Love Doesn't Just Sit There Like A Stone

Notes on learning to cry

Valentine’s Day was this week, maybe you heard. In our house we don’t do big extravagant gestures but I do appreciate the holiday as an opportunity for thinking about love.

Austin Kleon @austinkleon

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, THE LATHE OF HEAVEN

I am lucky enough to be married to a wonderful person, a committed partner who is not afraid of doing the real work required when two different souls merge their lives into one. I am also lucky enough to have a set of friends who I love in the deepest sense of the word that I know. All that I have come to know about life and love and all manner of other things as a result of these relationships would be too much for any ten newsletters and so I’m not going to get into most of it here.¹ But I’ve been reflecting a lot lately on one particular aspect of it that feels worth thinking through and sharing, in case it helps someone to hear.

Husbands share feelings like *this*, but wives, see, they share feelings like *this*!

What I’ve learned after all these years is that one key way that I recognize my feelings of love toward another person is that I can cry in front of them. It is no secret that the socialization and cultural expectations of cis, hetero men in particular can make this a difficult thing to do. Broadly I think we are making a positive cultural shift away from the whole “real men don’t cry” thing, but there’s still a long way to go on that front. Shame is a powerful force in all of our lives and in my experience a lot of men are encouraged from a young age, implicitly or explicitly, to transform it into anger or silence.

I was a sensitive kid. I was an anxious wreck and terrified of plenty, and accordingly I cried easily, at the first sign of trouble. This was not encouraged or accepted anywhere in my life outside of my home and like I imagine other sensitive boys do I learned to bury these things when I was around others. To dissemble. It didn’t make me any less sensitive, but it did rob me of a lot of opportunities to learn to accept my emotions and process them in a healthy fashion. I’ve spent the past few years realizing that this still has daily consequences in my life.

Right before I took this picture, sitting above this lake in the Desolation Wilderness a few years ago, I was bawling my eyes out, seemingly for no reason. I remember thinking “maybe there’s such thing as a maintenance-type cry.”

There was no particular moment or incident that made me start working on this. A whole host of factors has probably brought me to this place. All I do know is that my life has gotten significantly better since I started allowing myself to cry in front of other people again. In fact it has gotten so much better that I find myself wondering what I was doing all those years, pretending that I wasn’t feeling all the things I was feeling. Desperately trying not to sniffle or sob during movies that were tearing me up inside. Making a mask of my face during other people’s beautiful wedding vows. Turning the frustration of bad days into fights rather than taking a chance at real catharsis and release. What a waste!

I’m still working on this—crying in front of anyone is still not what I would call easy—so it’s not a perfect metric. But it’s pretty close: in general, I am able to cry openly in front of people I love. This has been a blessing to me beyond measure, even as I still have to work to accept it.

So to whatever extent I am qualified to give advice, especially to other men, it is this: do what you can to work past your shame and let yourself cry. By yourself, first, but it will eventually be important to find people you trust enough to share that with. (A bonus challenge for men who are in relationships with women: find someone besides your partner that you can cry in front of. Hopefully you can trust her with that, but your emotions shouldn’t just be in her care, either. That’s a lot of work!)

Things everywhere are getting cheap and broken and careless at a rate that feels impossible to ignore. The infrastructure we have long taken for granted as permanent is crumbling in big and small ways every single day, from train car explosions to stupid little particleboard pieces of the bathroom furniture kit you’re maybe trying to assemble as an act of love for your spouse. It is the necessary work of our lives, then, to dedicate ourselves to building our relationships with care, so that they might not be one more thing that breaks easily in this world of junk we occupy. So that they might last.

There are many ways to do this and I can’t tell you how to live your life. But learning how to cry again has been an indispensable piece of the puzzle for me.

wint @dril

see this watch? i got it by Crying. my car? crying. my beautiful wife? Crying. My perfect teeth? Crying. now get the fuck out of my office

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be, although there is a voluntary paid subscription option if you’d like to support Tabs Open that way.

1. Plus my wife is sort of a private person and has this weird thing where she doesn’t insist on pouring her every thought out to the public in longform every week. I don’t get it, personally, but I do respect it. (She gave me permission to post this, though.)