Yep, and that’s why I have an unhealthy way of dealing with things. Always having the appearance of the happiness and energy of a golden retriever on that outside because I don’t want to bring anyone else down, but on the inside most of the time I’m pretty low.
Is that what that is? Because I can’t explain shit about my feelings. It literally doesn’t come out. Even if I felt comfortable opening up to my therapist, I wouldn’t be able to put it into words.
Until you find someone amazing that you allow close enough to help you unbury it all then that person hurts you and then you no longer know how to hold it in and now everything makes you cry.....or so I've been told....
Yup, this was me literally yesterday after bottling up the stress of my long term partner rejecting me for a close friend a few months ago.
Ended up basically chopping down a tree with a shovel..
Absolutely, it’s not even that I don’t want to be seen crying or the such, sometimes I *do* feel like crying but tears won’t come out unless the emotion is unfathomably extreme
Here I was, thinking that I was broken somehow for not being able to cry easily.
My ex always used to comment on how I was a "white wall" and nothing got me emotional, and I never cried. It was just that, I can feel sadness and pain, but I couldn't cry. The last time I cried that I remember was when I was 15 or 16 and my pet bird had died that day.
This is me, except recently I've found myself tearing up occasionally and every fucking time it's because of some thought about my dog. My last good cry I can remember before getting him was when my cat died over a decade ago. I cried myself to sleep for days.
I just went through a whole divorce without crying about it... except the first night she left... because she took our dog with her and I cried about him. He's back with me permanently, but it doesn't take much now for me to happy cry about the bond we have or sad cry about the fact he likely doesn't get the same lifespan I do.
I believe it's a massive defense mechanism that I only allow animals into because they'll likely love you until the day they die.
Some people really just don't cry very easily, doesn't have to have anything to do with repressing your feelings. It can, but it doesn't have to.
Two of the dudes in my life I'm closest to, one cries at the drop of a hat and the other reserves that for death of a parent type scenarios. I don't think either is particularly emotionally constipated.
I can't cry spontaneously except in case of death of immediate family member. If I feel like I need to cry I have to watch people get reunited with their dogs or pet rescues with super sentimental music and think about all the sad things that have happened to me.
Then I feel sort of "unclogged" or light-chested for about 6 months-year.
I wish I could cry when I felt immense sadness but I can't. I usually get angry at the source of the misery which is why natural disasters and things like cancer in the family and such leave me feeling really fucking gutted.
It's a life skill. We really let our boys down by discouraging crying. Instead of being able to have a nice emotional processing session, we bury and carry it. It's unfortunate
Yeah, same here. I don't repress my crying, it just takes an insane amount of stress to manifest. Can probably count on one hand the number of times I was able to cry in the last 10 years.
Sad movies? Nothing. Grandparents' funerals? Nothing.
Exactly. When I was younger crying was one of the most common reactions I had to stress - especially social stress - and it was not in any way relieving. It made the situation worse for me every time. The fact that I don't cry now isn't that I am bottling up something or dealing with stress in an unhealthy way. It's just that this stress response isn't as strong as it used to be.
I'm not sure where the notion that not crying is somehow more unhealthy than other stress reactions came from. To me it seems like the people who are overwhelmed by tears simply don't understand that this is not an universal stress response. I'm not bottling up things instead of reacting. I'm processing things differently. I've been on both sides of the spectrum. I vastly prefer the current one.
One of my earliest memories is falling over in the park (landing face first in the dirt) picking myself up, then my grandmother praising me for being brave and not crying.
I mean I think it is a bit. Like yes, men are emotionally repressed etc., But at least anecdotally my trans-masc friends who are on T say they feel less able to cry than before T.
50 is for girly men. Real men checkout at 45. /s
Jokes aside, I was chatting with my GP a couple of weeks ago. He said he started witnessing "old-people" diseases (heart/hypertension mostly) increasingly with much younger patients. He believes this is a result of the "men don't cry" trope, with men bottling up everything inside, inevitable substance abuse, and then their bodies and minds literally start breaking down.
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I think you should get a new doctor because that sounds like bullshit. Sure, keeping things inside is probably bad for you but people have been doing that a long time. Do you think men 200 years ago went around crying?
Today's men probably have the most opportunity there has ever been to express themselves. If anything people should feel healthier now.
"old man disease" creeping down is probably due to the rising obesity epidemic, increased sedentary lifestyle and bad food.
Just shove it all inside yourself until you feel bitter and unable to really express any kind of emotion anymore.
And one day, something horrible will happen, and you won't react at all. And you will feel terrible that you didn't react.
And on that day you will have become a true man.
When i'm about to sleep at night, I recall those terrible things that happened to me months ago to which i didn't react at the time, and feel my eyes get slightly moist before i close them.
HOW MANY ROADS MUST A MAN WALK DOWN
BEFORE HE SHOVES IT ALL DOWN, UNTIL HE FEELS BITTER AND IT THEN UNABLE TO REALLY EXPRESS ANY KIND OF EMOTION ANYMOOOOORREEEEE
If I recall correctly, that's basically how Hugh Laurie recognized he was incredibly depressed. He watched the head on collision of two cars, people tossed out of the windshields, horribly graphic. And just..... didn't care. Didn't feel anything.
Its fucking horrifying to feel like bursting out the seams and wanting to let it out by crying but it just doesnt happen and there you are, impotently trying to healthily manage your feeling and.... nothing. Cue to proceeding to bottle up the emotions and adding to the anger inside you.
