My ideal man? I’ll take a carer over an adventurer, any day

Is it ever OK to leave your family – including small children – to live in the wilderness or walk around the world?

The latest season of Alone – the US TV competition in which cocky survivalists are dropped into a remote, inhospitable wilderness only to be rapidly humbled by squirrels and their own colons – has just ended. I love Alone. The landscapes are spectacular and their implacable hostility to humans obscurely cheering; plus, I get real atavistic satisfaction from watching my favourite contestants make shelters or manage to trap rabbits (grim, but at least every scrap of every creature is usually used – someone even ate a hare’s partially digested stomach contents once). I’m also gripped by what it says about being a man.

Obviously, the contestants aren’t all men, and anyone who goes on a survival show confident they can outlast 11 others living off shrews and moss is a particular personality type. But they are mostly men and it’s striking how many seem better equipped to tackle starvation and grizzly bears than “experiencing emotions” or “being a father and partner”. Contestants are always suddenly remembering, filthy and shivering, that they have families and agonising over what to do about it. On day three this time (spoilers ahead), David, a man with a baby back home, tapped out – Alonespeak for admitting defeat – declaring: “I know the kind of father I’m committed to being; a good father doesn’t take days off from that.”

He got there fast: it usually takes chaps weeks of self-inflicted suffering and near-fatal constipation to reach this revelation; some stick it out whatever the physical, mental or relational cost. Towards the bitter end this time, another contestant talked about missing his son, and fatherhood. “I think about my relationship with my dad growing up and I get this sense of just … absence,” he mused. “If I want to be a better dad, how about just spending more time with your son?”

Then he stayed, because Alone was “an amazing opportunity to be able to have a body of work he’ll always be able to look back and see”. (Has anyone on a reality show who says they’re doing it so their kids will be proud actually met a child? They’re not proud: they’re pissed off you can’t take them to netball.)

A third miserable, cold, hungry man talked about wishing he could talk to his estranged wife and how they were trying to work things out, concluding: “We have to suffer.” Do we, though?

It’s unfair to extrapolate this from a handful of hardcore survivalists, and of course the massive potential paycheck ($500,000) skews their thinking. But that adventurer ideal of manhood – the notion that there’s admirable, selfless nobility to being away from home, facing physical challenges – serves no one well. There’s an obvious parallel with Karl Bushby, whose recent return to Britain after walking round the world for 28 years garnered only a partial hero’s welcome. Many expressed discomfort at lionising a man who abandoned his family for decades. I’m always baffled by mountaineers with families taking on deadly peaks; the same self-destructive impulse has inspired a meme about cave divers with loving wives and three children choosing to squeeze into high-fatality-rate crevices.

This isn’t most men. Fathers do more childcare than ever before; they’re present and involved and regularly express a desire for more family time. But it’s an ideal of manhood that won’t quite die: in March, research from King’s College London found 21% of gen Z and 19% of millennial men thought men engaged in caregiving were “less masculine”. Anecdotally, I often hear about men taking on extreme physical challenges with pregnant partners or new babies at home. Guys, just wait till you try the punishing physical and mental challenge that is amusing a toddler and comforting a colicky newborn on 13 minutes’ sleep!

Partnering and parenting are about presence, time, attention. “Talk to anybody on their deathbed and … all they want is time,” David mused, abandoning the wilderness. It seems a lot more admirable to me to stay home and put in those boring, precious hours. My stepfather did – he looked after my sister as a baby, nappy pins jangling from his belt loops, and he’s been quietly there for both of us over decades. I reckon that makes him a better male role model than any Alone warrior.