This is an excerpt chapter of my upcoming book “48 High Value Male Principles”. I’m writing out in the open to gather feedback and find engaged readers who might review my book upon release.
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Rule number X: Men cry but don’t choose to cry. It’s Ok to cry. Even necessary. But for a man, it’s not okay to seek out your tears on purpose.
One of the hardest things that most men in their 20s have not yet learned is the fact that life is hard. This seems like an obvious statement, but deep pain is something that one has to experience, not understand. When you are a young adult, you are bound to not understand how much the world is out there to hurt you.
A ruined life is sometimes just one wrong step away, which spirals you down the wrong path. Some men never recover from the hardships and realizations they had to face in the least expected moments. I experienced this firsthand when I got stuck abroad during covid, lost my business, job and the country I got stuck in confiscated 55k UDD of my crypto assets. I was lonely, hopeless, and anxious and lost all my sources of income. As a result, I became very depressed and my health issues were inconceivable to me at that point of my life. I never could have possibly known how hard life would be despite already having gone through painful episodes of my life. During this time of my life, I cried many times and in hindsight, I wish that often I wouldn’t have bcause those tears achieved nothing but wallow further in my misery.
Every man hits one or two breaking points throughout his life where he’s confronted with a harsh truth about life: Life isn’t fair. Life is pain. Life is cruel. The older you become, the more respect you have for those who have lived well beyond their 70s and have endured the test of time. This is why, although it sounds like a boring and not-so-cool advice, you should respect and listen to your elders – they know more about hardship than you do even if you think they don’t.
As you go through life, you will endure pain on a large, and sometimes colossal scale. No doubt, your first breakup with a deep love will be one of those. But there may be pain waiting for you that buries itself even deeper than a lost love.
When tragedies befall a man, he’s faced with a choice: To cry, or to keep fighting and hold in the tears. What’s the better choice?
To discern when it is appropriate to cry as a man, vs. when you should suck it up, let’s first look at the anatomy of our tears, why we cry, and what the benefits of crying entail. There are three types of tears – basal tears, reflex tears, and emotional tears. All three are designed to protect us from harm. Basal tears keep our eyes hydrated at all times, to keep out debris such as dust. Reflex tears are strong fluid tears that help us wash out sudden obstacles in our eyes, e. G. a fly that ended up in your eye. And emotional tears – the main discussion of this chapter – happen to protect us from emotional pain.
When we feel deep emotional pain, our bodies are filled with anxiety and stress hormones such as cortisol. Naturally, we want to relieve ourselves of that source of stress. Crying has been studied to have a self-soothing effect. By activating the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), it helps us relax.
More importantly, emotional tears are a treasure trove of hormones and chemicals. A core hypothesis of the study of tears, is that they serve the function of releasing stress hormones from the body. When we cry, we quite literally flush out our system from stress hormones. On top of that, tears release the feel-good hormone oxytocin, and the pain-reducing hormone endorphin. As such, crying helps us reduce pain and kickstarts the recovery process to feel better and you’d be hard-pressed to believe, that as a man, you should cry. And to a certain degree, you are correct. Although not a conclusive researc, suppression of emotion may convey risk for earlier death, including death from cancer. Just bottling up your emotions is not a healthy approach to dealing with your problems.
However, and this is where the crux of crying and differences between gender comes into play. In an experiment to study the negative affect of crying, researchers compared how individuals would respond to watching an emotional movie. They surveyed individuals multiple times during the experiment, to track their overall mood. They would keep track of their mood before watching the movie, after the movie, 20 minutes after the movie, and 90 minutes after the movie. While the crying participants were in a worse mood right after the movie, individuals who had cried during/after the movie, after 90 minutes, individuals were found to be in a better mood than individuals who didn’t cry. As such, the short-term effect of crying is positive. While we’re crying, we unsurprisingly, we feel worse, but after roughly 60-90 minutes after, our mood improves more than if we wouldn’t have cried. Crying is a universal, cross-cultural tool the body uses to self-soothe, irrespective of cultural differences and the ratio of how often men & women cry is roughly the same across cultures.
Then case closed, isn’t it? Crying is good for our mental health, so, we should choose to cry whenever we feel like it? Or should we? Unfortunately, no. Crying can help temporarily, especially when it is done in front of one person for emotional support. Sometimes you need a shoulder to cry on to feel better. But crying by yourself or for many people to see makes you feel worse, not better. In the same study, it was found that crying may temporarily boost our mood, but the long-term effect of crying makes us feel worse on a daily basis.