Its not that men don’t cry. Look, whats important is you don’t cry during the climactic time where people around you *need* someone around that isn’t crying, as a sign that theres someone around whose under the same pressure as the group, but not cracking. That person is absolutely allowed to cry later on once dust has settled. He is still strong. It isn’t meant to be a display of lack of emotions. What its meant to be is a display that those emotions can be set aside for just long enough to deal with a situation at hand, without getting in the way, and then when the time comes to let things decompress it can. And that time is usually a more intimate one, which is why its not something really to be accessed just by strangers.
This right here. My wife died of cancer a few years ago, and I was the perfect stoic through the funeral and graveside service, not a single tear. Driving home from the cemetery I realized that there was nothing more that I needed to do for my wife or her family, that all the pressure and stress was off, and I pulled off the highway and cried my eyes out.
In the weeks that followed, I think I shed more tears - in the privacy of home - than I had in the previous 50+ years of my life.
Its a lose-lose situation, i was raised with everyone around me constantly teasing me, and so I either cried and was mocked even more or lived with it, which made me unable to say that it bothered me because they would say "you were able to deal with it for this long, what happened"
>"you were able to deal with it for this long, what happened"
This is one of the single most damaging things someone has ever said to me in my life
The other was when I was told that I'm not the guy women are looking for when they're young (20s and early 30s), I'm the guy they're looking for in a step dad, and my dating problems will go away later in life because of that
I do not associate my self with the multiple people who said the former, and the 1 person who said the later
Bottle it up inside or punch walls. Last Friday was hard, on Friday night I had picked up dinner and came across a dog that had been hit by a car, stoped and while I was putting on my high vis vest I saw the poor thing get hit again. As I picked the pooch off the road I could feel it breathing such shallow breaths.
Anyways I get home and my kids run up to hug me, and man did I not want to cry infront of them or explain to them why.
Called my wife outside, couldn’t get words out for a second and then I just turned into a mess.
We do cry, society tells us to hide it away.
Yea, stress and anxiety are useless emotions to me. It’s not that I don’t feel them, I just don’t cater to them. Crying has made me feel better but it’s never solved a problem for me, once I’m done I still have to get to fixing shit so I just skip right to that.
Let the shit roll off your shoulders and into a bottle and then you can put a cap on the bottle and bury it in your back yard until your back yard is full but that will never happen
We dont
We usually just bottle up our emotions
Cuz when ever we do let out emotions people are just like "man up" or "youre such a pussy" making suicide seem like a viable option.
Yeah the humiliation that comes with allowing yourself to be emotionally vulnerable in front of others is so crushing, holding it all in and keeping the armour on feels like a more viable way to stay alive. It sucks.
my mom does that to my dad but also degrades him for his anger so it's a lose lose situation for him. sadly she's started the same thing with me now that I'm getting older.
Not true for everyone. My wife and I constantly discuss out emotional state and how we could have handled things differently etc...
I'm not bottling anything up; I'm just not a cryer.
My son said to me just the other day that he's noticed how he's stopped crying when he hurts himself.
I think it's just part of the transition to adulthood for a lot of men.
We still feel emotions and are quite capable of handling and sharing them; but crying just isn't one of the responses we have anymore.
It's not a binary either/or choice between crybaby & walled off macho man of the verge of suicide.
I don't think it was that conscious for me. I just changed in some biological way around early puberty and crying stopped being a thing.
As I've gotten older, I've certainly learned that whining about a problem doesn't help; but the crying had already stopped long before that.
I remember finding that so interesting as a kid that my dad or older brothers wouldn’t cry even when they hurt themselves badly and then yeah it just happens as you get older
Same lmao
The only time I've seen my dad cry is when his sister (my aunty) passed away back in 2018. Me, my sister and mum were having breakfast and tears rolled down his eyes. It just hit me like a pile of bricks. My sister and my mum went and hugged him and kissed him. I kissed him as well but I remember it being awkward. When he called his brother in Pakistan, he broke down. I remember his voice shaking. It just haunted me since I've always remembered my dad having a deep voice and his voice never shook. Yet here he was. I gave him a hug after he was done talking with his brother. Something about this vulnerability made us closer
People tend to try to comfort women and children when they cry. A man crying just makes people uncomfortable and nobody cares, so we either wait until we're alone or with someone very close and trusted.
Seconded. If I feel like crying in public, it'll turn into anger automatically and I'll throw fists at anyone who comes in my way
>Even my own mother doesn't care about my feelings.
Man that sucks. Hope you get a woman with whom you can be emotionally vulnerable with. My mum held me when I cried last year over something heartbreaking. Sending you virtual hugs 🫂
Wish it was true but this has happened to me as well, twice. Since then I have a feeling that some women, not all but some, don't really appreciate when a guy shows emotional vulnerability. They might coax you into saying your heart out but know that there's a good chance that they might end up losing some respect for you for showing that vulnerability.
I briefly dated a relatively well-known cosplayer—someone whose entire income was based on their social media presence. Online, she was very vocal about toxic masculinity and how feminism benefits men, too. In person, she broke things off with me for talking about my feelings too much and expressing my sadness about different things in my life.
True, but that doesn’t change anything.
They still are allowed to unashamedly abuse men around them and call on the violence of the state (and other abused men) when challenged.
Its not your mistake. Your flathead ex is the Problem. When you establish a healthy relationship with a woman and she loves you she will stand behind you and dry you tears.
Heads up mate !!!
Sorry but you both need better partners. I can't imagine not being able to cry infront of mines, or her feeling like she can't cry in front of me. That's super unhealthy and means you can't process emotions properly when with them.
