“The day I found out about the massive earthquake in Haiti. I cried like a baby almost every day. I had to turn off CNN and do my part as a Haitian American and help my country.”
Tertulien Thomas Jr., actor and model
“Sadly, I don’t remember. I didn’t come from a household where men cry. In my youth I thought it was a cool thing; but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to respect men who are in touch enough with their feelings to cry. It’s better than repressing those feelings that bring one to tears.”
David Atchison, writer, producer, and journalist
“I cry at emotional moments with my soccer team. So do they.”
Dan Woog, high school soccer coach
Several years after [my three-year-old daughter] Kate died, I went to the funeral for a classmate of mine from West Point, John Lewis. The funeral was in a rural part of Virginia, on sharecroppers’ land, in an old country church. The ceremony was deeply moving and memorable. Nothing like the cold, ritualistic, Catholic funerals I’ve been to before and since. This service was clearly a celebration of John’s life. Every member of John’s family spoke before the congregation about him. Then at least forty more people got up to speak about him. They talked about how they had met John, and what his friendship had meant to them. Everyone participated in the singing. Then one of John’s closest friends played some music videos on a big screen TV. Country and western… John’s favorite, some real melancholy music. I guess it was the combination of the setting, coupled with the music and the sincere, kind words by so many people, but a powerful wave of emotion came over me just then, and I cried more than anyone in the church. John’s sister kept handing me tissues, patting my shoulder to comfort me, and I couldn’t stop the flow of tears.”
John Oliver, entrepreneur (Quoted in “Blindfolded,” The Good Men Project book.)
“I cry sometimes, but never when I play baseball. After all, there’s no crying in baseball. Maybe you can get away with crying in softball. But definitely not baseball.”
Jason Peters, teacher
“Occasionally I cry in the safety of a darkened movie theater or while watching TV alone. But I haven’t been able to cry in response to anything in my own life for quite some time. I was an overly sensitive kid. The slightest transgression could send me into hysterics. My father was a gruff, virile man, possessing a Grizzly Adams physique but with a loud, booming voice. He was quick to anger and tended to criticize me for not living up to his concept of masculinity that my older brother seemed to achieve effortlessly. I wasn’t able to be the son he had envisioned, and I retreated further into myself. When puberty hit and the baby fat melted away, I grew into a kind of masculinity I didn’t know was possible for me. I grew taller than my classmates, found solace in the isolation of competitive swimming, and became a star of the team. Still, I was far from what I thought would garner my father’s approval. I let go of the things that interested me most growing up: fashion, celebrity gossip, and pop music, seeing them now as trivial. By the time my grandmother died a few years after I graduated high school I was so closed off I was unable to cry at her funeral. I stood over her open casket, stared numbly down at her clasped hands, trying to shake myself out of this torpor. But I couldn’t will the tears to come. Whatever internal mechanism that used to ignite my emotional core as a child had broken down completely and I had no idea how I was supposed to repair it.”
Ryan Berg, restaurant manager and writer
“I cry often, almost every day, or at least I well up or choke back tears. Occasionally it is from despair, but mostly it is from the mere thought of my daughter or the awe and appreciation of something remarkable someone has done by sheer power of brilliance and will.”
John C. Abell, journalist
“I don’t cry as much as I used to, and it upsets me. I think that, maybe, one of the things about manhood is you’re so damn busy trying to either avoid, you know, the subway in New York or the mastodon 30,000 years ago, that there’s no time left to feel like that. But when I wrote The Murder Room, there were parts of the book where I cried. I think our mind—the intellect—can only go so far, and the greatest understanding of other people, and any kind of art, comes from your heart.”
Michael Capuzzo, journalist and author
“I don’t cry. I’m not a girl.”
Justin Thompson, middle school student
“I cried last weekend. I was doing a seven-mile run on Fire Island from the Pines through Cherry Grove past Sailor’s Haven and into the Sunken Forest. For most of the run I was running either on paved sidewalk through dunes, where it was desolate, or on boardwalks through Sunken Forest. On the way back I came up to a point that I could see across the bay between Fire Island and Long Island, and I said ‘thank you’ out loud. I said ‘thank you’ to the universe, and I cried. I felt so moved, grateful and lucky to be alive and present.”
