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?"
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.
A few days ago, I asked a colleague if everything was ok because the colleague was not looking all good.
The colleague motioned me to close the door. And broke down. Tears down the cheeks.
It was all related to workplace stress.
I listened. As I have noted many times in the past, I learnt a long time ago that when people share emotions it is not because a problem has to be fixed. Instead, it is about having somebody to listen to.
The colleague thanked me for listening.
A couple of days later, the colleague said, "I am sorry for having been unprofessional. And I am glad you didn't roll your eyes ..."
"Whether it is at home or at work, I don't roll my eyes in such contexts" I said. "We are humans, and we have emotions. We can't be robots at work. Sometimes the emotions overwhelm us."
Quite a coincidence that a leading peddler of fake news has a piece about crying at work and why you shouldn't feel bad about it. It is an interview with "Alison Green, who runs the career advice blog Ask a Manager and whose latest book, which has the same title, published earlier this year."
The bottom-line there is no different from what I told the colleague:
We’re human! We have emotions! Good
managers will know that, and it’s not the end of the world if you
occasionally show that at work.
I don't understand why this should be news to anybody. Right?
So, why the tears at work?
If you’re really invested in your work and care deeply about doing a
good job, you’re more likely to experience the sort of disappointment or
frustration that can result in teariness. And of course, employers want
us to be engaged in our work and to care deeply about it — and it’s
hard to do that but also be detached enough that you never have a strong
emotional reaction. So again, it goes to context and frequency. If it’s
occasional and relatively private, you’re probably fine. If it’s
frequent and/or public, if I’m your boss I’m going to be more concerned
and trying to figure out what’s going on.
Which is also exactly what I told the colleague: The emotions were because the colleague was so involved and invested in the work and the people. If this investment and involvement occasionally brings out tears, hey, we are human. "The key word there being “occasionally.”"
A few weeks ago, the friend and I were at the cinema watching Inside Out. To my left was a boy who was about eleven or twelve years old. His father was on his other side and then the mother and the sister. The kid was certainly animated during the funny scenes. During one particularly emotional scene, I wondered how the boy would react. I saw him slowly raise his right hand to his eye and wipe away the tears--it was clear that he didn't want even his father to know that he was crying.
I could relate to him; I, too, right from the time that I was a kid, was told not to cry like a girl. Oddly enough, the ones who urged me to man up, so to speak, were women, which is no surprise because, after all, it was women who raised us while the older men were busy being useless! I knew I did not want to be a sob story.
Not that the women who took care of me were the crying kind anyway. I have no memories of my grandmothers or my mother ever crying, . They did not come from any steely stock either--perhaps they shed tears when they were by themselves or when we kids were not around. Which is all the more why I felt like the worst son ever when I made my mother cry by telling her about my marriage having collapsed.
Real men don't cry--that's what we are always told. But, apparently not so, argues this essay, which asks:
History is full of sorrowful knights, sobbing monks and weeping lovers – what happened to the noble art of the manly cry?
Even the Indian movies, in whatever language it was, never shied away from portraying the male character crying a big cry. So, what gives?
But actually, the gender gap in crying seems to be a recent development.
Historical and literary evidence suggests that, in the past, not only
did men cry in public, but no one saw it as feminine or shameful. In
fact, male weeping was regarded as normal in almost every part of the
world for most of recorded history.
Not having read that essay, you are perhaps thinking that the men cried only at the huge manly events--like the death of a fellow soldier at the war.
Men might cry in this ritual manner over weighty issues of death, war
and politics, but surely personal tears of love and frustration were
still confined to women?
Right?
Wrong, argues the author. Here's an example:
In medieval romances, we find innumerable instance of knights crying
purely because they miss their girlfriends. In Chrétien de Troyes’ The Knight of the Cart,
no less a hero than Lancelot weeps at a brief separation from
Guinevere. At another point, he cries on a lady’s shoulder at the
thought that he won’t get to go to a big tournament. What’s more,
instead of being disgusted by this snivelling, she’s moved to help, and
Lancelot gets to go to the tournament after all.
Visualize that--Sir Lancelot crying because of being away from Guinevere. Didn't anybody tell the knight not to cry like a girl? ;)
So, what happened? Boys and men being conditioned not to cry is something recent, modern?
The most obvious possibility is that this shift is the result of changes
that took place as we moved from a feudal, agrarian society to one that
was urban and industrial. In the Middle Ages, most people spent their
lives among those they had known since birth. A typical village had only
50-300 inhabitants, most of them related by blood or marriage; a
situation like an extended family stuck in an eternal reunion in the
middle of nowhere.
So?
But from the 18th through the 20th centuries, the population became
increasingly urbanised; soon, people were living in the midst of
thousands of strangers. Furthermore, changes in the economy required men
to work together in factories and offices where emotional expression
and even private conversation were discouraged as time-wasting. As Tom
Lutz writes in Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears
(1999), factory managers deliberately trained their workers to suppress
emotion with the aim of boosting productivity: ‘You don’t want emotions
interfering with the smooth running of things.’
Has this brainwashing to make us less human and more productive helped us?
Labour productivity might be enhanced; we’re spared the dramas of
strangers; and men (and women, in the workplace) are constrained in
their use of emotional manipulation.
However, human beings weren’t designed to swallow their emotions, and
there’s reason to believe that suppressing tears can be hazardous to
your wellbeing. [Research has] found a
relationship between a person’s rate of stress-related illnesses and
inadequate crying. Weeping is also, somewhat counter-intuitively,
correlated with happiness. ... Finally, crying is an important tool for understanding
one’s own feelings.
Anything else?
Taboos against male expressiveness mean that men are far less likely
than women to get help when they’re suffering from depression. This, in
turn, is correlated with higher suicide rates; men are three to four
times as likely to commit suicide as women. Male depression is also more
likely to express itself in alcoholism and drug addiction, which have
their own high death toll.
We modern humans are crazy, is all I can conclude. There is a huge difference between crying as a temper tantrum, which both girls and boys do in order to get their ways, versus crying as a genuine emotion. If we humans can laugh and laugh heartily to emote, the yin-yang means that we would cry to express the other set of feelings, right? Maybe the least we can do is stop telling male kids not to cry like a girl.