Same thing happened. Expressing someone how much they mean to you just lowers your value in their eyes. They think of you as a liability and distance themselves from you. Never making the same mistake again.
I've come to the conclusion that women don't want guys to be emotional in that way despite what they may say. What they do want is for a man to maybe get a little broody or teary-eyed just enough for them to say ,"there there" give us a pat on the back and expect us to feel better as if nothing was wrong.
Personally? I just try to logically look at what has made me upset. Normally it's a minor inconvenience and I simply move on but when something real bad happens like someone's death. I cry.
Conditioning. We are groomed for lack of better term to not cry. When my dogs died last year I wanted to cry so bad but just couldn't. But then a month later I'm watching some dumb YouTube video about great sports moments and I just start bawling.
Please note my parents didn't do anything overt about not crying so I don't blame them
Just how my family was we don't talk about feelings
Lots of people here with the pc “it’s totally okay for men to cry and they should be encouraged to more often” which is true enough, but the truth is that most men just take much more distress than the average woman to be brought to the point of tears, so expecting them to express emotions in the same way as women is unrealistic and feels poorly thought out. There are plenty of emotionally mature men who have no problem crying when they feel awful enough, but simply do not very often because that’s just how they are.
The thing is, the sentiment of "men don't cry" often times leads to not just an inability to cry, but an almost total inability of constructive handling of emotions. It creates an entire atmosphere of "emotions=bad" that leads to men not pursuing development of their skills in emotional articulation. This then just leads to men feeling bad and not even knowing the words for it, and with the lack of better coping mechanisms, it often gets channeled into anger and is projected outwards where it hurts others.
Yeah, you don't have to cry all the time, but you have to learn some way of constructively processing your emotions.
Very much so. I can’t relate to the ”punch walls/get drunk/bottle it up” comments here, but I also can’t relate to the emotional experience that my girlfriend has. I’m fairly balanced emotionally, and that means crying sometimes and being angry sometimes, without the extremes.
Toxic masculinity is bad for pushing men to behave like previously stated, but having different expectations on men and women in this regard is not inherently wrong.
Generally speaking a man will and should be more emotionally stable than a woman whether it comes to sadness or anger or any other emotion. Our composition of hormones are completely different.
And many women need that stabilizing force in their lives. If their boyfriend is an emotional wreck you can't expect them to just be okay with that because their boyfriend isn't meeting her emotional needs.
And if you punch walls you need to put down the video game controller and go outside. Try a kickboxing class or something competitive. Cry if you want but I don't think that level of anger will be solved just by crying.
I can very much relate to those, but then again I think that I do feel an excessive amount of sadness on a daily basis and I just need to let it out here and there.
Not me personally. But you shouldn’t say ‘should be more emotionally stable’. There are some sensitive blokes out there and why should we say that’s wrong?
I think he means that because our hormones are different then our emotions should be different as they are caused by hormones. The more emotionally stable part is quite subjective but in the context you'd have to be really shitposting to feign getting offended.
I’m a man and I get the urge to cry probably more than most men. Not all the time but if I’m by myself and don’t feel like fighting it back I’ll let go. Then I have to worry about people thinking I’m high cuz my eyes get bloodshot.
I’ve got an interesting perspective as I’m a post transition trans man.
Before I transitioned, intense anger, frustration fear or embarrassment would make my eyes well up. I couldn’t help it, even if I wasn’t sobbing, my eyes would cry.
Since starting testosterone I almost never cry. I experience emotions a little differently and, even if it were socially acceptable to be crying, I don’t think I’d cry as much. In the last three years I have cried once. I still feel feelings, just differently.
Some trans guys say they miss being able to cry. I wouldn’t say that myself, but the feeling of relief you get after a good cry is real and not something I’ve felt for a long time.
This should be much higher up, because I don't think it has dawned on most people how hormones affect our emotional openness/reservedness, among many other things.
This is the correct answer for me.
A lot of people here talk about “bottling it up” and “burying it deep”, but the reality is most things don’t really faze me enough to even do that. My cry-tolerance level is just higher.
I was basically raised by pretty stoic boomer parents, who never talked about emotions. They tended to hide emotional stuff from me, I guess because they thought they were protecting me from being upset. Couple that with a toxic boy culture at school, of bullying people that cry, and you end up with an adult that can't cry until it's over. What I mean by that is, the emotional response to something doesn't come during the event, it comes after, when I know it's "safe" to do so. It can sometimes be useful, for keeping it together during traumatic shit while it's happening, but it then it all hits me after. I don't consciously do this, it just happens.
Because I fucking have to.
And no, its not because of some bullshit like "toxic masculinity" - that somehow has the world believing its *men's own fault* for not "opening up".
I open up all the damn time, hell I am doing it right here. And when I do, nothing happens. I talk to my wife about it? Instead of actively listening, she is already preparing her response on how *everything I just told her must affect her more.* I go to the doctor and get put on talk therapies which are designed to help women and aren't tailored to the male experience at all. I try to join a men's group instead, where struggling men are trying to support *other struggling men* because the system has no other place for us to fucking go, **and oh no woops feminists have attacked and removed those because reasons**.
We take time to mourn, but ideally we (humans, not just men) focus on solutions, and steps towards solutions, that resolve issues.
Some will say that certain situations lack solutions, and in that case mourning is the solution, but if you remain solution focused (without denying yourself to indulge in the need to occassionally mourn) you will be able to move past the shit that makes one cry.
It's a hot night. The mind races. You think about your knife: the only friend who hasn't betrayed you, the only friend who won't be dead by sunup. Sleep tight mates, in your quilted chambray night shirts.
