I don't really cry. I'm fine.
My sister and I were raised largely by our single mother, a passionate, fiery woman bordering on histrionic. I remember like it was yesterday how proudly she looked at my sister when she was crying or having a fit. My mother would later comment, multiple times, on how she admired my sister's ability to express her emotions in colorful ways, unimpeded by any constraints.
To my mother, my sister was "true" and "real". I was not. In my home, introversion was a crime. I was viewed as broken, and my lack of emotional display was something to correct. Throughout my life, different extroverts arrived at a similar opinion. Why aren't you crying? Why can't you be exactly like me? Are you a psychopath?. I am not. I experience the full range of emotions. I express them differently and at my leisure. But I feel them completely.
Sometimes, when I reveal that I do not cry, people assume that I am against emotion and against crying. I am not against crying or emotion. I understand that, to some, crying is important to emotional regulation. It can be uplifting and cathartic. Crying does not make someone weak -- much to the contrary. Men shouldn't be ashamed of crying, nor should they take any measures to avoid crying.
In the same way that no one should feel constrained in their crying, no one should feel oppressed into crying, or be made to feel ashamed of not crying. My emotional life is beautiful, deep, and intricate. I express it in a myriad of ways. The fact that I work through my emotions without the use of my lacrimal glands must not be viewed as a disease to correct. I have many problems. No crying is not one of them.
You are fine. You are not alone in this, it's amost like I wrote the post (apart that nobody pointed out loud that I don't cry).
I simply take the facts as they come. Sometimes they are known long before they come and one can be kinda ready for them (emotionally). But not crying isn't showing some non-emotional state. I have emotions, I just have them for me at the time. I can certainly show emotions, but in times like these, I tend to have them for me.
People are and will be different and nobody should force anybody else to do something. To each their own.
EDIT: fixed spelling
Funny you post this. I do cry, and while it hasn't been consistent my mother definitely told me to 'man up' a few times. Implicitly or explicitly. I've been navigating gender roles the last few days myself as some others things have been boiling up. Some of you know, but I'm developing radical self love and currently its in colission with being a man and what comes with it. And the role of men in society including how we treat women demographically.
(Fantastic to navigate when there are so few peers you can talk about this in a healthy way btw, whoop die whoo)
Anyway. That is all to say.
I hope you can accept the way you are. We're more alike than different, yet our differences shouldn't be shunned when they don't harm people. In fact, it's something to cherish if you ask me.
Life would be terribly boring if we were all too familiar.
I can sympathise with that: when I was coming to terms with my sexuality, I also finally accepted that I was never going to be "masculine" and it was a weight that fell off my shoulders. Once I let go of those expectations I felt a lot more free.
I am lucky to have some people I can talk about this subject with, but you find out quickly that many men are on some level anxious about their masculinity.
Edit: oops sorry I didn't see what Tildes I was in. I am a cis woman.
I get teary watching good commericals: when the IKEA lamp got thrown out, and subsequently get a new home, when a car brand I don't even like has a commercial about a puppy, etc. There are games that made me cry, and shows or movies, and I still feel the signature "sourness" at the bridge of my nose when I think about a dream sequence in an anime, when a side character looks at his wife and small child, and realizes he's only been hypnotized and must now wake up and leave them. I cry when other people share stories with me as well.
But tears are much more rare when it comes to my own life. I experience emotions, but crying isn't a necessary part of how I express them, nor do I find the expression of an experienced emotion necessary.
Sentimental/tearjerker media is what most consistently gets me crying, too. Several Kyoto Animation shows come to mind, but there are many others, live action and animated alike.
For real life situations, since losing a parent in my mid-teens it’s only been events of that magnitude for the most part that do it. The main notable exception was the one time in my early twenties when the reality of my situation and associated dismal future prospects hit me like a ton of bricks.
There are occasions when I get a bit misty-eyed though, most frequently when I’m left to my thoughts and my mind wanders to how fortunate life has been for the past several years and how starkly it contrasts to that darker time some decade and change ago.
I'm not a psychologist. I don't play one on T.V.. I've been told that social media has a very stretched out of shape definition of "introvert" and "extrovert". I think the dichotomy is only about that some people find prolonged socializing tiring, while others find it energizing.
There's a layman understanding of "introversion" which is conflated with social anxiety which I think is genuinely very harmful to people.
Many people with social anxiety think that they're just "introverted", and use that as justification for never attempting to ease their social anxiety, which means they live lonely and painful lives because they actually do want social interaction.
To add to this, my understanding is intro/extro is about how people socialize. Intros prefer fewer and more intimate interactions, extros more numerous and more surface, level, or at least shorter. Alas that the world seems run by extroverts; I find small talk that persists more than a few minutes very taxing.
This is very true. Unlike the common understanding, a shy extrovert is absolutely something that exists. Likewise an outgoing introvert is also something that absolutely exists. I often seem quite outgoing, such that people who only know me superficially will think I am an extrovert. But I am absolutely an introvert.
Introversion/extroversion has nothing to do with what you prefer to do, it has to do with what recharges you emotionally. An introvert could love to go out to bars and night clubs and party all night, but will be drained by the experience. An extrovert could love to sit inside by the fire and read a book all day, but will also be drained by the experience.
Social anxiety is an entirely different problem. Anxiety can make someone appear introverted when they are not, but they are otherwise unrelated. Actually, an extrovert with social anxiety is probably the unluckiest combination of symptoms. I feel bad for people in those situations.
Yes, it's actually about how we process information, not about shyness or talkativeness, etc. The best definition I've seen:
An extrovert gets his best ideas when interacting with others.
An introvert gets his best ideas alone, thinking to himself.
