Friday, February 6, 2015

The Crying Game


     Crying is a natural part of the human experience. Everyone from infants to the elderly shed tears. However, crying is often used as a tool. The question remains, when is it ok to cry?

     I’m not a big proponent of crying. In fact, the older I get, the more uncomfortable crying makes me. Tears of joy or at a funeral are one thing, but just crying for the sake of crying is odd to me. My strained relationship with tears started when I was about 8 years old. One of my mother’s friends, “Aunt” Melba, was a habitual tear jerker. After one too many drinks, she would start to reminisce about her past divorces and failed relationships. My natural instinct as a child was to attempt to comfort her. This was a bad idea. She would sob uncontrollably, which made me panicked and scared. The whole thing was rather jarring. To this day, I have no patience for people who get drunk and start crying.

     Having just recently left my twenties, I’ve seen improperly used tears galore. I’ve seen crying fits over relationships shorter than Kim Kardashian’s previous marriage. Countless times I’ve witnessed tears used as a weapon of guilt to keep someone in a relationship they are desperately trying to leave. I can’t lie; I’ve had tears used on me. (Yes, men do it too.) I try to avoid crying. It isn’t that I’m too strong to cry. It’s that my life has no place for useless tears, dwelling on the past or pointless causes in it. Do I cry? Yes. Will you ever see it? Probably not. Unless I win the lottery, we’re at the same funeral, or I am at my wit’s end, you won’t have a front row seat to my tears.

      I especially don’t cry over men. I’ve only cried over two men in my life. When my first boyfriend and I broke up my freshman year of college, I cried.  The next and last time was over a boyfriend who had also been my best friend for much of my college career. He and I had even talked about getting engaged. When he and I broke up, I cried so much my eyes were swollen and red for days. It got the point that my eyes wouldn’t produce tears. I tried to cry to get the feeling left over out of my body. No such luck. I just had to deal with it. Even then, I never did it in public and my family never knew what was going on. In all honesty, few people knew what was going on. I promised myself after that relationship, to never cry over a man as long as I lived. I’ve kept my promise. When my relationships end, I move forward. My wounds don’t weaken me; they make me stronger.

     There’s no shame in crying. If we weren’t meant to cry, we wouldn’t be born with tear ducts. That being said, there is a way to go about it. As Joan from Mad Men once told a colleague crying in the break room, “There’s a place to do that – like your apartment.”

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