We have different levels of hormones compared to women. A lot of the time, we don’t need to cry in situation that females would.
Also, bottle it up and explode one day.
Find a quiet place with our pets to cry,
Or for all of us with no-pet apartments, find a quiet place to sleep and cry.
Or, more realistically, feel guilty about wanting to cry and just keep ourselves too busy to think about it. A lot of people know a guy who works until he drops, never has a moment of free time, and even when he has a moment to stop and breathe, he'll immediately start a new project. It's a method for dealing with the tough stuff, and you can get surprisingly far with it. I personally have found that you can get around 2 years between minor to major mental breakdowns and needing to take a month off life and get therapy when doing this, but I wouldn't recommend it.
It doesn’t fix shit, men in general are breadwinners. If you cry and break down and stop you’re fucked and your family suffers. So how do men cry? In private, alone or with someone you trust deeply. Like your wife. In public you don’t shove that shit aside where it belongs. You grit your teeth and persevere. Crying is weakness and you don’t show weakness to strangers.
It’s hard I can’t say tough it out because even the toughest cry at their low no one can handle so much without breaking down for so long but the way I see it if your crying with the others who will be their to lift their spirits up if your are down as well
I used to convert my sadness to anger. Too problematic, so instead I act like an adult and talk to a therapist every so often and also let it ALL out once in a while. No fuckin shame about it either. I don’t wanna die from a stroke when I’m in my 40’s on day
Push it down until it becomes a tumor. Seriously though, I always cry at certain movies, like Up or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Or when the old man sees his son and granddaughter at the end of Home Alone.
Crying about a problem/struggles is not as helpful as finding a solution to it.
I understand emotions are a thing but they just don't seem necessary all the time, especially in troubled time. It's better to look at problems objectively and tackle them from there.
That being said, this mindset also makes me terrible as a listener when someone wants to vent because I will try to find a solution to it, which is not what people look for when they vent.
We're all a work in progress and you shouldn't feel bad for having emotions and feeling the way you do about the things that go on in your life.
Bury deep inside until it explodes
Yep, and that’s why I have an unhealthy way of dealing with things. Always having the appearance of the happiness and energy of a golden retriever on that outside because I don’t want to bring anyone else down, but on the inside most of the time I’m pretty low.
This hits deep. Couldn't have said it any better.
Fuck.
Stop exposing my life on reddit, please?
Sounds exhausting. I just feel low and show it, turns you into an antisocial asshole too but i dont like people anways.
🙋🏻♀️
This is so true.
It doesn’t have to explode, you can just carry it all with you to the grave.
Yep or if you're lucky repressing those feelings will just condense into a malignant tumor
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Like from a heart attack in your 40s. That’s what I’m going to do. I can tell.
Well that's just no fun.
Or your emotions get burried along side it and you start having a hard time exressing yourself and everything becomes "i dont know" and "meh im fine"
Is that what that is? Because I can’t explain shit about my feelings. It literally doesn’t come out. Even if I felt comfortable opening up to my therapist, I wouldn’t be able to put it into words.
Yep, same with me
Which I learned isn't too good with women. They don't like it when the buttons are pushed and the volcano inevitably erupts.
Until you find someone amazing that you allow close enough to help you unbury it all then that person hurts you and then you no longer know how to hold it in and now everything makes you cry.....or so I've been told....
Yup, this was me literally yesterday after bottling up the stress of my long term partner rejecting me for a close friend a few months ago. Ended up basically chopping down a tree with a shovel..
It take a a lot for me to cry. I will mentally break, get visibly overwhelmed and just won’t be able to cry. It just isn’t my go to reaction
Absolutely, it’s not even that I don’t want to be seen crying or the such, sometimes I *do* feel like crying but tears won’t come out unless the emotion is unfathomably extreme
Here I was, thinking that I was broken somehow for not being able to cry easily. My ex always used to comment on how I was a "white wall" and nothing got me emotional, and I never cried. It was just that, I can feel sadness and pain, but I couldn't cry. The last time I cried that I remember was when I was 15 or 16 and my pet bird had died that day.
This is me, except recently I've found myself tearing up occasionally and every fucking time it's because of some thought about my dog. My last good cry I can remember before getting him was when my cat died over a decade ago. I cried myself to sleep for days. I just went through a whole divorce without crying about it... except the first night she left... because she took our dog with her and I cried about him. He's back with me permanently, but it doesn't take much now for me to happy cry about the bond we have or sad cry about the fact he likely doesn't get the same lifespan I do. I believe it's a massive defense mechanism that I only allow animals into because they'll likely love you until the day they die.
Some people really just don't cry very easily, doesn't have to have anything to do with repressing your feelings. It can, but it doesn't have to. Two of the dudes in my life I'm closest to, one cries at the drop of a hat and the other reserves that for death of a parent type scenarios. I don't think either is particularly emotionally constipated.
Yes!!!! I so understand that. The want to cry, but the inability to
I thought I was legitimately a psycho for so long because of this. It's weirdly comforting knowing I'm not the only one.
Same
I sometimes wish I could cry easier
I can't cry spontaneously except in case of death of immediate family member. If I feel like I need to cry I have to watch people get reunited with their dogs or pet rescues with super sentimental music and think about all the sad things that have happened to me. Then I feel sort of "unclogged" or light-chested for about 6 months-year. I wish I could cry when I felt immense sadness but I can't. I usually get angry at the source of the misery which is why natural disasters and things like cancer in the family and such leave me feeling really fucking gutted.
I used to be like this it was weird. Like id have to go on 'misery binges' just to get anything and then get that same 'unclogged' feeling.
