Isaw a thread from a man I don’t know, a post that went viral, if you want to call it that. He was talking about the expectation placed on boys and men to hide emotion, which has been an expectation for quite some time — generations, it seems. Generations of men telling their sons, “Don’t cry about it.” Generations of boys becoming men who do the same. Generations of fracturing psychoses because of one piece of terrible advice.

The man was attacked for his declaration, which amounted to this: boys should be permitted to cry, too.

I had thought, apparently mistakenly, that we were shifting into a more enlightened recognition of the emotional lives of boys and men — which is rich and deep and undeniable. I saw dialogues popping up, books written by psychologists and specialists, people using their voices to shatter outdated expectations.

And yet here were the same old insults, the same old denial, the same old misdiagnoses of a man’s place in society:

Sure, if you want to be a wuss about everything, do it. Don’t expect me to do the same.

Men sure have gone soft in modern days.

What is this world coming to when men break down and cry about anything and everything?

Stop making us all look bad.

There was much worse, too, of course. The man had posted online, and online means anonymity, which means words can be arranged and aimed at will and random, without concern for the person on the other side of them.

It’s a new world out there. And yet it’s clearly not. I suppose it takes a while to change the direction of a ship that’s been moving through waters generations in the making.

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I learned to apologize for my emotions when I was young, even though I was not a man. But it was worse for my brother.

For a while, during our childhood, we lived with our father, who did not believe in boys crying. In fact, I clearly remember the words, “Boys don’t cry.” Because he said them so often and because he seemed so annoyed by my own frequent displays of emotion, I carried that message deep inside, too.

We were children. We cried.

My father always had words at the ready:

Stop crying.

I’ll give you something to cry about.

Pick up your lower lip before you trip on it.

I taught you better than that.

I don’t blame my father for his errant teaching; it was only what he was taught as a kid. It’s not easy forging a new way. I know this, too.

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When one of my sons is whining for the third hour straight, I often feel the itch in the back of my throat, the words of my father rising up, the fear that the boys will be less than they are supposed to be.

And what are they supposed to be? Strong?

What does strong really mean?

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Being strong for my father meant stifling sadness. What this amounted to, for him, were explosions of anger — once he knocked the headlights out of a car because someone cut him off in traffic; another time he followed a man who had cut him off all the way to the bar where the man was headed, and my father got out of the car — where my mother huddled, terrified — said some words, and flung some gestures that caused the other man to point a rifle at him. The shooting was averted by an officer parked nearby — a giant dose of luck, my mother said later.

Would my father have been better able to handle this anger if he’d better handled his other emotions? It’s difficult to say, but research does suggest that when boys learn to cope with negative emotions — sadness, anger, disappointment, fear — they learn to cope better with them all, are better practiced at balance and regulation, and are less reactive and more responsive.

Are some more given to anger than others? Of course. Does that also mean some are more given to sadness? Of course. And when a boy is told he can’t cry, what else is there to do but stuff it down and let it fester, where it becomes a ticking time bomb?

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What happens when the ticking time bomb becomes a grown man?

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Years ago, a friend asked, “Why are they always male?” She was asking in the aftermath of another tragedy: bombs mailed to people around the country. We’d had bombs recently here in Texas, too, placed on the doorsteps of unsuspecting people. This local bomber killed two people, wounded five, and then took his own life.

“It is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his life that led him to this point,” Interim Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said at the time, referring to a video the bomber had left for authorities.

Challenges that led him to this point: Could they have been discussed, confessed, healed if he’d only been given permission to speak? Perhaps even to cry?

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What do we expect of our men? I often ask myself this when I am confronted by a moment of vulnerability from my husband. Do I, as a woman, expect him to be unswayed by the circumstances of our lives? Do I expect him to sit tall on that white horse and never slump in the saddle? Do I expect him to meet the storms head-on and never express his grief over a daughter who died, a dream that didn’t work out, a burden that feels much too heavy today?

