Loving Men Who Cry
Personal reflections on family, friends, and lovers.
I grew up around men who cry.
The two most strongly imprinted on my memory are my father, and the bishop of the Latter-Day Saints ward (congregation) I attended from about 9 to 18 years old.
For better and worse, my dad’s an emotional guy. There was a lot of anger, as is traditionally acceptable from men. But his pain came out in tears, too. He cried sometimes when he apologized for hurting or scaring us in anger, of course. He cried when I was baptized into the church. I thought at the time they were happy tears, but given how conflicted his relationship with his faith was, I now doubt that was the only source of feeling. He cried when our pets died.
And okay, I say cried —lest I evoke an inaccurate image, he got teary-eyed and choked up. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen him full-on sob. I can picture it, but I don’t know if it’s a true memory. Our memories, technically mental reconstructions of our experiences, are fallible even for the sharpest of us. And my particular ability to remember things is all fucky.
I do remember the time he shot a pigeon off our roof. Pigeons are considered a common nuisance where I live, so he decided to try to warn them off by making an example of one. He used a BB gun, but the pigeon still died, and he was ashamed and miserable for hours.
My dad could be hurtful, but the grief he felt over causing suffering was real. It made him easier to be close to than my mom, whose culture of origin didn’t provide guidance in emotionally connecting to her American children.
It’s complicated, wanting to trust and be loved by the father who wishes for nothing to hurt, yet fearing and resenting him for the authority he thought he had to enforce with aggression.
Meanwhile, the bishop — a silver-haired man with kind eyes and a Whoville nose — got teary and choked up every time he bore his testimony. In the LDS faith, one Sunday of the month is dedicated to fasting and bearing testimonies. During the sacrament (communion) meeting, members are encouraged to go up to the lectern and proclaim the ways in which they know their faith to be true:
Minor miracles after prayer, like finding one’s lost keys. A blessing gained or misfortune avoided by listening to the “still, small voice” of the Holy Ghost. The perfect peace or shuddering passion that can only be evidence of a greater power, able to fill the human mind and heart so completely that all else vanishes in its presence.
A bishop, being the spiritual leader of a ward, of course bears his testimony every time. And our particular bishop cried every time. Of course he cried publicly on other occasions, too. Baptisms, baby blessings, weddings, those moments of celebration when we supposedly meld with the divine.
As far as I can remember, the bishop’s tears were generally regarded within the ward as wholesome, a sincere expression of how deeply he felt the Holy Ghost. I vaguely recall my dad poking fun about it in the privacy of our home, with the awkward chuckle he had for things that made him uncomfortable, but I think I just took that as an issue with my dad. My parents lost credibility as guides for my own thoughts and feelings pretty early on in life.
I found the bishop’s crying captivating. It meant he clearly felt something irrepressible, something transcendent, whereas whatever conduit I was supposed to hear and feel the Holy Ghost, God, and Jesus through was silent and empty.
And, well, the bishop was a widely-liked, handsome male authority figure. He had silvered early, only in his mid or early 40s at the time. But most importantly, he seemed trustworthy and was kind to me, a gentle presence in contrast to the tumult at home. So I had something of a prepubescent puppy crush on him before I started to seriously question my faith. The displays of powerful but tender emotion made him the object of reverent curiosity.
I don’t think I ever told anyone, and nothing bad ever came of it. As far as I know, the bishop was (and probably still is) an authentically compassionate and moral man.
To the best of my memory, then, I’ve never felt differently witnessing men or boys crying vs. women or girls doing the same. I imagine the early examples normalized it.
Tears work on me pretty much exactly as nature intends, if we accept the theory that tears from emotion — medically referred to as “psychic tears,” comprised of a chemical makeup distinct from the eye-cleaning and protecting basal and reflexive tears — developed to elicit sympathy and promote social bonding.
Like many people, my heart goes out to someone when I see them crying in distress. I want to help them, and if I can’t help them, I’ll hover around feeling useless while hoping they’ll feel better soon. Even when it’s someone I dislike, I can’t help feeling a little bad for them if they’re crying. It takes quite a bit of moral revulsion before that part of me turns off. Meanwhile, another person’s tears of joy draw forth the warmth and fondness of compersion.
In other words, I’m softhearted. Mostly. Sometimes. At least, I’m the kind of person who can’t go fishing because I feel too bad seeing the fish struggle, knowing that I caused them pain.
I’m sure I got it from my dad.
My younger brother (and only sibling) inherited the same softheartedness and overpowering emotions. It never occurred to me in my duties as an older sister to tell him to stop crying when I witnessed tears from him as a kid or a teenager. It was my job, given to me by myself, to sit with him and talk him through it the best I could, with what knowledge I had scraped together from my own experiences dealing with rage and hopelessness, feelings Too Big to do anything but surrender oneself.