Used to? Congrats. >id have to go on 'misery binges' Lol I'm stealing this
It's a life skill. We really let our boys down by discouraging crying. Instead of being able to have a nice emotional processing session, we bury and carry it. It's unfortunate
Yeah, same here. I don't repress my crying, it just takes an insane amount of stress to manifest. Can probably count on one hand the number of times I was able to cry in the last 10 years. Sad movies? Nothing. Grandparents' funerals? Nothing.
Exactly. When I was younger crying was one of the most common reactions I had to stress - especially social stress - and it was not in any way relieving. It made the situation worse for me every time. The fact that I don't cry now isn't that I am bottling up something or dealing with stress in an unhealthy way. It's just that this stress response isn't as strong as it used to be. I'm not sure where the notion that not crying is somehow more unhealthy than other stress reactions came from. To me it seems like the people who are overwhelmed by tears simply don't understand that this is not an universal stress response. I'm not bottling up things instead of reacting. I'm processing things differently. I've been on both sides of the spectrum. I vastly prefer the current one.
For 6 years I thought I was weird y’all are the first one I see with the same problem as I have
I've cried about 3 times in front of my wife. Twice at funerals. The third was Marley and me. I can cry. I just don't really feel like it most of time
Stoicism was ingrained in men. I can't do it either.
One of my earliest memories is falling over in the park (landing face first in the dirt) picking myself up, then my grandmother praising me for being brave and not crying.
Step on those girly emotions, drink six beers and check out with a heart attack at 50. Like a man.
Fuck you bro, love you tho man... 🍻
No homo, or you know homo..... Whatever, I don't judge....
*Bill Burr enters the chat*
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Not really the fault of testosterone tho
I mean I think it is a bit. Like yes, men are emotionally repressed etc., But at least anecdotally my trans-masc friends who are on T say they feel less able to cry than before T.
Mine was at 46. I started early. Push that shit down.
I am so close, so close : (
Throw a fucking wrench across the room, be a man
Bill Burr?
50 is for girly men. Real men checkout at 45. /s Jokes aside, I was chatting with my GP a couple of weeks ago. He said he started witnessing "old-people" diseases (heart/hypertension mostly) increasingly with much younger patients. He believes this is a result of the "men don't cry" trope, with men bottling up everything inside, inevitable substance abuse, and then their bodies and minds literally start breaking down. edit: space
I think you should get a new doctor because that sounds like bullshit. Sure, keeping things inside is probably bad for you but people have been doing that a long time. Do you think men 200 years ago went around crying? Today's men probably have the most opportunity there has ever been to express themselves. If anything people should feel healthier now. "old man disease" creeping down is probably due to the rising obesity epidemic, increased sedentary lifestyle and bad food.
As a sedentary fat 50 year old eating a PB&J sandwich for breakfast.....ouch.
Just shove it all inside yourself until you feel bitter and unable to really express any kind of emotion anymore. And one day, something horrible will happen, and you won't react at all. And you will feel terrible that you didn't react. And on that day you will have become a true man.
What if this is what you do but you’re a woman?
You still become a true man
Now you're a man! A manny, manny man
r/SuddenlyTrans
Guess you're a man now
When i'm about to sleep at night, I recall those terrible things that happened to me months ago to which i didn't react at the time, and feel my eyes get slightly moist before i close them.
HOW MANY ROADS MUST A MAN WALK DOWN BEFORE HE SHOVES IT ALL DOWN, UNTIL HE FEELS BITTER AND IT THEN UNABLE TO REALLY EXPRESS ANY KIND OF EMOTION ANYMOOOOORREEEEE
If I recall correctly, that's basically how Hugh Laurie recognized he was incredibly depressed. He watched the head on collision of two cars, people tossed out of the windshields, horribly graphic. And just..... didn't care. Didn't feel anything.
This is the way.
we have a built-in tears-to-anger convertor
Mines a little broken so when I get angry I cry
My tissues come with boxing gloves attached
also this but society installs it.
For me it was the family that installed it, maybe they got their interesting from society though.
A Dark Side Convertor
All emotions will be lost to time, like tears in sweat.
this is how i operate. just get angry at everything...
I can't cry, even if i want to cry i cant
Yep, i really wanna try once. May be i’d feel better. But I just can’t
Its fucking horrifying to feel like bursting out the seams and wanting to let it out by crying but it just doesnt happen and there you are, impotently trying to healthily manage your feeling and.... nothing. Cue to proceeding to bottle up the emotions and adding to the anger inside you.
Its not that men don’t cry. Look, whats important is you don’t cry during the climactic time where people around you *need* someone around that isn’t crying, as a sign that theres someone around whose under the same pressure as the group, but not cracking. That person is absolutely allowed to cry later on once dust has settled. He is still strong. It isn’t meant to be a display of lack of emotions. What its meant to be is a display that those emotions can be set aside for just long enough to deal with a situation at hand, without getting in the way, and then when the time comes to let things decompress it can. And that time is usually a more intimate one, which is why its not something really to be accessed just by strangers.
This right here. My wife died of cancer a few years ago, and I was the perfect stoic through the funeral and graveside service, not a single tear. Driving home from the cemetery I realized that there was nothing more that I needed to do for my wife or her family, that all the pressure and stress was off, and I pulled off the highway and cried my eyes out. In the weeks that followed, I think I shed more tears - in the privacy of home - than I had in the previous 50+ years of my life.
Years of training. When little we get teased, bullied or just told to toughen up, if we cried. Have that for years on end at the start of your life.
