Do Big Boys Really Cry?

http://ifttt.com/images/no_image_card.png

Big boys don’t cry, or do they?

“Stop crying, big boys don’t cry!”

A phrase drilled into all teary-eyed boys from as young as the tender toddler stage, Big. Boys. Don’t. Cry! – An instruction that has never really left our minds.

But we do cry, don’t we? We cried every time the aforesaid phrase was uttered to us as a form of comfort. We’ve cried when we’ve suffered heartbreak. We cry when we suffer loss. Damn, we’ve even (sometimes) cried at romantic comedies (okay, maybe on the inside).

Nevertheless, the truth is that much of history has taught us men to never share a teardrop let alone the full waterworks. From an early age, boys are trained to be macho and strong – both physically and emotionally. Our whole environment/community encourages us to block out, or better so eradicate, the emotional side that brings forth tears. We are emotional robots simply following programmed instructions. This in belief was told will make us strong men; role models in fact.

The issue of male sensitivity, or rather the lack of it, could be argued goes back to decades and centuries of men being fine-tuned to view emotions as nothing, to perceive it as a weak factor; a mere ‘thing’ men must not embody. Evidently this has never really benefitted us romantically. Fascinatingly, it also has...(I’m sure women know what I’m talking about).

There have been various situations where I’ve found myself listening to women tell tales of their relationships collapsing because the man either wasn’t “emotional enough” or “He wasn’t in-tune with his feelings.” Irrespective of the excuse, it is this same robotic emotion of ours that women play on with taunts such as “Be a man!” or “Man up!” – the list goes on.

However, I’m not here to put the blame on women, but to point out that as men we live in a society where we’re emotionally conflicted. We go through childhood believing that life is black and white, blue is for boys and pink for girls. Emotions, especially ones associated with weakness (e.g. crying), are things we must not reveal. Regardless of the fact that some men go through therapy sessions to deal with the topic at hand, the weeping truth is men do cry.

The biggest lie ever told by men is that we do not cry. Ironically, all the training and instructions drilled into us from boyhood are what’s led to the deception. Boys cry, men cry, but maybe we’re just not macho enough to talk about it.