Hunt County Author Examines Masculinity

Dennis Bairos was standing at the bathroom sink when his wife delivered the observation that would become a book. 'You overdo everything,' she said while brushing her teeth one night, her tone matter-of-fact rather than accusatory. The comment stuck, and once the Royse City father of three started looking, he saw the pattern everywhere.

That moment of recognition became 'Wired Like This: Why Men Push Too Far — and Still Say I Got It,' Bairos' debut book releasing June 3, just 18 days before Father's Day. The 197-page book isn't another self-help manual promising transformation in five easy steps. Instead, Bairos offers an honest field guide to the small 'I got it' instincts that quietly wear men down.

Across 27 short chapters, 'Wired Like This' moves through familiar masculine territory: the reflexive 'I got it' when help is offered, standing on the top step of the ladder, the hobby that quietly becomes an obsession. One chapter keeps surfacing in early reader conversations, where Bairos pushed his 8-year-old son into competitive junior golf until pressure caught up with the boy on a tee box.

The book targets what Bairos calls 'the high-functioning guy in his thirties or forties who looks fine from the outside, runs hot on the inside, and has built a life on the assumption that if he just keeps performing nobody's going to ask whether he's okay.' Since finishing the book, Bairos admits he's still 'wired like this' — the wiring doesn't disappear.

The biggest irony? His wife's observation about overdoing things launched him into obsessing over writing a book. 'The drift between what I think I'm doing and what I'm actually doing is shorter now,' he said. 'That's all. But it's enough.'