When babies cry, they most likely partially cry in an attempt to self-soothe but without their parents to solve their problems, they would feel just as bad, if not worse after they stopped crying. When a baby feels discomfort, or at least when it thinks that something is wrong, it needs their caregivers to solve their struggle because it is not self-sustaining. Crying for a baby is the only reasonable choice to get attention to be freed of its discomfort. However, as an adult man, you are self-sustained. You don’t need your mother, father, or anyone else for that matter to care for you. Even if you do cry, and even if you signal your pain to one of your closest friends, or your partner, the goal should be to alleviate the pain – but in the case of an adult man, it is you who has to get rid of what’s causing you pain. Crying simply for the sake of crying solves none of your problems and in fact, only decreases your mood and mental health..
Women cry 30 to 64 a year, whereas men cry about 5 to 17 times per year, and the more egalitarian the country, the bigger the gap between men & women. The more equal a country, the more distinct the gender differences are pronounced in that country. The ratio of how often men & women cry remains the same, even in the latest studies on crying. This indicates is that crying has nothing to do with societal norms. Men who live in free societies, where expression of thought and emotions are encouraged, don’t cry more than men who grew up in countries with strong gender-roles and gender-stereotypes. Yet, women who live in free societies cry even more than women who grew up in let’s say, Indonesia.
Why is that? The established theory among researchers in the field of crying is that men cry less because of high testosterone levels, which inhibit crying, as is the case with animals. Likewise, it is hypothesized that women cry more frequently due to high prolactin hormone levels, making them more prone to express their emotional distress.
This aligns with another crying related-study, that highlighted that fathers with low testosterone levels were more sympathetic to crying infants – they were more likely to want ot help the child and acted more nurturing. Low testosterone levels, as such, connect us with our emotions and turn men into better caregivers – it makes us more nurturing.
That low testosterone level is one of the reasons why we men love women to begin with. Naturally, of course, you should learn to be nurturing but the fact that as a man, you are less negatively impacted by your emotions, less nurturing qualities, and so on, they are an asset – not a weakness. Besides, high testosterone levels will is not something you should be obsessed as you become a father, but with age, your testosterone levels are going to drop naturally.
So, crying is not in your biological programming as a man, nor is crying good for our mental health. It’s no coincidence that women – on average – fare worse in terms of their mental health.
There’s a reason why women cry less frequently than men. In XYZ’s paper on the basic reasoning for why people cry, XYZ created a hypothetical framework for what triggers us to cry. When we face hardships, we are confronted with frustartion, then feel suffering, next we attempt to resist the suffering, which results in perceived helplessness because we believe we cannot remain strong enough to resist, and eventually we give up and start to cry. If you’re highly neurotic, as women are to a much larger degree than men, then every negtive emotion will feel more intense, and you will feel negative emotions more often. Eventually, as a woman, you are going to cave and give in to your pain.
You being a man, with lower levels of neuroticism, so a lower tendency to feel negative emotions, to be less depressed and less anxious, and especially crying less, are all an asset, to you, and the women you date. Women don’t want a man who’s sensitive and prone to be incapacitated by his negative emotions. Yes, women want a man who’s vulnerable – someone who listens to his feelings. But vulnerability is different from weakness. Women don’t want men who succumb to their pain and gives in to it. They want a man who chooses to not give in, and keep on fighting for solutions for as long as he can.
So, should men cry? No. Generally speaking, crying only makes things worse. It’s Okay Not To Be Okay, and cry when you must, but you shouldn’t seek to cry to become engulfed by your negative emotions. Control your negative emotions instead of being controlled by them. If you as a man find yourself frequently crying, it is far more likely that your testosterone levels are low, and that you aren’t emotionally resilient enough. Nothing’s wrong with crying, and nothing’s wrong with women crying or being more emotionally vulnerable than men, but if you find yourself on a similar emotionally vulnerable spectrum as women, then you should question whether you are mentally strong enough to attract your dream woman.