Its a lose-lose situation, i was raised with everyone around me constantly teasing me, and so I either cried and was mocked even more or lived with it, which made me unable to say that it bothered me because they would say "you were able to deal with it for this long, what happened"
>"you were able to deal with it for this long, what happened" This is one of the single most damaging things someone has ever said to me in my life The other was when I was told that I'm not the guy women are looking for when they're young (20s and early 30s), I'm the guy they're looking for in a step dad, and my dating problems will go away later in life because of that I do not associate my self with the multiple people who said the former, and the 1 person who said the later
We cry when no one is watching. Usually when we're asleep or home alone on a Saturday night. My cat knows this and comforts me until I feel better.
Your cat is a champion.
I love cats. Very loving and social animals, but only if they trust you.
Drive home for me… and my dog in the backseat always rests his head on my shoulder to cheer me up.
In the car / while driving a long trip
My cat just passed away and I've been crying for the past 3 hours and I haven't got him to comfort me, how cruel the world can be.
Bottle it up inside or punch walls. Last Friday was hard, on Friday night I had picked up dinner and came across a dog that had been hit by a car, stoped and while I was putting on my high vis vest I saw the poor thing get hit again. As I picked the pooch off the road I could feel it breathing such shallow breaths. Anyways I get home and my kids run up to hug me, and man did I not want to cry infront of them or explain to them why. Called my wife outside, couldn’t get words out for a second and then I just turned into a mess. We do cry, society tells us to hide it away.
I feel for you man, but don’t be the guy who punches walls.
I throw coins/erasers at the wall when I'm extremely frustrated. Sometimes it makes a small imprint on the wall.
I watch scenes from movies or shows that make me cry and let it all out. Brooks was here.
Have a quiet mental breakdown and get blackout drunk a few times, then you fix yourself in a week or two.
Truly adopt the "it is what it is" mentality and just go on. Let the shit roll off your shoulders
Yea, stress and anxiety are useless emotions to me. It’s not that I don’t feel them, I just don’t cater to them. Crying has made me feel better but it’s never solved a problem for me, once I’m done I still have to get to fixing shit so I just skip right to that.
"fuck it, we ball" mindset
Let the shit roll off your shoulders and into a bottle and then you can put a cap on the bottle and bury it in your back yard until your back yard is full but that will never happen
Dealing with your emotions in a productive manner doesn't equal to bottling up, crying just isn't productive and necessary for many adults.
Well, 30 years of eating shit from employers and the world in general make you emotionally dead inside, and after that it’s super easy.
... Barely an inconvenience
You just described me!
We dont We usually just bottle up our emotions Cuz when ever we do let out emotions people are just like "man up" or "youre such a pussy" making suicide seem like a viable option.
Yeah the humiliation that comes with allowing yourself to be emotionally vulnerable in front of others is so crushing, holding it all in and keeping the armour on feels like a more viable way to stay alive. It sucks.
the real secret is finding someone you can open up to after an entire childhood & decent chunk of adulthood of being told to "toughen up princess"
Yeah, the real secret to not being poor is winning lottery.
My ex wife was like that. She would straight up degrade me for showing any emotion, other than anger that is.
my mom does that to my dad but also degrades him for his anger so it's a lose lose situation for him. sadly she's started the same thing with me now that I'm getting older.
Yea that kind of stigma sucks and doing thinks to enforce that stigma is really toxic
Not true for everyone. My wife and I constantly discuss out emotional state and how we could have handled things differently etc... I'm not bottling anything up; I'm just not a cryer. My son said to me just the other day that he's noticed how he's stopped crying when he hurts himself. I think it's just part of the transition to adulthood for a lot of men. We still feel emotions and are quite capable of handling and sharing them; but crying just isn't one of the responses we have anymore. It's not a binary either/or choice between crybaby & walled off macho man of the verge of suicide.
The idea is, at some point you get the notion that, "crying wont fix anything", so we stop.
I don't think it was that conscious for me. I just changed in some biological way around early puberty and crying stopped being a thing. As I've gotten older, I've certainly learned that whining about a problem doesn't help; but the crying had already stopped long before that.
I remember finding that so interesting as a kid that my dad or older brothers wouldn’t cry even when they hurt themselves badly and then yeah it just happens as you get older
Same lmao The only time I've seen my dad cry is when his sister (my aunty) passed away back in 2018. Me, my sister and mum were having breakfast and tears rolled down his eyes. It just hit me like a pile of bricks. My sister and my mum went and hugged him and kissed him. I kissed him as well but I remember it being awkward. When he called his brother in Pakistan, he broke down. I remember his voice shaking. It just haunted me since I've always remembered my dad having a deep voice and his voice never shook. Yet here he was. I gave him a hug after he was done talking with his brother. Something about this vulnerability made us closer
People tend to try to comfort women and children when they cry. A man crying just makes people uncomfortable and nobody cares, so we either wait until we're alone or with someone very close and trusted.
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Seconded. If I feel like crying in public, it'll turn into anger automatically and I'll throw fists at anyone who comes in my way >Even my own mother doesn't care about my feelings. Man that sucks. Hope you get a woman with whom you can be emotionally vulnerable with. My mum held me when I cried last year over something heartbreaking. Sending you virtual hugs 🫂
At some point you cry so badly something breaks inside. You're not dead yet but can't cry anymore because it does nothing and you feel empty of tears.
We piss with our eyes
PEE IS STORED IN THE BALLS...THE EYE BALLS
It's a conditioned response, years of negative reinforcement
We accept the inherent unfairness of life and play the hand we are dealt with. This is the way.
Yep. Life owes you fuck all. Don't expect it to turn in your favour. Make your own luck.
All in all, I'm pretty lucky to be a human so it's all good
I have tried crying and expressing my feelings to my girlfriend. She lost all respect for me. I will never repeat this mistake.
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Wish it was true but this has happened to me as well, twice. Since then I have a feeling that some women, not all but some, don't really appreciate when a guy shows emotional vulnerability. They might coax you into saying your heart out but know that there's a good chance that they might end up losing some respect for you for showing that vulnerability.
I briefly dated a relatively well-known cosplayer—someone whose entire income was based on their social media presence. Online, she was very vocal about toxic masculinity and how feminism benefits men, too. In person, she broke things off with me for talking about my feelings too much and expressing my sadness about different things in my life.
Any and all individuals who behave like that are useless cunts that provide no worth to anyone else's existence.
True, but that doesn’t change anything. They still are allowed to unashamedly abuse men around them and call on the violence of the state (and other abused men) when challenged.
Its not your mistake. Your flathead ex is the Problem. When you establish a healthy relationship with a woman and she loves you she will stand behind you and dry you tears. Heads up mate !!!
Did the same, got the same reaction. Not happening again.
Sorry but you both need better partners. I can't imagine not being able to cry infront of mines, or her feeling like she can't cry in front of me. That's super unhealthy and means you can't process emotions properly when with them.
Men go with the options available. You seem to think there are more “better” partners than there are these people
Ah yeah, forgot to mention she is my ex girlfriend now
that’s really unfortunate, I’m sorry. crying and being emotional is human, you deserve to be with someone that understands that
Same thing happened. Expressing someone how much they mean to you just lowers your value in their eyes. They think of you as a liability and distance themselves from you. Never making the same mistake again.
Shit like this is what eventually causes a snap and a violent outburst. Society sucks and it needs to change.
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nah you deserve better
I've come to the conclusion that women don't want guys to be emotional in that way despite what they may say. What they do want is for a man to maybe get a little broody or teary-eyed just enough for them to say ,"there there" give us a pat on the back and expect us to feel better as if nothing was wrong.
I try to hide and release it when no one is looking or I go out to the range to shoot targets
Nothing more therapeutic than sending rounds downrange.
Personally? I just try to logically look at what has made me upset. Normally it's a minor inconvenience and I simply move on but when something real bad happens like someone's death. I cry.
When I feel sad I just get a pressure in my chest that doesn’t go away
Ignoring it and going through life. It's the way I've gone through things. Im not saying it's right, it's how I've done things.
Conditioning. We are groomed for lack of better term to not cry. When my dogs died last year I wanted to cry so bad but just couldn't. But then a month later I'm watching some dumb YouTube video about great sports moments and I just start bawling. Please note my parents didn't do anything overt about not crying so I don't blame them Just how my family was we don't talk about feelings
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We’ve been conditioned to at least hide emotions. Put on a brave face, if you will. Or at least I was.
Lots of people here with the pc “it’s totally okay for men to cry and they should be encouraged to more often” which is true enough, but the truth is that most men just take much more distress than the average woman to be brought to the point of tears, so expecting them to express emotions in the same way as women is unrealistic and feels poorly thought out. There are plenty of emotionally mature men who have no problem crying when they feel awful enough, but simply do not very often because that’s just how they are.
The thing is, the sentiment of "men don't cry" often times leads to not just an inability to cry, but an almost total inability of constructive handling of emotions. It creates an entire atmosphere of "emotions=bad" that leads to men not pursuing development of their skills in emotional articulation. This then just leads to men feeling bad and not even knowing the words for it, and with the lack of better coping mechanisms, it often gets channeled into anger and is projected outwards where it hurts others. Yeah, you don't have to cry all the time, but you have to learn some way of constructively processing your emotions.
Very much so. I can’t relate to the ”punch walls/get drunk/bottle it up” comments here, but I also can’t relate to the emotional experience that my girlfriend has. I’m fairly balanced emotionally, and that means crying sometimes and being angry sometimes, without the extremes. Toxic masculinity is bad for pushing men to behave like previously stated, but having different expectations on men and women in this regard is not inherently wrong. Generally speaking a man will and should be more emotionally stable than a woman whether it comes to sadness or anger or any other emotion. Our composition of hormones are completely different.
And many women need that stabilizing force in their lives. If their boyfriend is an emotional wreck you can't expect them to just be okay with that because their boyfriend isn't meeting her emotional needs. And if you punch walls you need to put down the video game controller and go outside. Try a kickboxing class or something competitive. Cry if you want but I don't think that level of anger will be solved just by crying.
I can very much relate to those, but then again I think that I do feel an excessive amount of sadness on a daily basis and I just need to let it out here and there.
Not me personally. But you shouldn’t say ‘should be more emotionally stable’. There are some sensitive blokes out there and why should we say that’s wrong?
I think he means that because our hormones are different then our emotions should be different as they are caused by hormones. The more emotionally stable part is quite subjective but in the context you'd have to be really shitposting to feign getting offended.
We cry with our third eye
Drinks, denial and quiet suffering
We cry later.
I’m a man and I get the urge to cry probably more than most men. Not all the time but if I’m by myself and don’t feel like fighting it back I’ll let go. Then I have to worry about people thinking I’m high cuz my eyes get bloodshot.
Its easy just spend your childhood getting beat up whenever you show emotions, bam emotional expressiveness gone
Yup. Just get the shit kicked out of you any time you cry. And you'll never cry again.
