Real Men Do Cry

The ongoing frustrations of an American man.

Real men don’t cry. At least according to some. We bite our lips, crush our feelings down, bottle them up, seal them, and throw them away. Nobody wants to see that crap.

Real men are stoic. They have a stiff upper lip, they stand ramrod straight and accept their drubbing like a man. Until they’ve been pushed over the edge, at which point it’s time to get angry. When the world pushes you too far, you kick its ass and the asses of everyone in a 30-foot radius.

That whole notion is stupid. At least to me. Men are people, and people have complex feelings and emotions. People are nuanced, and they can be weak, or unsure, or scared, or any other number of non-manly emotions.

Unfortunately, it took me a lifetime to learn that. I had to go through a series of transformations that shaped me into a cold, unreactive man who didn’t allow himself to feel sadness or anger.

When I was a child, I cried a lot. My father called me the self-punishing child, as I would literally cry over spilled milk.

I carried my crying streak into grade school. I would cry if I was upset, or hurt, or uncomfortable, or any other number of negative emotions. The kids mostly tolerated it, and I received minimal abuse.

When I got to middle school, I wound up in a class with a bunch of new kids who decided that the awkward crying kid was a great target for their bullying. Combined with the manifestation of my mental illness, I learned by the end of the year to not cry.

Over the course of middle school, I replaced the crying with anger. Whether the sadness morphed into an explosive anger problem, I got pissed off because of my newfound depression, or both, by high school I was an angry, depressed kid.

Thankfully, after transferring to a therapeutic high school, I was placed in an anger management group and was able to largely kick my anger problem by the time I got midway through college. What replaced that was…nothing, really.

I had been out of therapy for a while by that point, and I didn’t share my feelings and emotions with anyone close to me at that point. So, I did what a lot of guys do: I went stoic. I exercised what I called “self-control,” but was actually suppressing a pile of negative emotions that I didn’t have an outlet for.

Eventually, I moved in with a roommate who would eventually become my wife. She and I were fairly similar in a lot of ways. We had many similar likes and quirks, and I felt like I could trust her. Slowly, I began opening up.

Thankfully, it came naturally to me. Despite having not been in therapy for years, the habit of sharing my feelings came back to me easily, and we began talking about our deepest feelings with each other. It was cathartic.

Around the same time, I was seeking to feel…more. I decided somewhere that I would allow myself to cry, that it would be okay to cry if I needed to. I sought out sad things — comics, movies, anything. I gave myself permission, and I wanted to cry again so desperately. I couldn’t.

Over the next several years, my roommate became my partner became my fiance. We bought a house together, we adopted a trio of male black cats, I settled into a new job, and we were successful.

One October, a few months after adopting a fourth black cat, one of the three original brothers, Darby, became sick. We rushed him to the emergency vet, and he wound up on life support. It was becoming clear that he wouldn’t make it much longer.

We went to visit him at the vet, and he was in bad shape. He was hooked up to a lot of machines and was in a warming sock to maintain his body temperature. In spite of that, he still tried to jump down to see us. He had always been a shit disturber, and he continued being a little fighter even when incredibly ill.

We pet him and scratched his head and booped his nose, and after the fleeting few minutes we had with him, we were ushered out. We got in the car to go home that evening, and I cried. For the first time in almost two decades, I truly cried.

The next morning, at around 4:30, we received a call that he had gone into cardiac arrest. We told them to try to save him, but we knew that it would probably be futile. We dressed, got in the car, and drove to the vet. On the way, we got the call that he had died.

I cried over his body, the hard, ugly, un-manly crying of loss and mourning. I didn’t care. I had lost my Darby, and there was nothing left to do but cry.

For me, crying for the first time in so long was the unleashing of so much raw emotion pent up over many years. And yet, after it was over, I felt so much better. The catharsis of releasing the emotions that I had held onto was better than feeling un-manly over ugly-crying over my cat.

I think that’s what is hard for a lot of guys. The drive to be stoic and unemotional in the face of tragedy and loss, all for the sake of being “manly,” forces them to suppress their feelings and emotions, but holding onto those feelings is like pus in an infected cut. Eventually, you need to clean it out and disinfect the wound.

Unfortunately, what often happens is that they express their negative emotions in a destructive way. Smashing and breaking things, getting into fights, physically and emotionally abusing their partners, committing sexual violence, and in extreme cases, committing murder. These are all tragedies, but they’re “manly” tragedies.

Many men also choose to end their own lives, and because men like guns, they often end it in a gruesome and very final way. Because men are much more likely to use a very lethal means of suicide, such as a gun, they have a much higher success rate than women.

Suicide is a tragedy, and many people wonder why the victim didn’t say anything, but when men aren’t allowed to express their feelings, they often decide that they can’t tell anyone what they feel at the risk of sounding “un-manly.” Unfortunately, often the only other viable option seems to be suicide.

We need to teach our young boys and men that it’s okay to express their emotions. It’s okay to talk about their feelings, their weaknesses, their flaws. It is not un-manly to hurt, to feel pain, to cry.

We need to stop the whole “real men don’t cry” bullshit. No more “suck it up” or “be a man” or “don’t be a pussy” or any of that negative talk that causes men to bottle their emotions and express frustration in the form of anger and aggression.

Real men do cry. Men get upset and sad and depressed, they feel insecure about themselves, their bodies, their abilities, and they are allowed to feel pain and frustration and loss. To have feelings and emotions is to be human — they are part of what makes us human, and to deny them is to deny your humanity.

To be a real man is to be a man. Real men are lumberjacks and miners and construction workers, but they’re also writers and artists and dancers. Real men drink whiskey and beer, but they also drink fruity cocktails. Real men are high-power doctors and lawyers and CEOs, but they’re also caretakers and stay-at-home dads.

Men are allowed, hell, encouraged, to feel. I have had to relearn that over the past few years, and I’ve written about how I have a hard time relating to some of my friends because they haven’t gotten the message. I want them to know that they can feel. They can cry. They can be emotional. It’s okay.

You are not any less of a man for having feelings. You are not any less of a man for crying. It’s okay to express yourself. Please, talk about your feelings. Talk about your insecurities. Tell me how you feel.

Do it for you. I promise you’ll feel better.