The joy of life includes tears too

I, like most boys, was raised with phrases like "don't cry like a girl."  If I had any smarts, I would have asked them right then, "how do you cry like a boy?"

Anger I could display. Fight I could--because boys will be boys.  But, crying was unmanly. I see that attitude even now, even in the adopted country.

Crying is an expression of feelings.  Women cultivate their sisterhood through talking about their feelings, whether it is about their husbands or mothers or colleagues or kids or ... it is a long list of events and people about which we have feelings and women seem to unreservedly talk about them.

We men, on the other hand, talk about sports and politics and the weather and everything else that is not about one's own feelings.

All these despite plenty of men singing about feelings.  Is it any wonder then that men who sing about feelings were, and are, immensely popular with women, from Frank Sinatra to Marvin Gaye to ... recall Rebecca's weak spot in Cheers?

Yet, "vulnerable emotions are coded as not masculine."  It is a world of emotions, but men aren't supposed to feel their vulnerability and cry?  The inability to share emotions means men have difficulty with friendships too, unlike women and their sisterhood.

Normalize it. Normalize the desire. Normalize the fact that all humans need these relationships to thrive. Charles Darwin said that our social abilities and skills is the reason why we've thrived as a species. I mean, we've known this for over a century - that these relationships are critical to our mental health - and we need to stop having a culture that says, somehow, you know, a certain gender doesn't need them and only another gender and sexuality needs them.
It's human to want friends - close, deep ocean friends, friends you love with an exclamation point, friends who know your deepest weirdness and your favorite emoji.

I am not at all surprised that of the students who come to my office, only female students ever are honest with their emotions and seek my assistance.  With quite a few male students, I have thought that they could straighten out their lives if only they reached into their true emotions ... but, hey, boys will be boys, right?

Even as we try to get past these false gender norms and become healthy, Covid-19 has upended our lives.  Death and illness.  Jobless.  Houseless.  Lining up at food banks.  As we try our best to help them, one of the PSAs that we could run is this: It is ok for adults--yes, including men, to cry.