A few years ago, he told me, “If it wasn’t for you, I would have grown up without any emotional intelligence.”
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around this, since I didn’t start consciously studying emotional intelligence until well into adulthood, and I certainly didn’t talk to him about it directly. Anything he picked up from me was observed and interpreted, but I can’t see myself from his eyes.
And I was a bit of a wreck:
I Was an Abusive Girlfriend
A story of personal growth, with links to resources at the end.
medium.com
So it’s hard for me to take credit as a role model. There’s too much cognitive dissonance to feel proud or happy about it. I told him that he did the work and made his own choices. But if my influence is part of his narrative about his journey, I’m grateful that it helped.
To this day, I’m a sucker for tears when it comes to finding a man attractive. A man who cries for love of you? Who cries when the mirror of his heart reflects the suffering he sees? Who cries even as his fists are clenched in the face of injustice?
Peak romantic male lead material. The aggressive alpha and the unbreakable stoic can fall off a cliff.
Only one of my boyfriends was much of a crier. I still think well of the men I’ve been intimate with, but in terms of temperament, he was my favorite. I don’t have very many clear, happy memories — like said, the processes responsible for them seem to be run by a skeleton crew — but the first time I accompanied him to the airport so he could fly across the country for grad school, he hugged me goodbye with tears in his eyes.
Despite the whole association of airports with romcoms, they don’t really have a romantic atmosphere, or at least none of the ones I’ve been in do. Even so, in my mind, this moment is all bright, natural light and warm traces of old fondness.
For most of my life, I somehow missed that it really does bother some — many? most? — women when men cry or display vulnerability. These kinds of oversights aren’t uncommon. I live in my own head a lot, and don’t really respect cultural norms. Moreover, this one in particular didn’t interfere with my life.
But I finally gathered that it was A Thing That Happens from men venting about it online. Since I only directly experience things through my own lens and don’t have unfiltered access to anyone else’s thoughts, I just assumed this was a problem with boring normies, not with progressive women who challenge traditional expectations of gender. Not with someone “like me.”
Recently, a friend and I were at a Pride festival, enjoying over-salted french fries and talking about her marriage while we walked towards one of the drag pavilions. She’s a little younger than I am, and a lot more militantly left than I am (think counter-protests and quips about guillotines rather than online harassment), but we share very socially progressive views, including, of course, on gender.
She was explaining how she and her husband have been working on open communication, and how her husband was willing to be vulnerable about his hurts and insecurities.
“He’s way more emotionally aware than any other guy I know.” She laughed, and then her smile turned bashful. “Sometimes it actually makes me a little uncomfortable.”
I now imagine myself stopping mid-stride in some sort of cartoonish double-take, but in reality, I probably just raised my eyebrows.
I don’t know if I point-blank asked, “Why?” or phrased it in a gentler way, but regardless, I got confirmation from at least one flesh-and-blood woman I know that she did indeed feel troubled by a man being openly sensitive.
I don’t think I pressed her on it. My educated guess is that the response was something like, “Huh,” some curiosity about the shape and origins of the feeling, and then moving on to the specifics of their difficulties.
She seemed relieved and bolstered by the end of our conversation on the topic, and I was happy for the bonding moment. I’m still happy about it. But the reveal that even someone “like me” can and does feel discomfort about male vulnerability stuck like a push pin.
There’s an awkwardness to realizing the limits of one’s perspective. Awkward because I’m aware that my mind doesn’t provide a universal experience, and yet I can only continue to think along the tracks of my own knowledge and interpretations until they’re interrupted by someone else throwing a switch with their words. Somehow it still surprises me every time.
I’m not really sure what to do with this new little thumbtack of awareness about (some) women’s discomfort with (some) men’s sensitivity. The stories I’ve written on Medium so far have been akin to putting together little gift boxes of neatly processed lessons learned. Things that I think would be helpful, so I have a reason to share them, and the internal security that I’m contributing something.
I have the feeling that once I know a thing, I’m obligated to do something useful with that knowledge. If you couldn’t guess, this can be an exhausting and frankly self-defeating way to exist.
I’m not about to run around interrogating every woman in my physical and digital vicinity about how they feel towards men crying and then lecturing them if our feelings don’t align. That’s the current model for dealing with epiphanies in online activism. Aside from the likelihood of getting my throat slit by someone who is angry that I’m yelling at them to think about men’s needs, it’s rude and obnoxious behavior that I would rather not engage in.
So what now?
I don’t have an affirming message in the nicest ribbons and shiny paper I can manage. This time, I’m just a child holding out a small, private wonder cupped in her hands: “Here, I found this, but you can have it if you want.”
Looking for more on this topic? Mark Greene just released an article with an example of women’s expectations about masculinity, and the difficulties men can face when they try to break free from the Man Box:
For a more personal, intimate exploration of men’s emotional confinement, Hazlit shares his experience with the struggle:
