness. He is, by most external measures, formidable.
And he loves like he’s terrified of what it means that he loves this much.
That’s the man I’m interested in. That’s always been the man I’m interested in.
Marc Dalton is not a soft man by anyone’s definition of the word. He is a man who was built, through circumstance and necessity and years of operating in environments that rewarded hardness, to take up a very specific shape. Contained. Controlled. Competent in ways that leave very little room for uncertainty. He leads, he protects, he solves — and he does all of it from behind a level of emotional management that took decades to construct.
And then there is Finn Cooper, who is — in his own way — just as armoured. Finn’s softness is deceptive, and that’s what makes him so interesting to write. He looks more open, more present, more immediately warm than Marc. But Finn stopped eating to keep his sister safe. Finn dragged a man thirty metres with a fractured skull. Finn’s softness is not fragility. It’s something that survived an enormous amount and came out the other side still capable of tenderness, and that’s a very different thing.
What happens between them is not the collision of hard and soft. It’s the collision of two people who both built walls — different walls, different materials, different architectural styles — and then found themselves in a space where the walls were no longer strictly necessary and had no idea what to do with that information.
That’s where the love lives. In that not-knowing.
When I write men who love softly, I’m not writing men who have been declawed or domesticated or relieved of their complexity for the sake of being palatable. I am writing men who have access to the full range of what it means to be human — which includes tenderness, and uncertainty, and the willingness to be seen — alongside everything else they are.
Marc learning to let Finn in is not Marc becoming less. It is Marc becoming more. The control doesn’t disappear — it shifts. It turns toward something. He brings to loving Finn the same absolute commitment he brings to everything else in his life, and when you combine that with a man who has finally been given somewhere safe to direct it, the result is — well. It’s the reason I write.
Finn, for his part, loves with a kind of fierce quiet that surprises people who’ve misread his openness as lightness. He is not light. He is warm, which is a different thing entirely. He loves Marc with the same determination he applied to surviving everything that came before Marc — completely, practically, without drama, as if it is simply the next right thing and he has decided to do it properly.
Two men who have been through the fire, loving each other with every tool the fire left them.
That’s soft, in the way I mean it. Not gentle as the opposite of strong. Soft as in — without armour. Soft as in — here I am, this is what I actually am, and I am giving it to you anyway.
I think we underfund this narrative in fiction about men. We are very good at the falling — the tension, the conflict, the almost-and-not-yet. We are less practiced at the being in it. The morning-light version of love. The quiet scene that doesn’t have dramatic stakes, just two people existing in the same space and choosing each other in a way that is so habitual it’s become structural, like load-bearing walls.
Marc making Finn coffee before he’s asked. Finn knowing exactly when to speak and when to simply be present. The way they have built, without a blueprint and against considerable odds, something that holds.
That’s what I want to write. Men who are not diminished by love but completed by it. Men who arrive at tenderness the long and difficult way and turn out to be extraordinarily good at it.
Men who love softly.
It’s the bravest thing I know how to write.
— Avery
Avery Beckett Books 
Leave a comment