Corey Johnson, political consultant
“The week before my husband and I got married, I said to myself, ‘No one understands how I’m suffering. I have to take care of everybody else, but no one knows how I feel.’ And the minute I said that, the minute that was in my head, I saw the face of the suffering Christ and I heard, in my imagination, and I felt held. It was very much God saying, ‘I love you. I know how you suffer. I have suffered as you have, and I love you and I’m with you.’ And I felt euphoric. Dried my eyes. I’m like, ‘Screw it! What’s the worst that’s going to happen to me? And when I have this love in my life, what do I care?’” Well, I care, it hurts, but it wasn’t the same.”
Rev. John Finley IV, founder of the Epiphany School
“My son had a serious nerve injury last Christmas, and he was in such extreme pain that I found myself crying almost every day until his pain was successfully treated and he was cured. Nothing hurts so much as watching your child suffer.”
Jim Moret, television anchor
“Watching Marian Anderson sing ‘My Country Tis of Thee’ in front of the Lincoln Memorial in the late 1930s as the closing scene in one of Ken Burns’ PBS shows on our National Parks.”
Jim Matlack, my dad
“I cried just the other day while watching an episode of THE CHOIR on BBC-America. The 100 boys in the school choir that Gareth (the choirmaster) had just started went on a field trip to Cambridge to hear the King’s College Choir. When I was a child, I used to sing in church choirs. When I was 50, my 80-year-old father and I went to England and France for two weeks and spent a wonderful day in Cambridge, where we went to the famous chapel where the all-male choir performs. When I saw the beautiful place on my TV screen, I thought, “I’ve been there, I was there with my father,” and just burst into tears. I’m 63 now, and I wanted my father back. It’s not the only time I’ve cried since he died in 2006. All my life I had longed for a closer relationship with him, and I found it on that trip to Europe in 1997. I miss him enormously.”
Michael Lassell, writer
“I remember it like it was just last Sunday. Okay, so it was last Sunday. I was packing up and getting ready to leave one of my favorite places in the world. For each of the past twelve years, I have spent the last week of August at a summer camp for gay and lesbian adults in Maine. The camp’s tag line is, “Remember when summer was the best time ever? It still is!”, and you know what, it’s true! Invariably, year after year, at the end of having another ‘best time ever!’ with so many old and new friends, I cry. It’s not the intense chest-pounding cry I might have when a loved one dies or when a relationship abruptly ends. It’s a mix of tears of happiness for the experience, tears born of the noticed connections and friendships, and tears of sadness as the realization that it will be another fifty-one weeks before I’m in the warm embrace of this place, these people, this community. Interestingly, it seems that most of us cry at least once in the last day. I’ve certainly been in situations where I have welled up with potential tears that I didn’t let myself shed, due to pride, discomfort, embarrassment, or social stigma. The funny thing is, I never feel better for having held it in. In fact, I often feel worse. The times I let myself cry, I almost always felt better.”
Phillip Clawson, corporate responsibility consultant
“A few weeks ago watching my 6-year-old son, Connor, graduate from kindergarten. Sitting on the floor of my son’s classroom with other parents, we all watched a video of our kids saying what they loved about their families and when my son said, ‘I love my family because my dad takes me to Giants games.’ I laughed and cried with pride and love.”
Steve Cadigan, human resources executive
“Yesterday, while I was in the shower. Israel Kamakawiwoole’s version of ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World’ came on the stereo, and I tried singing along with it (again) and ended up crying (again). I never get past the line ‘I hear babies cry, and I watch them grow.’ There’s a sweetness and a yearning in Brudda Iz’s voice that just wrecks me.”
Todd Mauldin, bluesman
“I started to cry this morning—thinking about words to describe my father got me smiling and tearful. He has been gone four years, and I miss him.”
Andrew Seibert, magazine executive
“I last cried when my wife showed me the plus sign on her pregnancy test eight months ago. Outwardly, they were tears of joy. Inwardly, they were tears of elation and trepidation. I’m 47 years old. The prospects of having a teenage daughter beginning to seek her own way in the world when I am ready to retire and finish off my bucket list is daunting at this point.”