I believe a lot of people think of expressing emotion in an undeniably "potent" way as the only way to demonstrate you care. Part of maturing is realising that not all emotions are a realistic representation of what you see or even what you really feel on the inside (hence the "never trust your brain after 22:00" meme), and you're supposed to watch some of these feelings come and go without taking them in.
There were plenty of moments in my life where I was deemed "uncaring" because I knew a person too well, and knew that they wouldn't react well to emotional outbursts - so I stayed calm because that was what would make them feel at ease. The people that criticised me were people that barely knew that person, and didn't realise different people react differently to the same things.
The best parallel to this is an old parenting trick: babies mimic their parents' emotions, and reacting "outwardly" can stress them, so while some people would think of a tranquil parent as emotionally detached, it's very much the opposite.
It's also that although there's nothing wrong with expressing feelings or thoughts, I'm not comfortable with sharing them with everyone. My parents would falsely associate this with mistrust and lack of confidence in them, and whenever they expressed that, it would (counterproductively so) further cement that I should never share any of these feelings with them. This is, of course, not directly correlated with how much you know someone, but a myriad of factors, like whether or not this is relevant to that person, whether you're/they're in the right mental space, etc.
I lost the ability to cry sometime around 2017. I genuinely wonder if I have brain damage from chronic use of hard drugs back then, as my hands also shake ever so slightly and doctors say it's not a recognizable tremor disorder.
I can feel sad or happy but I think I've only mustered two ten-second crying sessions in those years.
I'm a cis woman, but I have an experience that might be interesting to you.
I very rarely cry. When I do it's usually because I'm very stressed out and I guess I need an emotional release. I don't outwardly express many emotions at all.
When I was in my 20's, my doctor put me on a hormonal medication. I can't remember what it was, but I now suspect it was a progestin/progesterone.
The result made me feel like I'd gone crazy. I yelled, I cried, I got hysterical, I threw stuff. All this happened at work. I couldn't stop it, it was like I was watching all this on TV. My manager demanded that I go home for the day and "Stop taking whatever garbage that quack gave you."
I don't know if what I experienced was a typical level of hormones that I didn't have the tools to deal with or if it was way too much. I did stop taking it and things settled back down to my baseline over a couple of days.
This is really interesting, and reminds me of a story on This American Life that has stuck with me. A trans man describes his experience going on testosterone, and how prior to taking it he found crying cathartic, whereas afterwards it was very difficult to cry, and after working hard to being himself into a crying state, it wasn't nearly as satisfying. (He also gives a great description about his compulsion to check out women, in ways that made him feel deeply affronted at his own behaviour.) I think hormones play an enormous role in our emotions and behaviour, but if we don't have major changes in hormone levels, we don't tend to think of them much - it doesn't feel great knowing that your body chemicals play a major role in your personality and are largely out of your control.
I am absolutely not a crier either. I haven't even had so much as a whimper for nearly thirty years. I am, however, considering getting hypnotized so I can cry like a bitch at least once... no idea if that works, but I really want to have one good heavy sob session so I know what its like.
Interesting thread, and @lou, I'd be curious how that factors into Brazilian culture. It may be the subsection of Capoeira players that I knew, but the subtext and the up-front-text was that crying isn't for men. Is there a cultural overlay?
It's an interesting topic. I'm a stiff upper lip sort of guy most of the time, but can get pretty emotional in the moment when films, music or books trigger something. My take is that everybody feels in different ways and at different times, and while it's important to know when is and is not an appropriate time to really show it, you have to do so and in whatever way feels appropriate.
But perhaps my experience was the opposite. My father and his side of the family thought that crying was for men who were either soft or gay, and that it was a show of weakness. The joke's on them, though. The out of that bullshit idea of masculinity is that you make a choice about who you are and who you surround yourself with, and that unreality, the true "sissies" are the ones whom aren't honest with themselves.
Inwas a huge crybaby when I was a kid. Like tears any time things didn't go my way.
Then at some point I just stopped. I probably went 20 years without really crying. Even through breakups, funerals and so on.
Then my daughter was born a few years back and I swear it broke something in that part of my brain. I can barely sit through any sort of emotional scene in a movie. I cried yesterday when I watched the Wild Robot. I tear up during Simpsons episodes I've seen hundreds of times.
That's great!
I had a kid too but I still don't cry. I can never reveal that on /r/daddit. People who cry take offense (because they think I'm judging them). Sometimes they treat me like a psychopath.
So I never mention this anywhere really. Not even in real life.
I havent cried in over a year. Im not fine. I used to be able to cry, due to stress, depression, anger, all the usual (for me) stimuli. But then I just... stopped. IDK why, but I feel the urge to cry, I feel like I should be crying, but Im not able to. It feels like just another way my mind is broken...
If you don’t mind sharing, how do you express grief, sorrow, joy, and gratitude, if not by crying?
Not lou, but crying isn't something that we do with full intentions, is it not? There are folks who at times try super hard not to cry and still does, and there are folks who at times keenly feel they want to much more visually verbalize / externalize the internal grief/joy etc but find their lacrimal glands not part of the equation.
It's like salivating at the thought of something: its possible to watch a cooking show wanting that food without salivating. It's like bleeding when hurt: there are extreme hurts where blood doesn't flow even if an organ has ruptured or become twisted.
I would imagine that lou feels all these emotions, but for the experience of them, expression is not automated and not necessary.
Personally, I find crying, and laughing, and most of my other expressions come spontaneously. Because of my trauma background I often laugh when some other expression, often attentive compassion, is called for. Other times I dissociate or suppress. My own journey is toward ever more frequent appropriate expressions-and sensitivity. Still working on appropriate degree however.
I talk. I write. I watch films or read books. Or I simply experience emotion without crying. Not everything must be expressed externally.
Of course not. I’m just curious if, when, or how it works for you. The variety of human experience is a forever fascination for me.