Sometimes the hardest part isn’t finding the answer. It’s finding the question.
Two decks of questions for men, drawn one at a time: one on masculinity, one on relationships. Use them alone, with a friend, or in a men’s group. There are no right answers. The point is the conversation it opens.
Choose a deck
There are two decks. Each opens in a new tab and works full screen on a phone or tablet. To keep one on an iPad, open it in Safari, tap Share, then “Add to Home Screen”.
Masculinity
What it means to be a man
Twenty questions about masculinity, dealt one at a time, with an opening passage and a sentence stem to start. Use it alone, with a friend or in a men’s group.
Open the deck →Relationships
The ties that shape us
Questions about men and relationships in five sets: self, family, friendship, intimacy and society, with a few playful wildcards. Made for a group passing a tablet round, each person choosing the set they answer from.
Open the deck →Before the questions begin, there’s an opening card: a short passage about men and boyhood, and a question to sit with before anything else gets drawn.
After that, the deck shuffles itself and deals one question at a time. Each one is an invitation, not a test. Skip any that don’t land. Sit longer with the ones that do.
How to use it
On your own: draw a question, write about it, or just let it settle. You don’t have to do anything with it straight away.
In a group: one person draws, reads it aloud, and anyone who wants to speaks. No one has to. The facilitator can hold the space, or the group can run itself.
A note on what these questions are for
Men are often good at occupying space without taking up much room inside it. The pub, the football, the workplace: all of it runs on a version of okayness that doesn’t ask too much. These questions ask a little more than that. Not to be difficult, but because most men, given a space where it’s safe to speak, find they have more to say than they expected.
“It’s like talking with a seven-year-old boy who just wants to do his best but doesn’t know how he’s supposed to be or what he’s supposed to do. He didn’t fail. He was never taught.”
That’s the frame for these decks. Not a diagnosis. Not self-improvement. Just an honest look at what we were given, and what we might want to do with it now.
If anything in this brings something difficult to the surface
That’s not a bad sign. It means something is live. You might want to talk to someone: a friend, a therapist, or one of the helplines below.
Samaritans: 116 123 (free, any time, day or night) CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably): 0800 58 58 58 (5pm–midnight every day)