Tears

The same friend I mentioned in the previous post, recently asked me a question that fired another chain of thought. This time, the words were spoken during a prolonged and relaxed conversation that housed many interesting topics. He asked me, "...why don't men cry?"

"Hah!" exclaimed the psychologist within me, as he drew upon psychoanalysis, social learning theory, reinforcement theory and a fair amount of self-wrought notions, to gush out some reply, which hopefully answered the above question. The dreamy thinker in me, however, was already thinking about the contents of this post! This is what he had to say...

I've always struggled to discover why we deny a man his tears...it is, in my opinion, one of the most irresponsible and unfair lessons that a boy is taught by just about every agent that contributes to his development (family, friends, 'education'...the works!). Today, if a male celebrity admits that he is emotional, it is enough to make some desperate reporter a quick buck, once he or she has written a poorly exaggerated account of it. The issue is considered interesting enough for less-than-competent tabloids and magazines to actually ask them to recount the last time they cried! In short, tears in a man's eyes, unless provoked by natural or unnatural calamities (and mind, some don't even consider these as sufficient criteria), are unusual and must not go unnoticed...

Why is this so? Why should a man's tears be regarded as so uncharacteristic? Why does something catastrophic need to occur before a man cries? What about tears of happiness...don't men deserve them? For heaven's sake, I've actually known men who can count the number of times they've shed a tear or two in the last decade(s)!

"Boys don't cry!", "Stop crying like a little girl", "Crybaby!" ,"Sissy!"...the list just goes on an on and you can take your pick from the collection of jibes used to teach a little boy that he does not have a right to express his sadness through tears. So, he learns instead, to bottle-up his pain, hiding most of his experiences of unhappiness in the secret confines of his being...a lonely place where the tears may be shed, but there is nobody to comfort the one who sheds them. Soon, the aspect of bottling up negative emotions transfers to the expression of emotion in general (regardless of valence). Now, you get the typical man who, at a social gathering, cannot speak on anything beyond work, politics, the stock market and other dry topics. He is the person who cannot understand why his wife wants them to communicate some more...having never realised that communication happens at more than one level...and that tension release cannot be achieved permanently if the golf-course or a punching bag is the only listener you have!

While I was in college, one of my favourite teachers read out a passage from a book which contained a therapist's accounts of sessions with his clients. I will never forget the eye-opening account of how a suave, controlled and intellectual male client beat a pillow to shreds with a baseball bat when the therapist asked him to think that the pillow represented a person who had hurt him very much (and asked him to express how he felt about her). The narrative was just about one person, but the scary thing is that there are millions more like him...people in whom a mistrust of their own feelings has been indoctrinated from their earliest days. It is part of a constellation of injustices and wrongdoings that leads to the development of both, the repressed (and inexpressive) man as well as the pathological and criminal one.

Have you ever paid attention to the feeling of lightness that remains after you've cried? You don't feel like a million dollars, that's certain, but at least you don't feel like a tonne of bricks is parked on your chest! They don't say "get it off your chest" for nothing, you know!

The way I see it, crying helps you get over a significant part of the pain after which you can process things a little more rationally...it's normal, it's adaptive and it's essential. I'm not suggesting that we cry for each and everything that goes wrong in our lives...things don't happen that way. What I'm suggesting is that men give themselves the space to cry when they feel wounded emotionally, without having to feel guilty or emasculated as a result! As a man, I should be able to bawl my lungs out, if it'll help me process my unhappiness...and not feel judged for it. Our tears have meaning. They deserve to be released, even if there is nobody else to witness or value them.

Think about it...