Randy Strauss, emergency medical technician
“It is getting very cold. I spend every workday in the South End [of Boston] with Peter, surveying apartments. We go into the top-floor apartment thinking there’s structural failure. While I try to imagine how we’re going to fix this building, Peter stands still in the middle of the room, then flings open the door of the living room closet. Cowering inside are two little boys. The older one—he’s maybe five—is clamping his hand over the younger one’s mouth, trying to silence his crying. They are both filthy, with snotty, crusted noses. Peter gently takes the little boy into his arms, fishes out a handkerchief, and wipes his face. ‘Call social services,’ Peter says. A woman tells me someone will be there in half an hour. We sit down on a battered couch with the kids, the baby in my lap, the five-year-old in Peter’s. Both the children fall asleep, exhausted from crying. It feels so familiar to have a warm child in my arms, sleeping peacefully.
In the apartment, the baby’s face is pushed into my chest, soaking it with drool. When the social services woman arrives, the baby wakes with a start and looks up at me. His eyes are big; he’s afraid. I feel as though I’m handing over my own son.
The woman departs, the children crying all the way down the stairs. I’m still sitting on the couch, looking at the wet spot on my shirt where the baby’s head had just been. ‘What is happening to this world?’ Peter says. ‘These little babies left alone. And you can’t blame the woman. Her husband’s gone, left her alone. She’s got to get a job, feed those hungry mouths.’
I close my eyes tight. My breath comes in ragged gasps.
‘Hey, you okay, man?’ Peter walks over and touches my shoulder. ‘These things happen. You gotta let it go.’ When I open my eyes, they are filled with tears.
I remember the first morning in the hospital after my son was born. Cradling him, I looked out at the city and whispered, ‘Baby, I’m your father, and I will always take care of you.’”
Amin Ahmad, architect and author. (Quoted in “Structural Failure,” The Good Men Project book.)
Read Bawlin’ on Scribd.
i cried two weeks ago at brian mays rendition of love of my life at the albert hall,a song classicly sung by freddie mercury at queen concerts……..
My most recent really big cry was about 2 weeks ago at the end of the movie Fearless. Jeff Bridges stars as a plane crash survivor struggling to come to terms with his experience, with his relationship to others, and with himself in the aftermath of the disaster. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more accurate representation of living with, and moving through, the effects of trauma, shock, and dissociation. I’ve certainly never seen one that moved me as much as this film did. As a survivor myself (not of a plane crash, but of childhood abuse), it was… Read more »
Placed flowers at the cemetary on Mother’s Day. Hard to believe this is the 3rd Mother’s Day since we lost Mom. Especially hard since I’m a Dad now and there are so many times I’d like to ask her about parenting stuff. Really breaks my heart that she never got to know her only grandson.
Thank you for sharing these stories.
Some of the comments saying women would disdain men who were crying really bothered me. Men have just as many emotions as women and it’s unfair to pressure them not to express those emotions. I remember my dad crying when I left for college, and he’s not the least bit ashamed of it — as he shouldn’t be.
Seeing a man cry is indeed hard, but i have always felt deeply honored if a man trusted me enough to cry in front of me. Seeing one of my boyfriends bawling in a fetal position after his grandma (who raised him) died, totally crushed me. He was so vulnerable.
I’m so sorry for the men out there whose wives (or others) make them feel weak for crying.
There are some women who find it wonderful.
Just now. after reading Julian’s lost in the museum story and re reading these posts. I find myself like this much these days as the final legal dissolution of my marriage takes place. Suffering and also succeeding in the face of some depression over the years, my wife definitely had the “suck it up” mentality. I rarely cried before, tending to brood instead, now the tears flow frequently and copiously and always when thinking of my son who is just old enough to know that his dad isn’t there when he goes to sleep at night and isn’t there when… Read more »
I am crying right now. Reading all these posts. Its a beautiful thing. Blessings and tears to all.
