If you are a baby you should cry when you need something. Crying is your language until you learn other words, gestures, and sounds. If you are a small child, you should cry when you hurt, because crying still conveys more information about the degree of your pain. If you are an adult you should cry less if you cry everyday, and you should cry more if you cry only once a year. These are not hard and fast rules, but they are guidelines.
We cry when we feel pain physically because it is how we get help. Even when you are old enough to have a great command of language, you can be hurt so badly that your vocabulary skills are temporarily impaired.
Nature invented tears for very good reasons. They not only cleanse and disinfect, they purge of us powerful emotions in the most expressive way possible. If the emotions are real, be they of physical pain, emotional anguish, desperate fear, or loss, we should allow nature to carry on with her intelligent design.
Tears are different salinity and compositions for various emotions. The type of tears we have when “you laugh till you cry,” are different in their ingredients than those we have when crying out of sorrow. Emotional tears have more stabilizing hormones, and prolactin, as well as traces of other hormones and proteins.
Other tears, such as those we experience when we cry due to physical injury have yet another biological make-up and purpose. We have tears for real reasons, and if we are wise, we use them to be authentic. Tears were not created for us to have something shameful to hide, nor were they designed to mis lead either through over-use and emotional manipulation, or our suppression of them.
If we had to keep track of all the things are bodies do naturally, we could not function. We would have to know when to breathe, shift our weight, swallow, circulate blood, and even digest our food. Humans, the animals with the most convoluted brain, both physically and metaphorically, need to allow our bodies to do as they need when the situation is appropriate. All kinds of tears do cleanse and lubricate eyes, and release tension.
Men and women are wired differently; women are generally built to be stronger when it comes to pain tolerance, intuition, endurance, and being in touch with emotions. Men generally are stronger at lifting strength, power surge, and “suppressing” their emotions. It is incorrect to say that either of these general descriptions lends more over all strength.
Hiding our emotions, especially extreme tearful anguish, or rage, does lead to false impressions, harmful and self-destructive toxins in the body, and an unhealthy regard for the sane ness of tears.
Our hormones, and emotions provide most appropriate strength as needed, and do not indicate inferiority. In sex and gender roles, it is a general rule that women express more emotion. Most female sprinters could certainly run faster than your average guy, and your average guy may be more capable, for better or worse, at not crying at the loss of an important medal.
Not all cultures are the same, but in many western cultures tears are seen as weak. In other cultures, for both men and women, they distinguish a person as sensitive and aware. Poetry can move us to tears, as can powerful rhetoric, but for the most part, average humans cry no more or no less than they probably should.
That said, there is nothing but dishonesty to gain by telling people only babies cry, or real men (or women) don’t cry. Tears, if honest and natural, are human features that give us strong indicators of what another is going through, and therefore, we can answer to them with compassion. Hiding our emotions also leads to false impressions, harmful self destructive toxins in the body, and an unhealthy regard for the sane ness of tears.
We all have a tendency to apologize when the voice cracks, or our eyes mist. Perhaps in time this prejudice will fade. This is because at some self delusional point tears came to be linked with loss of control, but giving in to your tears in no different then giving into thirst, weariness, or responding when someone calls your name. They are an expression, a communication, a disinfectant, and stress relief, and rebalance. The idea that they are weak is tied to the strength women have to express them and to read them in others. The weakness theory is idea based on misogyny, and not on reality.
