What makes grown men CRY

Modern men are three times more likely to blub than their fathers. And what’s setting them off can be VERY surprising

A‘modern man’ is far more likely to cry than his forefathers. In fact he’ll blub in front of other people 14 times in his adult life, according to new research. A stiff upper lip used to be a mark of pride for a Briton. But our national trait is starting to wobble.

modern men are nearly three times more likely to cry in public than their fathers’ generation, with four out of ten admitting to public tears within the past 12 months.

But it’s still unusual to see a man crying in public. And arguably, it’s hardest for middle-aged men — the so-called ‘buffer generation’ — who are caught between their stonyfaced fathers with their stiff upper lips (who only weep when a close family member dies) and their emotionally intelligent sons who happily sob along to pop music and hug their male friends.

Here, five male mid-lifers reveal what makes them cry — and why.

LONELINESS by Simon Mills

my FATHER refused to eat at fast food restaurants.

this wasn’ t a matter of taste — he was indifferent to the allure of fries and milkshakes — but more because he didn’t want anyone to ever see him sitting alone (my mum had died) on moulded plastic banquette seating, consuming the generic stodge of an unhappy meal off a paper-lined tray, surrounded by boisterous families and migraine-inducing colour schemes.

As a blazer-wearing man well into his 70s, dad believed burger joints and chicken shops to be grim, bland, basic, unlovely and uncivilised places fit only for ‘yobs’.

He preferred a knife and fork, a proper linen napkin and a friendly waitress. ‘ there’s nothing sadder than looking into the window of mcdonald’s and seeing an old man on his own,’ he once said to me.

I didn’t think much about this until a few days later, when I had time to consider this Hopper-esque/ Larkin-ish image of dad in an east yorkshire branch of Subway or dunkin’ donuts.

I realised he was probably speaking from experience — that in a moment of hunger and weakness, he’d dropped into a fast-food outlet for some instant sustenance, opted to ‘eat in’ and, while sucking on the straw of his gaseous sugary drink, had caught his own tragic reflection. the thought made me stop dead at my desk and have a little cry.

many years later, just before he died, dad came to visit me in London f or the weekend. on Sunday afternoon, at around 5pm, he packed up his car and set off up them 1 for the three-and-a-half hour drive home. I called him that evening at 9pm to check he’d arrived safely.

‘everything was fine,’ he said, rather breezily. ‘I stopped halfway and had a bit of dinner at the Leicester service station.’

By the time the call ended, tears were streaming down my face. the image of dear 78-year-old dad, in his car coat and flannel trousers, dining alone under the ghastly fluorescent illumination of a Welcome Break, no longer concerned with what others might think, was just too much to bear.

A few years after dad died, I, too, found myself on my own, heading for a divorce. In my l ate 40s, perhaps less in tune with my dignity and self-worth than my father had been, I still wasn’t too proud to force down the odd lunchtime meal deal for one. And I was generally OK with my solitude.

So long as I had a project on the go — tinkering with my old Land rover, a bit of light DIY, a diverting movie or some work to attend to — I could manage long periods of seclusion (sometimes days at a time without speaking to anyone) by focusing my mind on day-to-day practicalities and not indulging myself in the wretched ennui of my situation.

But when it came to feeding myself, particularly shopping for food, I’d quietly fall apart.

Wandering the aisles of a rural market town supermarket on a mean winter afternoon, pushing a trolley comically overly capacious for my solo dining requirements, homing in on marked-down goods, ready dinners and cans of beer, under strip l i ght and among upbeat graphics and jolly signage, brushing past f amilies, their baskets bulging with the ingredients for a week of homemade, happy meals, I allowed myself to feel thoroughly despondent.

Stoically, I swiped through my pathetic haul of items at the selfservice check-out, carried my bags to the car and was crying before I had my key in the ignition.

Add middle-aged men alone in supermarkets to my old dad’s theory about fast food establishments, I thought to myself as the tears welled up.

BAD BIRTHDAY by William Leith

I CRIED the other day, which was weird, because I never cry. But this time I did. I cried, just for a few moments, i n the course of a l ong walk in the country.

Still, nobody saw me, so that’s OK. Like I said, I never cry. What I mean by this is I never cry in front of other people. not properly. not actual sobbing. When other people are around, I have some kind of mechanism in place to stop me from crying. I must really want other people to think I never cry.

I’m pretty sure it all goes back to childhood. for me, i t’s about boarding school. you can’t cry when you’re at boarding school. At least you couldn’t when I was there.

crying was an admission of weakness. It was like an open invitation to the bad guys. When somebody starts crying, that’s when the bad guys come out of the woodwork. It’s like blood in the water attracting sharks.

