Relationships Talk

Emily Ratajkowski doesn’t want the newlywed period to end. The model and actress married Sebastian Bear-McClard in a surprise courthouse wedding in February, and while many believe she rushed into the marriage—the couple headed to the judge only a month after the I Feel Pretty star ended a three-year relationship with music producer Jeff Magid—she sees this love going longterm.

Ratajkowski was recently a guest on Busy Phillips’ new talk show Busy Tonight, where both discussed being newlyweds. Ratajkowski was shocked when Phillips explained the newlywed title typically expires after the first year. “Oh really? That so fast,” she said. “I feel like we should get longer than that. Like if you’re thinking in fractions I feel like three years is maybe better if you have the rest of your life.”

The actress also set the record straight on her “rushed” wedding. Although it might have seemed like a sprint down the aisle, she actually played the long game and admitted to knowing her then just friend for two years before their relationship progressed.

“We knew each other for a long time before and he likes to joke ‘yeah everyone thinks we got married quickly, but you vetted me for two years,’” she revealed.

Busy also asked Ratajkowski if she saw Bear-McClard as just a friend and one day just realized there was something more, but Emrata shut down the idea that she stumbled upon this conclusion. “Women always know, come on. What?” she said confidently. “Who all of a sudden changes the way they look at someone? No. I was always like I probably shouldn’t hang out with that guy alone.”

There you have it, folks. Ratajkowski also talked more about her secret wedding. “I mean yes it was secret for four hours,” Ratajkowski, who got wind that the press knew and broke the news herself on Instagram, said jokingly.

She continued, “Weddings are amazing I want to party I want to celebrate love and relationships but this was just for us and it was very nice.”

See more: Emily Ratajkowski Reveals How She Kept Her Secret Wedding Ceremony Under Wraps

Ratajkowski took advantage of her time on the show and asked Phillips for some marriage advice. The host is pretty much a veteran with her two kids and 11-year-marriage to Marc Silverstein.

“The secret is a lot of things,” Phillips told her. “Like I think the secret is honesty, and being truthful. It’s a journey, man.”

Masculinity, in its most noxious, stifling forms, can hurt men. Suppressing emotions can lead to aggression and violence, make men less healthy both mentally and physically, and push them to be less accepting of others.

It can also hurt women. It can exacerbate rape culture, and subvert efforts (from both men and women) to promote gender equality. “Certain masculinities preserve and promote the inequalities experienced between men and women, and, in order to achieve gender equality, they must be dismantled,” reads one 2015 study.

But honest discussions and genuine camaraderie between men can counteract all that. Talking about how to be a man—a real man, one who is kind, who has freed himself of the pressures to be a worse man—can make all the difference.

We wanted to give prominent, high-powered men a place to do that. Quartz created How We’ll Win: The Other Half, a collection of 50 interviews with industry-leading men, to explore their thoughts on masculinity, feminism, and sexism. We spoke to US senator Cory Booker, comedian Travon Free, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Queer Eye star Karamo Brown, Bridesmaids director Paul Feig, DNC chair Tom Perez, Out Magazine editor-in-chief Phillip Picardi, AOL co-founder Steve Case, and dozens more—all men who are actively grappling with gender equality in their present work.

One of the most actionable questions we asked each participant was: What’s the best advice you’ve received from another man, and what’s your best advice for young men today?

Below are some of our favorite answers:

Cory Booker. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

“My best advice to young men today, which is advice I received from my dad, is to be a thermostat, not a thermometer. We all have this choice in life, we can be like a thermometer, simply reflecting the environment we’re in, or we can be a thermostat and take responsibility for setting the temperature.”

“This is a great question, as I’ve received advice from a host of great men and I could probably list a number of them. But what immediately comes to mind is from two men: Jon Stewart said to always trust your discomfort and it applies to many facets of life. When you feel uncomfortable, your body is trying to tell you something and you shouldn’t ignore it. The second is from a great man I’ve come to know, photographer Ruddy Roye, who reminds me constantly to act with intention and purpose. If you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it you can rarely go wrong.

My advice to young men today is to think critically about what it means to be a “man.” Are you moving, breathing, behaving, and being the person you want to be, the man you want to be, or are you performing manhood and masculinity as it’s been prescribed to you by society? The answers may surprise them. This is how we begin to create a new generation of men who see equity as beneficial and not detrimental to their advancement.”

Phillip Picardi. BLACOMBE

“My dad and I sure have a lot to disagree on these days, but I think in his older age he’s had a lot of time to reflect on his life and his values. One thing he said to me recently was, “Your job won’t love you back, so make sure you pay attention to and take care of the people in your life first.” He and my mom led a very traditional, gendered marriage—and he’s been open in sharing his regrets about that now that he’s a grandfather.

My best advice for young men is to identify a woman as your mentor or hero. It doesn’t make you any less of a man to have a mix of people as your heroes and role models. I look up to so many women—including my boss—who have taught me to be a better person, manager, friend, son, and partner. Why deny yourself all of that possibility for greatness and enlightenment solely on the basis of gender?”

“After we defeated the Stop Privacy Online Act (SOPA) and the Protect Intellectual Privacy Act (PIPA), I thought about running for office, and two of the most powerful men in the country told me (separately) that this country needs more women in positions of power, and that if I really wanted to make a difference, I should be working to help get the very best women into those roles.

Leadership means knowing when to lead and also when to follow. There are opportunities for us to be great leaders in our society by recognizing and empowering the best among us.”