One day, while we were driving in the car, I was saying something negative about a book of mine that was about to be published, and he was listening. At some point, he turned to me and said, “Why can’t you just believe you deserve something good?” Passion and sorrow tangled around his voice, and it cracked in places, but he kept going. “What happened to make you think you don’t deserve to be recognized for your efforts and your accomplishments? Why can’t you believe you are worth something great?”

My hands gripped each other. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. Tears rolled down his cheeks.

It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him cry, but it might have been the first time I let myself watch. Not because it was a spectacle, not because he made a scene, not because I wanted to remember it so I could hold it over him later. No. I watched because, as many vulnerable moments as we’ve shared, it still made me feel the slightest bit uncomfortable, perhaps a little afraid. I have been conditioned, too. It is much easier for me to watch my young sons cry than it is for me to watch my husband, a grown man, cry.

And I wanted to do better. So I kept my eyes open and fixed on his face, and I let his vulnerability sink down into my deepest places and say, This is for you. He loves you this much. He feels strongly enough about your worth to let himself be seen.

Vulnerability asks for trust. He knows what I will do with his tears: cherish them. He knows what I will think of him once he is done: he is the strongest, bravest man I know. He knows what will happen next: I will reach for his hand, lay my head on his shoulder, and whisper, “You are my favorite.”

We’ve been here before.

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Sometimes I think we’re doing better.

And then someone I love and care about loses a child, and in the delivery room, where he watches it happen, he turns his face away to cry.

As if he is still ashamed.

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When boys are told it’s weak to cry, when they wall off the emotions that are distinctive to the human condition, when they shove their fear and anxiety and aggression and sadness so far down that another won’t be able to spot it, they get sick. Sadness turned inward is depression. Depression unacknowledged causes a whole host of repercussions, many of which we don’t want to recognize. It’s easier to ignore them and then wonder, “Why are they always male?”

When boys are taught to stifle their negative emotions because the feelings are inconvenient or uncomfortable for the people around them, the boys learn that they are supposed to do this for the rest of their lives — this is what’s expected, this is strength, this is called Being a Man. They must be stoic. Tough. Unbreakable.

It’s an impossible charge. Humans are never unbreakable, and life has a relentless way of proving it.

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My son, early in his elementary school years, was flagged as a “problem child.” They didn’t use this term, of course. They used more technical words: “Needs help with emotional regulation.”

He had a stack of behavioral write-ups for frequent explosions in class, about which no one saw fit to tell me. I learned later — when a meeting was called between the school principal, the school vice principal, my son’s teacher, and me — that sometimes he would crumple up worksheets and throw them in the trash. Sometimes he would bolt out of a classroom, who knows why (no one thought it prudent to ask the question why). Sometimes his crying was disruptive, though I had never known him to be excessively loud (perhaps she meant “inconvenient”). Once, he threw a pair of dull-tipped scissors into an empty corner.

He was seven. He was acting out, yes, but he was seven.

I sat through a meeting with school administrators while they told me my son was out of control, that he needed some special help, that he would, at seven years old, be in school suspension. They didn’t know what else to do with him; he had to learn his lesson.

Two years earlier, my son had accompanied me to a doctor’s appointment, where I had promised him that he would get to see and hear the heartbeat of his baby sister. He didn’t get to see or hear that heartbeat because his baby sister died.

To this day, I wonder if it is my fault that he had so much trouble processing through his emotions — disappointment, sadness, fear (would it happen to him, too? A life there one day and gone the next?). Death is a difficult concept for a five-year-old to grasp. Maybe I had asked too much, though I had not known I would be asking anything at all the day I went to that appointment.

We have a script in our home for our children. When they are struggling with an emotion, we coach them to say, “I feel ___ when you ___.” We tell them it’s okay to cry, as long as that crying isn’t a screeching kind of crying (to preserve nerves). We invite them to feel their emotions in their entirety.

My son didn’t have the same freedom at school.

It didn’t take long to uncover the problem. We asked for help, engaged the services of a counselor, who took him through play therapy and unburied his emotions. He had already, at seven years old, begun picking up on the discomfort of a boy expressing emotions and had, as a result, begun stuffing them. He consistently burst with the effort of keeping his emotions hidden.

Behavior tells a story.

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My husband has cried in front of our sons before. It might be one of the best gifts a dad can give his sons: to show them that he feels, too.

He cries sometimes when he’s telling them how much he wants something good for them; he cries sometimes when he’s reminding them who they are; he cries sometimes when he’s attempting, somewhat unsuccessfully, to communicate how much he loves them.

His tears, I think, say more than his words. And in his example, they learn a whole new way of being a man.

This way of being a man means they can feel and cry and become something greater than the small version they are expected to be by a world that doesn’t understand how rich the emotional lives of boys and men can be.

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We have a mantra in our house. “Every emotion is acceptable,” we say. But there’s a caveat we’ve taught them since they were tiny: Not every expression of our emotions is acceptable. We have to do the work to find the right way to express what we’re feeling.

My sons know that hitting and kicking and destroying things is not an acceptable way of expressing emotion. They know that saying words that dishonor one another is not an acceptable expression. They know that stuffing emotions is not an acceptable expression.

Some people feel uncomfortable around a boy who cries. Some people cringe to see a boy walking side by side with sadness. Some people can’t stand to see a man barely able to crawl from his bed for the darkness hanging over his head, weighing him down.

All we do with our judgment is send it underground. We are responsible for the time bombs.

The boys in my home are full of emotions, and those emotions leak out one’s eyes when he’s told he can’t bring a book to the dinner table because this is family time. Those emotions climb out another’s mouth when his playing time passes way too fast and he’s not ready, not at all, for the clean-up time that follows. Those emotions hide behind frustration when another just can’t execute a flip as perfectly as he wants.

I know what the old ways of Being a Man would tell them:

Forget about it.

It’s not that bad.

We’ll give you something to cry about.

Man up, because real men don’t cry.

These are unrealistic expectations — asking men to curb their feelings instead of acknowledging them. Pretending denial means strength.

Men learn to turn from their inner lives toward stoic silence and solitude and cynicism. They learn to walk straitjacketed by the rules of manhood, so they don’t even know who they are anymore.

Society steals life from boys and men.

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We hear it in the low murmurs:

Wow. He’s really sensitive. Dramatic. Easily upset by so little.

We hear it in the overwhelming shouts:

Be someone different.

We hear it in a thousand other ways: Men don’t feel because they’re men, hallelujah. They’re the strong gender, not the emotional one.

Wrong.

Real men do cry. Real men do feel. Real men talk and grieve and walk with vulnerable hearts instead of clenched-tight ones.

A man is not a man if all he ever does is hide behind a straw house of strength. A man is not strong if he never shows us weak.

What would happen if boys were given permission to be who they are, without being called names or labeled into a box or dismissed as something they’re not? What would happen if men were allowed to feel and cry and even sob (heaven help us) if they needed to?

We might see all that negativity poisoning a life leak from a clenched-tight heart in those tears. We might save him from not just a physical heart disease but an emotional one, too, because he feels understood and supported and highly esteemed, even in his crying. We might see, in a man naming the darkness following him, a release from the shame and fear and anxiety heaping his shoulders at the possibility of being found out, of being seen as weak, of forfeiting his membership in the club of Real Man.

We might see them all walk lighter for it.

And that could usher in a brave new world, a world where boys stand with an emotional vocabulary they aren’t afraid to use, where boys honor and value their emotional lives as rich windows into their souls, where boys unclench those precious, magnificent, fierce hearts.

Where men can be real men.

That is worth letting my son weep when he loses a beloved toy because it means a lot to him, and we all cry when we lose something we love. It’s worth permitting a good, healthy cry when it’s time to leave his grandparents’ house because he genuinely, wholeheartedly enjoyed the visit with people he adores. It’s worth holding him while he shakes out his sorrow about the trouble he had at school today.

After all, Rumi says that “teardrops are healers as they begin to arrive.”

And healing is always worth the risk and discomfort and work it takes to shift the philosophies of a misguided society.

For the visually impaired or those using TTS reading aids: this is the end of the essay.

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