From the author: this article was published two years ago in the newspaper “Voice of Cherepovets”. The theme is eternal. Another look at what is happening to us. The topic of this article is family relationships. In the last issue of the Voice of Cherepovets there was already an article about the family crisis and its causes. Therefore, I can only complement, expand what has already been described by another author, and give my personal vision of reality. At the same time, it is hardly possible to narrow the topic to a “purely family framework.” In gender relations, the family is only a piece of land in the ocean of life. Many have visited this “promised land”, some live permanently and happily, others are preparing to emerge from the ocean onto this land, like fish once did. At the same time, everyone who leaves the ocean has to change. Become “earthly”, take responsibility for another person, for a shared future. The nature of my work encourages me to communicate a lot with people. Very different people, in different situations, at different levels of the social ladder, people with different characters, destinies, ideas, of both sexes and of all ages... Communicating “on duty,” I, however, experience true pleasure from the process of communication itself, while being, as it were, “on the side,” outside the plane of life of this interlocutor. Having the opportunity to look “from a different angle”, compare something, draw parallels with similar situations, remember what science says on this matter. Many problems arise from a simple misunderstanding of how different men's and women's ideas about the family and their role in family life are. The increased number of divorces also reflects changes in the distribution of roles in the family and, more broadly, in gender relations in general. In recent decades, along with progress and relative prosperity, the very essence and structure of these relations has changed. Women complain about the lack of “real men,” but today’s men did not appear out of nowhere, but were raised by the same mothers and fathers, growing up side by side and, it would seem, in the same conditions, the same world. The “real man” of the past is the breadwinner, the head of the family, an unquestioned authority, a hard worker, an example for children, this is DADDY with a capital letter. In old age, he is a patriarch, a respected man, whose voice is still listened to with respect. For many years now, especially in European countries, there has been a struggle for equality, and, in fact, complete equality and identity of the sexes. “Masculinity” itself is blurred, divided into the purely sexual function of a well-groomed “macho”, and “male chauvinism” and “sexism” rejected by society. The functions of the breadwinner, the family helmsman, the authority figure, the patriarch, disappear, leaving behind a vacuum that every man is free to fill with anything. The need for respect in a man remains, but is realized not through personal masculine qualities, but with the help of images, patterns of behavior suggested by advertising or the environment, “masculine” and even “courageous” in appearance, but devoid of the main thing for women - a sense of responsibility and care for whom -or. My teacher in St. Petersburg, who has been traveling to Europe for work for many years, paid special attention to the dynamics and speed of these processes, which in 15 years have “changed the face of Europe” from his point of view. Everything is replaced by unisex. For men, only the “naked” sexual function and the functions of the producer and consumer of goods remain; even his social position is leveled and completely deprived of specifically male differences. Having become a “cog in the machine” not through violence, but voluntarily, a man begins to “live for himself” and loses all motivation for “family life” in its traditional sense. In our country, these processes also run their course, perhaps more slowly, with adjustments for mentality. External unisex is not so typical for our cities. However, divorce statistics and drunkenness rates speak for themselves. It would be unfair to blame only the men themselves or the “binge of television” for the changes taking place. A man is formed from a boy in a family and the ratio of male and “nobody”…