“Understand that we all play a role in the fight for gender equality.”

“Well, my father was a very fair and very good man, but he just had absolute contempt for [any] married man who cheated on his wife. To him that was just completely inexcusable, and he really drummed it into my head. That is a very, that’s a terrible thing to do, he taught me, and no real man who’s worth anything would actually do that. So you need to be sure. You shouldn’t just jump into marriage lightly, and when you do, make sure it’s right. And stay with it.

Paul Feig

And my best advice for young men today would be to be friends with women. You know, it’s not about trying to date everybody, if you’re into heterosexual relationships. Be friends with women, and that should really start when you’re kids.

If anything, I think this is advice for parents of boys, to make sure that their boys have female friends growing up. Because what happens when boys and girls aren’t friends with one another is it just becomes, you know, “Them versus us,” and girls are later thought of as a prize, or a conquest, or something to acquire sexually. But growing up, almost all my friends were girls. And because of that, I was always just in tune with what you should and shouldn’t do, or what upset them, or made them happy, or wasn’t cool. And once you have the groundwork for thinking of girls as equals, you can’t just shift that.”

“The best advice I’ve ever received was in the form of an African proverb: “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Going together is about creating a more inclusive society. It’s an issue of equity and fairness, to be sure, but it’s also an issue of economic competitiveness. We shouldn’t just view this as a problem to solve—although it is—but also as an opportunity to seize, so we can be fully competitive as a nation.”

Dagmawi Woubshet

“My advice to young men today is to be of your generation and not get mired by the harmful worldview of prior generations, including the countless forms of sexism that have been passed down from one generation to the next. Why not be remembered as the generation that put extraordinary energy and pressure to end sexism? Not only that, [but] as an individual, as a human being who has a finite amount of time on this Earth, why not cultivate a sense of self-commitment to virtues like empathy, generosity, and courage, instead of one based on self-serving moral cowardice like sexism?”

“My advice for young men: speak up. When you’re in a small group of men in a professional setting and you hear an obviously inappropriate comment, you need to speak up then—even when it’s just the guys. Showing other men that sexist comments are inappropriate and changing the norms of what is tolerable is an important step to stigmatizing sexism.”

“My advice would be this: There is not one right way to be a man. Masculinity is not about physical strength, it’s about strength of character. It’s about how you treat others.”

Tom Perez

“My advice for young men is to think about who we were as children. Who were we before society took a hold of us? We need to reflect on the people we were before many of us were forced to believing that masculinity and tenderness cannot coexist together. I’ve been on this path for quite some time now and I urge us all to think about the boy or child who was filled with immense light, softness, and joy and to do all that we can to reclaim him.”

Read all 50 industry-leading men’s advice and insights on masculinity here.

The other thing about younger people today, they add, is that not only do they seem to wait longer to settle down and have children, but they seem less likely to stay together long-term. Why is that, I ask? “I think we were more innocent, you see,” Jill muses. “I suppose the television’s got a lot to do with it. And the internet. Because they have such sexual, violent things on. We never thought of those horrible things.” Michael feels the same: “I’ve always said that bad news is good news, because bad news sells. People don’t want to know about nice things happening anymore. It’s like the Barbra Streisand song: ‘Was it all so much simpler then?’ I think that life was much simpler in our generation. There weren’t so many distractions.”

Little did I know, that when I was planning a wedding and being told how I should treat my husband in order to have a long and happy life together, that trouble was brewing elsewhere.

Never was I warned that this man that was marrying me would be the easiest person from that vast family to deal with.

When young brides and brides-to-be are ‘prepared’ for matrimony, they are only told the theoretical aspects of what to expect.

It reminds me of the time I was in a journalism class and had teachers who had never worked in the field as journalists themselves. They would only teach us what they had read about in the books. When I finally got into the profession, I was shocked to discover that I had only gained at most 10 percent of the things I needed to know to work in the field. I am finding that the case is similar in marriage.

KNEELING DOWN

Brides are told, ‘treat your man with respect’ without the imparter of this knowledge explaining or giving an example of what this means. It can mean anything, from never disagreeing with him (or letting him know that you disagree with him) to kneeling down whenever you serve him food.

Also, they are always told to be ‘respectful and loving to their in-laws all the while maintaining boundaries with them’. Does that mean that you never invite them to your house? Does boundaries in this case mean physical borders? Don’t live near them?

Another common and very vague piece of advice those entering matrimony are offered is to be careful of your friends. They do not tell you how to look out for the ‘bad’ friends nor do they let you know which ones are keepers. One is left to figure it out on their own, yet maybe they and already seen clues into the real characters of the people around you.

Something else that the soon-to-be-married are never warned about is that they will be the face of the family and if anything goes wrong it will be blamed on them. These poor souls are not told how they are supposed to deal with these pressures and that eventually they should just stop listening to outside forces and just focus on themselves and their families.

LEARN THE HARD WAY

There are many more lessons that I wish I had gotten a detailed education on, but unfortunately, I have to learn things the hard way, through experience.

I recently went through something and I called out my husband and mother on why they did not warn me about the issue beforehand. My husband laughed, yet it was an issue involving him and my mum just told me to brace myself for more instances like that.

At the end of the day, I look like a bad person because some people did not get what they wanted and they think it is all because of me.

So, next time you want to give somebody advice, don’t give them the text book version, even the unmarried can do that. Use real life experiences with which one can relate. If you do not feel like doing this, then you might as well keep your advice to yourself!