Randy, I’m sorry that your wife has those huge judgements about you crying! It sounds like they are HER judgements, not yours. It’s still your choice. If you don’t feel safe enough to cry with her around, please do yourself a favor and allow yourself that wonderful freedom when you’re alone. As I mentioned, after years of ‘work’, I am now quite Proud of myself for letting myself cry. It makes me feel honest, and real, and alive… and I always feel sooo much better after. “Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know… Read more »
At 6’2″ 225, 5 years in the Marines, nearly 30 years of Martial Arts, and a stint in the gulf during Desert Storm, I didn’t even cry when I returned home to face my entire life turned topsy-turvy. Growing up without a father, I cried a lot as a confused young man, afraid to stand up for himself; despite the many years of martial arts. One of the first things I learned in boot camp is how to shut down my emotions, because the guy next to you could get his head blown off at any second. After so many… Read more »
Upon crying when pushed to my emotional limit by our marriage counsellor a few months ago, my wife’s response was, and I quote, “Quit being such a pussy.” Stuffing back my emotions is not a choice; it is what is expected of me as a man. Crying is seen as a sign of weakness by our peers, potential mates, current mates, past mates, parents, children and passing strangers. The difference is that men are expected to “do” and women are expected to “care.” The only time my wife saw me cry before that was when her cat of 16 years… Read more »
I cried last when I read the post about Ulee. I have been contemplating this same event as my little 14 year old friend Jax gets older and older. I don’t know if I have the courage to take his life away. I think I am hoping for natural intervention. It will be impossible to manage however it happens.
Another good article! You are not alive if you don’t cry – that is the conclusion I have come to after almost 20 years of stuffing it. And that is what men are doing by stuffing it and pretending that they are angry (I like what Matt P wrote) – slowly killing themselves. I cried this morning thinking about my father who died fifteen years ago. Crying does not have to be a big dramatic production. It can simply be a spontaneous response to sadness, joy, or any other number of life experiences. As a woman I knew some time… Read more »
What a wonderful question to ask and what brave answers you received. Of course some tug at our hearts more than others. But more importantly, the variety of reasons and experiences was so refreshing. Men DO get a bad rap when it comes to crying. Honestly, I don’t know how they hold it in so long.
I didn’t cry for 35 years, not once. But a traumatic experience a year ago sent me on a 6-month jag. Often, I had no idea why. It would hit me like a sucker punch. A long year on numerous couches have brought me closer in touch with myself (sorry, but that’s a fact), and now I can at least connect my crying with feelings. What a relief. The last time? This morning. A woman on NPR was describing saying goodbye to her college freshman then seeing parents on the street yelling at their kids and thinking ‘no, don’t do… Read more »
Hi. Good question… and an important one! Men do anger, rather than tears. Women do tears, instead of anger… neither are ‘real’ and therefore dishonest. I teach Emotional Intelligence and try to walk my talk, so I cry pretty often… and I’m proud of that. I cried yesterday when my granddaughter said some mean things to her sister, then lied to me about it. I coulda been angry, but instead the tears were more honest and more powerful for her to see what it does to me/her. Please take the judgement off of crying, guys. Crying is real, it’s healthy,… Read more »
Hello Matt, I have to disagree with you, based on my own experiences. Women in my family were taught never to cry. My mother upheld every dry-eyed moment that women exhibited on TV, in church, any public place. That said, this emotional damming is every bit as harmful to women as it is to men. There is nothing natural about it, nor even human. I am very glad to hear that you are “walking your talk.” It has taken me many, many years to let go of the anger and allow myself to cry. I am very glad for every… Read more »
“When our team lost and missed an opportunity to play for an NCAA tournament berth. To spend four years driving towards a chance at immortality—knowing you can hang a championship banner and to have it end otherwise—is both exhilarating and exhausting. They were tears of gratitude for the work of our program more than disappointment.”
—Steve Scalzi, director of basketball operations at Northeastern University
“I cried tonight as I said goodbye to my father in-law, Jack Ellis. I also cried tonight when I looked in on my daughter and son sleeping sweetly.”
—John Badalament, Modern Dads
“I cried yesterday when my son arrived home safely from Nigeria. He was, for three weeks, training doctors on how to improve their response to disasters and emergencies.”
—Bern Cohen, actor
Thanks Suzanne. I think as a guy, the idea of men crying too is the kind of thing that is very hard and also very profound. I think of guys like John Oliver, who I have known since he was married, serving in Iraq and surviving all that death only to come home to lose his daughter … and spending years trying to learn how to cry for her loss. That to me is at the heart of where we are as men and the truth of who we aspire to be.
What an evocative question with heart-tugging answers, many of which of course made me cry or called up similar experiences that made me cry harder. I know. I know. I’m a woman, but for some reason watching men with their sons often makes me cry. Any men. Any sons. I had to take a reading break because this story reminded me (and compelled big, ploppy tears) of our 8year old son singing “Somewhere Out There” with his dad in a century old church on a tiny Island in the 1980s and how I cried so hard I had to step… Read more »