Back to my mechanism. It works extremely well. If other people are around, I pretty much can’t cry. When my father was dying, I sat next to his hospital bed for hours on end.

then he died. I watched it happen. He was breathing, and then he sort of choked up, and then he wasn’t breathing any more. I entered a state of shock, which made me extremely calm.

for a while, everything seemed surreal. I could feel the build-up of tears. But I couldn’t have cried, even if I’d wanted to, because of all the doctors and nurses. But like I said, I cried the other day. I was walking up a hill, miles f rom anywhere, thinking my thoughts. I was actually thinking about my birthday. I hate my birthday.

When I was ten, my parents moved to Germany. I was sent to boarding school four days before my 11th birthday. they actually arranged some kind of birthday celebration for me at the school. there was a cake and everything. In my memory, there were 11 candles.

How amazing they’d arranged a party for me. It was the worst thing that could have happened. I’d hoped nobody would notice it was my bi r t hday. I hadn’t mentioned it to anybody. But they knew, somehow.

It was the saddest thing. I sat there, looking at the cake. I was smiling the whole time. I was desperate, desperate to cry. But crying would have been unthinkable. If I’d started, I wouldn’t have been able to stop.

Which is why I cried the other day. I was walking up a hill. At the top, I looked around. I could see for miles.

that’s when I started to think about my upcoming birthday, which led to thinking about a lifetime of birthdays I’d tried to avoid, which led, in turn, to the thought of a smiling boy, and a cake with 11 candles. And there i t was, the f amiliar build- up behind the eyes. And I let go. And the tears came. they ran down my face.

But it was OK, I think. Because nobody saw me.

The hungry Years: Confessions Of A Food Addict published by Bloomsbury is out now.

THE VET by Andrew Wilson

I CRADLED her in my arms and said a silent goodbye. We didn’t know how old my cat Socks was, but we knew she was old and ill enough that she was ready to be eased out of her misery. I tried to fight back the tears, but as soon as they came, they turned into a sob.

Although I am far from the steely, stiff-upper-lip type, I do not cry easily. I’ve cried at funerals, of course, but, at 48, I still have my parents and I’ve been lucky enough not to experience — so far, at least — any major traumas in my life.

But one thing is guaranteed to make me cry: anything to do with animals. I have cried at War Horse — the play and the film. I’ve cried at Lassie, many times. I’ve even cried at Animal Hospital.

the prospect of losing Socks — a cat which had come into my life when I had moved, on a whim, to rural Spain ten years ago — was so heartbreaking that I knew there was nothing I could do to prevent the hot splash of tears rolling down my face onto her beautiful blackand-white fur.

We had brought her, together with her mother, rosie, and two other cats — magic and Ginger Snap — from Spain to devon four years ago. Soon after arriving back in

Britain, 17-year- old Rosie and Magic, who was only two, both died. Poor Magic, a gorgeous black cat with eyes as big as a seal’s, had contracted a heart worm and had to be put down.

And then a year or so later Socks, who we guessed was around 16, was ailing from kidney failure. The moment I knew she would not make it — when she went missing overnight and we discovered her wet and bedraggled in a flower bed — was one of the saddest of my life. I clutched her to my chest and let the hot tears fall down my cheeks.

These t ears were not s el f - indulgent or self-pitying. I don’t think you can quantify or measure grief, and I certainly don’t believe one person’s loss can be compared with another and sized up for depth of emotion. The tears were simply tears for one of my best friends, an innocent, the very spirit of unconditional love.

ALEXANDER McQueen: Blood Beneath The Skin published by Simon & Schuster is out now.

NOSTALGIA by Tim Lott

I GAVE up crying around the age of 14, when I burst into tears after a vicious fight with my older brother.

Sadly, I can’t remember what we were fighting about, only that, for the first time, I was getting the better of him, and he sat down when he realised it and told me not to be so childish. Then I whacked him in the face while he sat there, undefended. Running out into the street, I cried out of shame and triumph.

Prior to that I cried regularly for the usual reasons — unhappiness, physical pain or watching Bambi — but at that point I decided the conventional demands of manhood meant my reservoir must be firmly dammed. Later, as an adolescent and into my 20s, I indulged in only recreational crying, to self-pitying music rather than real life. Weeping — usually to Californian singer-songwriters — kept me reassured that I was still a sensitive creature (while in the rest of my existence I was largely callous and narcissistic).

