I Need You: The Bravery of Saying What the Culture Won’t

Meant for covid - metaphor for today.

We’re living through an era where men and women are increasingly talking at each other, not to each other. Battle lines have been drawn—sometimes clearly, sometimes in subtext—over who is right, who is owed, who is misunderstood. Twitter wars replace conversations. Hashtags become ideologies. And empathy is often lost in the noise.

Against this backdrop, Malcolm and Jess—two of my main characters—step into the story not as representatives of their gender, but as deeply flawed, deeply capable people who learn, sometimes the hard way, that they are better together. Not because they complete each other in some cheesy Hallmark way, but because they complement each other—functionally, psychologically, and morally.

Malcolm MacKenzie is a cerebral tactician. His emotions run deep, but they're buried beneath a fortress of logic and intellectual rigor. He’s not emotionally illiterate, just wary of the inefficiencies of emotional decision-making. That makes him brilliant, sure—but also stubborn, cold at times, and unable to intuit the social nuances that Jess lives and breathes.

Jess, on the other hand, is grounded in the visceral. She’s warm. Empathic. Anchored in tradition, yes, but not shackled by it. She’s the kind of person who sends handwritten birthday cards and brings you soup when you’re sick—and never asks for recognition. She sees the world in the details, in the emotional subtext, in the long-term human cost of technological “progress.”

So what happens when these two work side by side?

They don’t try to become each other. They don’t dissolve into compromise. They each lean harder into who they are—because of the other.

Jess helps Malcolm slow down. Humanize. She teaches him to consider the person, not just the process. To account for how decisions feel, not just how they function. She doesn't “soften” him—she sharpens his ability to lead by grounding his vision in reality. He’s the kind of man who might save the world through sheer force of intellect—but without Jess, he might forget why the world is worth saving.

Malcolm, in turn, gives Jess permission to step into her own power. He respects her intellect—not out of chivalry, but because she earns it. He doesn’t protect her from the fire; he trusts her to walk through it. He challenges her sense of obligation, especially when it’s driven by guilt. He doesn’t coddle, but he sees her. And that? That’s rare.

They fight. Of course they fight. But the difference is, they fight to understand. And that’s where this all circles back to where we started—because isn’t that the part we’ve lost in our public discourse?

We’ve stopped believing the other side is arguing in good faith. Just saying that men and women both have legitimate wounds, and the rhetoric has calcified those wounds into identities, is often an invitation to be labeled a misogynist and cancelled. Victimhood has become currency. We talk past each other, or worse, perform outrage for an audience rather than sit in the discomfort of disagreement.

But Malcolm and Jess are willing to say the things most people won’t:

I need you.

Not in a codependent, rom-com montage way. But in a practical, high-stakes, life-or-death kind of way. They know their individual missions will fail if they don’t learn to collaborate. That doesn’t mean erasing differences. It means honoring them—and trusting that the friction between perspectives might just spark the solution neither could reach alone.

We are different, but equal.

Neither have ever looked at the other and thought one was superior, or that the other was somehow less. They call each other out when they think they're wrong, and are willing to go it alone if they have to, but neither want that. It's a level of mutual respect predicated on equality.

This isn’t idealism. It’s realism. The kind that comes from being in the trenches. The kind that says: I can be whole without you—but we can be better together.

Maybe the next evolution of gender relations isn’t about “winning.” Maybe it’s about co-creating. Like Malcolm and Jess do—not by default, but by choice.

And maybe the path forward—through the noise, through the divide—starts with that same radical admission:

We need each other.