During research for this book, I found a fascinating survey. While certainly not representative at only 1000 American respondents, 57% of them reported to be stressed about their mental health. More interestingly, 30% of respondents said that they were taking no steps to improve their mental health. An onslaught of emotions and crying are a sign that you need to make a change in your life and get rid of the pain, not to re-live your pain. Choosing to cry is choosing to be weak. Everybody’s weak at times of their live – enduring pain through that weakness is strength. Giving in to the pain continuously, rather than fighting for a better life, is weakness.
A 2022 study examined how socio-economic status impacts the Big 5 Personality Traits. Unsurprisingly, rich people are lower in neuroticism. If you are well off, without financial struggles, you are less likely to be impacted by your negative emotions. As such, if you find yourself crying a lot, you may also see this as an indicator that you need to take actionable steps to improve your current life situation. Choosing to cry and remaining stuck in the situation that makes you more susceptible to intensely feel your negative emotions only spirals you further away from happiness and success. It’s impossible to attract a woman if your emotional state projects weakness, rather than strength.
Is it possible to never cry? No. Are some life problems immediately “fixable” or fixable at all? No. Some things are irreversible. The death of a loved one. The breakdown of a relationship. Some problems cannot be solved, but they can be overcome. Choosing to cry about it will hold you back and make you become weak. Moving forward, even if the problem won’t be solved, at least gets you closer to where you’re meant to be.
If the pain is too great, cry and see your outburst of pain as a signal to find strength to move forward. Holding in your tears in is foolish. Sometimes, it is impossible to not cry. Sometimes, the pain we’ve accumulated is so big that there is no choice but to let it out in a burst of tears. This is a natural reaction to hardships. Let it all out and push onwards. Sometimes, the only smart choice is to move on from what hurts you and let it go.
A strong man will only cry when it is absolutely necessary. Oftentimes, your life is going to be hard. Sometimes, it simply won’t be fair and the things that happened to you have no rhyme or reasons. Sometimes, bad things beyond your control will happen to you and trying to make sense of them will only hold you back from moving forward with strength to new beginnings.
It is very tempting to give in to your emotions when you are feeling stuck, defeated, heartbroken. Bottled up pain will make you believe that if only you have a good cry, things will finally get better. You’ll tell yourself that you’ll feel better once you’ve allowed yourself to be sad and shed some tears. But that’s not true. There is a difference between allowing yourself to be sad, and choosing to cry.
Sometimes, we can’t help it. Some tragedies instinctively make us cry. I remember the day when I found out that my grandmother died as if it was yesterday. I was on my way to my favorite co-working space when I got the message from my sister. I was crying all the way as I was walking to the space and once I was sitting in the corner of the room, I completely zoned out and just cried a lot until one of my friends walked in the room and asked me if I was OK. That’s the “good” kind of cry. It’s an instinctive reaction. It happens on autopilot.
But, there is a “bad” kind of cry. The one that’s calculated. It’s something you’ve slowly opened up to until you became too weak and decided to cry rather than to keep on fighting. Choosing to cry is like ruminating over the same thing that hurts or bothers you over and over. It’s a futile attempt to get a solution to the problem without doing real work. There are no free rides in life.
A short cry may make you feel better for the moment, but you’re not addressing the real issue. If something in your life is hurting you, fix it. Crying about it will not solve the problem. Nobody is going to save you. You’re meant to be the hero of your own story, just as you’re meant to be the hero of a woman. If you can’t save yourself from ruin, then you’ll never be entrusted by a woman to be her safe haven. Nor will you ever be strong enough to climb the mountains that you are mant to climb.
When a woman cries, everybody – especially men – want to come to be her savior. But when a man cries, nobody is there to help you. In modern times, you may gain some attention and sympathy likes, but such attention is pointless and often does more harm than good –
Opening up to painful emotions and being vulnerable requires strength. But choosing to cry is not vulnerability. It’s weakness. It’s a choice to not solve what needs to be improved. You can cry 20 times about the same issue and nothing’s gonig to change. It doesn’t matter how unfair the thing is that happened to you. After the 21st cry you will realize that the only solution to get rid of the problem is to not let the problem have control over you. That requires strength. So cry if you must, but don’t choose to cry. If you find yourself crying over the same problem multiple times, then you’re choosing to cry rather than moving on from the problem that torments you. Choose to be strong and move forward. Don’t choose to cry.
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Footnotes & Resources
Charts of external sources may have been modified for visual consistency and improved readability and if necessary have been translated. See footnotes below for detailed, original references: