men are being told to cry once, shut it down, and call that strength.
this isn’t healing.
it’s emotional shutdown being sold as masculinity.
i wrote this for the men who know that grief doesn’t disappear —
it either gets processed, or it gets buried and runs your life.
nothing died.
something needed time.
Men have tear ducts and emotions. It’s human nature to weep in pain or in joy.
Anything layered over that is pablum, a cultural patina of posturing from some long-ago insecure male ego with enough charisma to sell a sticky line of machismo bullshit.
Gods below, it’s so eye-achingly stupid to suggest men are wired differently on crying. Plenty of other things are true about masculine urges, but damn, crying ain’t one.
Grief denied doesn’t disappear. It reorganizes the personality.
What’s sold as masculinity here is often just early emotional foreclosure.
Strength is not the absence of feeling,
exactly.
what we call “strength” too often is just unfinished grief that learned how to posture.
feeling didn’t weaken these men — it was interrupted.
— author
Men have tear ducts and emotions. It’s human nature to weep in pain or in joy.
Anything layered over that is pablum, a cultural patina of posturing from some long-ago insecure male ego with enough charisma to sell a sticky line of machismo bullshit.
Gods below, it’s so eye-achingly stupid to suggest men are wired differently on crying. Plenty of other things are true about masculine urges, but damn, crying ain’t one.