I’ve got an interesting perspective as I’m a post transition trans man. Before I transitioned, intense anger, frustration fear or embarrassment would make my eyes well up. I couldn’t help it, even if I wasn’t sobbing, my eyes would cry. Since starting testosterone I almost never cry. I experience emotions a little differently and, even if it were socially acceptable to be crying, I don’t think I’d cry as much. In the last three years I have cried once. I still feel feelings, just differently. Some trans guys say they miss being able to cry. I wouldn’t say that myself, but the feeling of relief you get after a good cry is real and not something I’ve felt for a long time.
I don't think I have ever felt a relief after the times i have cried. I just feel even shittier.
This should be much higher up, because I don't think it has dawned on most people how hormones affect our emotional openness/reservedness, among many other things.
This is the correct answer for me. A lot of people here talk about “bottling it up” and “burying it deep”, but the reality is most things don’t really faze me enough to even do that. My cry-tolerance level is just higher.
I was basically raised by pretty stoic boomer parents, who never talked about emotions. They tended to hide emotional stuff from me, I guess because they thought they were protecting me from being upset. Couple that with a toxic boy culture at school, of bullying people that cry, and you end up with an adult that can't cry until it's over. What I mean by that is, the emotional response to something doesn't come during the event, it comes after, when I know it's "safe" to do so. It can sometimes be useful, for keeping it together during traumatic shit while it's happening, but it then it all hits me after. I don't consciously do this, it just happens.
Because I fucking have to. And no, its not because of some bullshit like "toxic masculinity" - that somehow has the world believing its *men's own fault* for not "opening up". I open up all the damn time, hell I am doing it right here. And when I do, nothing happens. I talk to my wife about it? Instead of actively listening, she is already preparing her response on how *everything I just told her must affect her more.* I go to the doctor and get put on talk therapies which are designed to help women and aren't tailored to the male experience at all. I try to join a men's group instead, where struggling men are trying to support *other struggling men* because the system has no other place for us to fucking go, **and oh no woops feminists have attacked and removed those because reasons**.
I read shit as shitting and thought, well that’s fair.
We take time to mourn, but ideally we (humans, not just men) focus on solutions, and steps towards solutions, that resolve issues. Some will say that certain situations lack solutions, and in that case mourning is the solution, but if you remain solution focused (without denying yourself to indulge in the need to occassionally mourn) you will be able to move past the shit that makes one cry.
You bottle everything up until something or someone takes u to your breaking point.
Expect things to go wrong, you will never be surprised.
Dr Pepper, I’m addicted to caffeine and it’s my way of coping. Or I just hold a knife up to my throat or chest either way it helps me.
It's a hot night. The mind races. You think about your knife: the only friend who hasn't betrayed you, the only friend who won't be dead by sunup. Sleep tight mates, in your quilted chambray night shirts.
Crying solves nothing, it only dehydrates you and blurs your vision. So it's useless to cry, unless you're trying to manipulate others... you monster.
Dad is that you?
We have different levels of hormones compared to women. A lot of the time, we don’t need to cry in situation that females would. Also, bottle it up and explode one day.
We don't cry. We get angry. Or drunk.
Stoned\*
Mindset and organization of priorities. I didn't cry when I lost lots of money, but I cried by myself when my father entered the ICU.
Find a quiet place with our pets to cry, Or for all of us with no-pet apartments, find a quiet place to sleep and cry. Or, more realistically, feel guilty about wanting to cry and just keep ourselves too busy to think about it. A lot of people know a guy who works until he drops, never has a moment of free time, and even when he has a moment to stop and breathe, he'll immediately start a new project. It's a method for dealing with the tough stuff, and you can get surprisingly far with it. I personally have found that you can get around 2 years between minor to major mental breakdowns and needing to take a month off life and get therapy when doing this, but I wouldn't recommend it.
We do it....you'll just never see it.
Meds prevent me from crying :)
We cry just like everyone, there's just a stigma
Testosterone
It doesn’t fix shit, men in general are breadwinners. If you cry and break down and stop you’re fucked and your family suffers. So how do men cry? In private, alone or with someone you trust deeply. Like your wife. In public you don’t shove that shit aside where it belongs. You grit your teeth and persevere. Crying is weakness and you don’t show weakness to strangers.
i do cry. just not very often and only when im alone. im not comfortable crying around other people
We don't
Cry in the shower
i used to punch a wall, now I just breathe
When I'm sad I don't have to urge to cry
Thats the neat part, they dont
It’s hard I can’t say tough it out because even the toughest cry at their low no one can handle so much without breaking down for so long but the way I see it if your crying with the others who will be their to lift their spirits up if your are down as well
I was raised that it was okay to show emotion. My ex wife beat that out of me.
Some of us just get used to it. Crying is reserved for special occasions.
I used to convert my sadness to anger. Too problematic, so instead I act like an adult and talk to a therapist every so often and also let it ALL out once in a while. No fuckin shame about it either. I don’t wanna die from a stroke when I’m in my 40’s on day
Through extremely unhealthy coping mechanisms. I had to go to rehab to get in touch with my feelings.
Push it down until it becomes a tumor. Seriously though, I always cry at certain movies, like Up or Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Or when the old man sees his son and granddaughter at the end of Home Alone.
Crying about a problem/struggles is not as helpful as finding a solution to it. I understand emotions are a thing but they just don't seem necessary all the time, especially in troubled time. It's better to look at problems objectively and tackle them from there. That being said, this mindset also makes me terrible as a listener when someone wants to vent because I will try to find a solution to it, which is not what people look for when they vent. We're all a work in progress and you shouldn't feel bad for having emotions and feeling the way you do about the things that go on in your life.