By https://www.buzzfeed.com/about Raven Ishak
“Why we bottle our emotions up.”
鈥攂iggiantporky
“This. My wife and I lost a dog in our second year of marriage. He was sick for a month, and she was crying softly about it on a daily basis. I was extremely sad, but never cried. Then, when they took him away at the vet’s office, I cried loudly and uncontrollably for what felt like an hour (probably realistically like 45 seconds though) and just couldn’t calm myself down. In the car, she said, ‘You know if you didn’t bottle it up and let it out a little at a time, you wouldn’t get like that.’ What she didn’t understand at that moment is that for a lot of men, we don’t have that middle ground of crying; it’s either nothing or everything.
A lot of us never learned HOW to cry in a semi-controlled manner because we never saw a man do that when we were young. I’m 40 years old and I’ve never seen my father cry, not at any of our weddings, not at his parents’ funerals, nothing. In other words, I’ve never had that subconscious model of how a man is SUPPOSED to cry, and I don’t have any practice at it. When I try to MAKE myself cry, I can’t, whereas my wife can watch any commercial with sick animals, cry quietly for five seconds, and then be done with it.”
鈥擳rumpHasDementia