I know this sounds weird but my relationships have improved significantly since I started showing my emotions. Specially being able to cry in front of my wife really opened up the gates to the full spectrum of emotions in our relationship. Stigmatization of this subject really sucks…
As someone who hasn’t had that experience, I’m having such a hard time wrapping my head around this and how that previous status quo was at all healthy.
So it was the illusion of strength and stability that propped up trust in the relationship? How does crying destroy trust? There had to be more to it than just that.
> So it was the illusion of strength and stability that propped up trust in the relationship? How does crying destroy trust? There had to be more to it than just that.
If you were projecting social competence and emotional stability in the idiom of your culture and then you start acting like an upper middle class Californian your spouse may want to join you in that. Or they may view it as some combination of a huge red flag and an utter betrayal. Imagine if a (secular, orthodox or religious) Jewish Israeli told his wife he was a Muslim now. That’s what abandoning the cultural scripts a relationship was built on is like. If you’re not actually the person they thought they were in a relationship with they may be willing to try and make it work. Or not.
You're not wrong. She thought he's a proper orthodox Jew, he probably wasn't for a long time if ever, that definitely qualifies as an illusion. If hypothetical she were to leave, perhaps his illusion might have been that she'd not leave, but accept his decision and find a way to make it work regardless. Is she leaving because he kept his doubts a secret? I'd get that, can't have a working relationship without honesty. But if not: It's not like that sort of thing working out is completely unheard of, and while the HN audience tends to be dismissive of anything that doesn't feel simplistically rational, love is a pretty powerful thing that has overcome worse obstacles time and again.
The fraction of women who, consciously or unconsciously, see emotional vulnerability in men as repulsive is larger than most people would admit. That doesn't mean it isn't worth looking for one who doesn't. It may limit your dating pool a bit but I promise at the end of the day it's one hundred percent worth the effort.
If someone only trusts you because you act like an emotionless robot, they're not worth hanging out with. You want to hang out with people who accept your whole self, weaknesses and strengths included.
At some point in your life you might need support to go through dark and difficult times - you want people who are there for you throughout those periods.
I agree, but I think most people model others in their head quite crudely so whenever someone breaks outside of their box of expectations, that someone is no longer serving the same role in the relationship, and risks being shunned or replaced. Purely conjecture though.
On the flip side, now closer to an emotionless robot due to such experiences, I find people relying on me for my emotionless roboticism.
I have the opposite experience. Parts of our relationship are better but she's not as romantically engaged in the relationship. Many women prefer an emotionally numb confident man to an emotionally available one.
That's good it worked out for you. Many women tell their man it's OK to cry and be vulnerable, then are completely disgusted and sometimes leave them when it happens.
I know we are all speaking from our own experience here, but I’ve never even heard of a woman being disgusted by or leaving a man because he cried. I’ve cried in front of every long term girlfriend I’ve ever had and it’s never been a negative, only positive.
Could it be a cultural thing? I’m American and I’ve always lived in major coastal cities.
> Could it be a cultural thing? I’m American and I’ve always lived in major coastal cities.
Possibly—I’m from a Muslim country. I’ve seen my dad cry twice, once when our dog died and once when his mom died. He had a good relationship with his own dad but didn’t cry when he died. My mom would probably freak out if he expressed more weakness than that.
But to my point, Americans in major coastal cities are a minority in terms of culture. And I assume you are white. Even in major coastal cities, non-whites typically have more traditional expectations about male behavior.
Traditional norms obviously allow men to cry in certain circumstances. I don’t take OP to be referring to that. I read OP as saying that most women wouldn’t want to be with a man who consistently departs from the traditional expectations of when it’s okay for men to cry. Which I think is probably true.
You might disagree with it, but I don’t think it’s “weird.” Men showing emotional weakness or vulnerability is certainly not acceptable in my culture, and as far as I can tell it’s not broadly accepted in American culture either. The only inference I’m drawing is that women embrace the cultural taboo as much as men, which I think is a reasonable assumption—women are typically the strongest keepers and enforcers of culture and norms.
Can you tell me more about how you developed your intuition that it's not broadly accepted in our shared American culture? I think there's a lot of countervailing evidence (teaser: it's an MMA cliche) suggesting that this is not at all a taboo, but I don't understand well enough where you've gotten this notion.
My reference points for American culture are white southerners (where men crying is taboo) and elite whites in metro areas (who complain about “toxic masculinity” and its taboos on men crying). Those two groups disagree whether the taboo is a good thing, but both agree that it characterizes American culture. Since that’s also consistent with norms in my own culture, I have no reason to doubt those assertions.
I'm not sure I understand how the link supports what you're saying. A list of "manly" tears implies that generally speaking tears aren't "manly", and the examples seem to imply that the tears signify some extraordinary circumstance. Nobody's on the list for just having a really tough day at work.
It more or less is though. He's saying men can't show weakness. The examples in your page support that: men can only cry precisely when crying isn't a show of weakness.
I dunno. I'm reading through them. I don't see any examples of weakness. On the contrary, every example is a guy crying for a really good damn reason.
