Boys don't cry

How emotions got deleted from modern life

The song was described as “a calm song about anger” by Igor Haefeli, guitarist from Daughter.

I’m writing in a cafe, listening to a song that I love. This time I find something in it so excruciatingly beautiful that I’m moved to tears - the song is touching my core, in a bittersweet, melancholy, and quite lovely manner. But then I notice that my experience is split: part of me is truly cherishing this experience of allowing my emotions to move through me, and yet I’m also self conscious that I’m crying in public - how will I look?

A new emotion enters: anger. And I ask myself: Why the fuck does society abhor emotions?

Emotions, we're taught, are for children. A successful education will hopefully have expunged emotional outbursts from us. Children are seen and not heard. We're led to believe that emotions are something we’ll need to graduate from in order to contribute to a civilised society. If emotions in a cafe are concerning, in the workplace they are a catastrophe. Much better for all involved if they don’t exist.

So it is apparently a good thing, to be no longer troubled by these trifling things called emotions. This is evident if you ask a man how he feels. "Fine".

There are two sides to this story. On one side is a person with emotions, unsure what to do with them, leaning towards concealing them; on the other side is polite society, trying to maintain decorum.

Let's first look at the person who has emotions but is unsure what to do with them, the man who is 'fine'.

The fact that popular culture continues to valorise the romantic ideal of men being emotionless and cool (or solving their problems with violence) is rebuked by bell hooks in The Will To Change. She makes the point that, with this backdrop for inspiration, it really shouldn’t surprise us that so many men perpetuate anti-patterns of misery. Who can blame them when they have been brought up on stories of heroic men who sleep around, and never have to face their emotions, let alone those of their love interests? To this day, society still teaches us that men with emotions are weak.

And what happens when you point the lens away from the person with emotions and instead at the other side: poor old polite society, desperately sweeping emotions under the carpet?

I'll use myself as an example. What would I do if I saw a man crying in a cafe? I would look away, in panic. I would get my phone out. Maybe part of me would feel sad for him, whilst another part of me would think "this guy has lost it, why does he have to do it in public next to me drinking my cortado?"

As bystanders, we exonerate ourselves by framing the problem as the person with these inconvenient emotions, and their inability to contain them, rather than seeing that a less hostile environment to emotions may actually open some interesting doors. In the case I began with, all it would take is a slightly more open mind to understand that my tears were not even a problem, and yet would I myself be capable of this more hopeful hypothesis? I hope so, but I'm not sure.

Instead, we hide conveniently behind decorum, manners, and we end up in a world where people carrying emotions are socialised into a form of doublethink. The problem with this as a solution is that really the emotions don’t go away - we just gaslight ourselves into thinking they've gone. We sit and pretend that everything’s fine when really nothing is fine and everybody can feel it. These unexpressed emotions, and holes that they carve in our souls, fester and rage like abscesses.

And even if they are released, we find ourselves embarrassed (like in my example above) or needlessly apologising, as my friend did recently when he began to silently weep the moment before his soon-to-be-wife walked down the aisle.

Why? What on earth is there to apologise about?

Perhaps you are wondering why I care about this so much. I think it's because I know how much work it took to be able to feel my emotions again after suppressing them for years. I now see there are much more skilful and kind responses available than pushing people (including ourselves) away from emotions.

When I observe the pervasiveness of this dynamic, with these bullshit rules which are invisibly part of the socio-cultural norms and expectations, whilst at the same time causing such harm, it reminds me of a technical term: structural violence.¹

I think that's why I suddenly felt angry. I could feel the social expectation to contain the emotional outburst that I worked so hard for, and I was furious about it. Suddenly I could see the violence that is perpetrated when society asks that our emotions are expunged and deleted.

If only we could consider the contrarian point that it is only the most robust, self accepting, self loving, emotionally fluent people that are able to feel their emotions and honour them, regardless of where they find themselves. How could a society miss a point like this in its narrative of what makes a person healthy or successful?

We look at at someone crying in public and think “oh god, someone who can’t handle their emotions”. But what if it’s the exact opposite: someone who can handle their emotions, someone who isn’t ashamed to cry in public? Wouldn't that be a curious thing?

1. Structural violence is a form of violence wherein some social structure or social institution may harm people by preventing them from meeting their basic needs or rights. (wiki)