Even just the category itself kind of makes the point. The original claim way upthread was that women find guys who cry repulsive. I would assume this is roughly referring to guys crying when they run into a problem in life instead of dealing with it, that sort of thing. The examples in your link are, like, guys who gave their whole lives to a sport, everything's on the line, maximum skin in the game, and their crying is a show of strength, the raw emotion of someone at a peak/climactic moment.
I think there's clearly a difference in perception between crying as a show of strength vs weakness. My intuition is that it's strong if you're crying after "coming back from the battlefield", after a long buildup period of stoicism and having given a fight all you've got, and weak if you're crying as a matter of constantly giving into whatever you're feeling in the moment. The examples in your link are as far on the "strong" end of the spectrum as they could be.
It would falsify this if you found examples of our culture supporting guys just going through their daily lives and crying as an accessible reaction to random things that make them feel bad, almost as a sort of banality. (I think this is the bar, since culturally we're okay with women doing this.)
No, hold on: like I said, many of these examples aren't shows of strength, they're shows of vulnerability. You're dismissing them because you've concluded they're legitimate, which is a special pleading argument.
Hmm, okay. I was about to say that there's an interesting question of whether "vulnerability is a kind of strength," but I'm scrolling up and seeing that the original claim was that both weakness and vulnerability are unacceptable. I would agree there are some narrow forms of vulnerability displays by men that our culture finds acceptable, so I'll concede this one.
> Boys don't cry. It doesn't matter the circumstances; shedding any tears is the ultimate no-no in terms of what you can and can't do as a man. But sometimes... sometimes... sometimes there comes a time when a man's emotions deny any other form of expression, and they pour forth—prerequisite impassioned speech may or may not be present—by cascading down his cheeks. And crying does NOT make him any less badass in the eyes of the audience, but in fact may even reinforce this status. In other words, Manly Man-Tears Of Manliness.
...supports rayiner's point. Men aren't generally allowed to cry; when they are it's for exceptional circumstances, when the beauty of life so overflows one's cup that it becomes an expression of peak experience, or something like that. But the subtext is that everyday crying is taboo.
You honestly think the majority of women would be disgusted to find out their men have human feelings?
This seems ridiculous to me, but not impossible. Maybe women are different outside Europe and South America. What do I know how things work where you are.
In my opinion, you are interpreting it incorrectly.
Look from their perspective.
"My man is so smart, competent and emotionally stable. I can rely on him for anything!"
"Oh no he's crying, does this mean our family won't survive? What do I do?"
It's not anything more complicated than that. Women can probably chime in to tell me if I'm right or wrong, but this is a human perspective, because children will feel the same way if the father cries.
Oh no! he showed....gasps emotion! Surely you can't rely on someone who shows emotion? The stereotype of "the man cries = we're doomed" is perpetuated by people who think like you. It's not like men are designed to just not cry unless they're doomed.
This comment is quite demeaning to women's intelligence. There is no reason for a woman to consider that emotional openness on the side of her husband is an indication that their family won't survive.
Crying is an expression of bottled up emotions, not an acceptance of defeat. Someone can cry and be invigorated to try harder to deal with their problems or they can cry but still be supportive to their spouse and provide emotional stability.
Womens' reactions are dependent upon their personality, their values, their view of the other person, the environment, their current emotional state, their biology and a lot of other factors at any given moment. This explains the fact that some people in this thread talk about how their crying led to more fulfilling relationships why others talk about break ups and loss of trust.
Even the point about children is completely arbitrary. Will children feel that their family won't survive due to their father crying about a lost relative? Doesn't it depend on their age? Furthermore, children need to see that their parents are humans and how to express their emotions. The alternative is that they find more indirect ways to do that like alcoholism, abuse, self-harm, extreme escapism and many other banes of today's society.
Even in urban areas and cities, there is still a stigma attached with regard to mental illness. This is a topic that is somewhat taboo for the majority, many believe you can be cured with Christianity or any religion.
mental illness in developing world is a very sad subject. mostly people don't understand and don't have the capacity to deal with it, and there is almost no support.
Is it a “sad” subject? Or is it a cultural adaptation to scarcity and tough circumstances? Nobody cares about your emotional health in the Bangladeshi village my dad is from. Would the village function better if they sat around talking about their feelings like white people?
You need medication to meaningfully address those major conditions, which most people in the developing world don’t have. Even there it seems like the reaction of people in the Philippines (to ostracize people with those conditions to avoid them becoming a burden to thecommunity) is a rational adaptation to their circumstances.
An eye-opening piece on the inadequacy of psychiatric care in developing economies. Why "The Men Cry in the Dark" though? The article seems to be about both men and women and features a profile of a young woman with no discussion of male-specific issues.
> But the men stayed away. Verzosa and the team from the Health Ministry couldn’t figure out why. But when they changed the time of the meeting to 6 p.m., the men suddenly showed up as well.
> After all, it’s harder to see the tears in the gathering dusk. Men find it easier to cry when it’s dark.
It's always strange when someone immediately reaches for that kind of explanation instead of considering something much simpler: that it's easier to attend a 6pm meeting after work than tell your boss that you're taking a few hours off. But then again, it's Die Zeit, their audience has some expectations that need to be fulfilled.
In some (online) newspapers it's not uncommon for headlines to be just an interesting quote from the article and not the actual topic of the article. It's somewhat clickbaity and comes from the fact that the headlines are written by different people than the articles.