This shell only cracked when I had my heart broken at 27, after which I lived on a diet of Tim Buckley’s Song To The Siren and sought out heartbreaking films, in which the (usually male and working-class) protagonist came to an unhappy end one way or the other — film makers like Ken Loach and Terence Davies unfailingly left me in a heap.

Since then I have learned about other kinds of tears — tears of joy when each of my children were born. Blended tears of misery and relief when the papers of my decree absolute were received in the post after the failure of my first marriage.

Tears of pride for my children. Tears of anger and frustration when emotional demands of marriage and parenthood became too much. And tears at the poignant recognition of ephemerality as my children grow up (it never fails to get me whenever I have taken one of my four daughters to the playground for the last time).

Nowadays it’s not Song To The Siren but Turn Around by Nanci griffith ( about the brevity of childhood) that chokes me up.

Certain kinds of tears are gone forever. I remember my astonishment after a middle-aged female friend of mine banged her head on a tree branch and started crying. For me the idea of crying from physical pain was a thing of childhood — although I wish it wasn’t. Because, I think, crying is nearly always healthy and men don’t do enough of it.

Now I have turned 60 I find myself getting sentimental again. Old photographs, a fleeting memory, and, of course, the gradually accumulating heap of bereavements set me off.

No, the tears never stop — not until you become the one that everyone cries their tears over. And then you’re no longer there to enjoy it — which, as far as I’m concerned, is a crying shame.

THE last Summer of the Water Strider published by Simon & Schuster is out now.

MY LOST BOY by Cosmo Landesman

I LAST cried on March 20, 2016. It was the birthday of my son Jack, who killed himself late i n June 2015. He would have been 30. I told myself: no tears. He wouldn’t want tears.

The sight of a father’s tears is always upsetting. My father’s generation did not weep in front of anyone; i t was considered unmanly. But even though my generation were told it’s good to cry, I still hid my tears from my son. He needed me to hold it together while he was falling apart.

So I’d make Jack’s birthday a happy day. Instead of moping around and wallowing i n sad memories, I’d have lunch with a friend and we’d raise a glass to his memory.

But grief has a way of creeping up on you; it gets your heart in its iron grip and shreds your hopes and squeezes out your tears.

So instead of heading off to that fun lunch I sat on my sofa and went for a trip down memory lane that I knew would end in tears. First stop: the day Jack was born. How happy his mum and I were, leaving the hospital. He was safe and life was sweet. Nothing bad was going to happen to my boy.

Then I got out an old family photo album. There I found a picture of Jack as a little boy with his blond hair and big eyes, sitting in his big red plastic car with the yellow top, beaming with pure joy. He loved that car. And we loved him. My eyes went moist.

I thought about my boy whose life had been blown off course by drugs, depression and bad decisions. He suffered terrible depression and acute loneliness.

I saw him last year, a few months before he died. He was homeless. Had no job. No money. No friends. And thinking about that is when the first trickle of tears began.

I told myself to stop it. get up, get out. go to the gym. But I could not prevent myself from the most terrible thought of all: his lonely suicide in his broom closet of a room in the suburbs. It was five days before they found his body.

And here the trickle of tears turned into a flood. Most days I don’t weep for him at all. Life goes on and you have to go with it. I missed lunch, but I had a nice dinner with a friend who knew and loved my son. We raised that glass.

And so to bed. Then a thought struck me: I would never say happy birthday to him again. ever.

‘OK, no more tears!’ I said. I turned out the light.

And cried myself to sleep.

STARSTRUCK: Fame, Failure, My Family And Me published by Pan Macmillan is out now. THE author and broadcaster suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life. THERE is nothing more potent than a lost love. The passage of time embellishes the reality until the one that got away becomes an impossible standard against which all others are measured.

Sometimes though, the power of past feeling can trump the present.

My grandmother, widowed after a 40-year marriage, met the man who had jilted her 45 years before. Astonishingly the spark was still there, and the relationship gave them happiness until his death.

I always think of my grandmother when I read Persuasion, probably my favourite Jane Austen novel. Anne Elliot is on the shelf at 27 (ancient in those days) condemned to the life of a spinster, bullied and patronised by her sisters and father.

She still pines for Captain Wentworth, whom she loved but was persuaded to refuse seven years earlier. When Captain Wentworth turns up again in her life, Anne is mortified when she is told that he thinks her ‘so much altered he would not recognise her’.

The rekindling of Anne’s belief in a second chance is so beautifully done that the ending always brings tears to my eyes. This novel offers hope that lost loves can be found and will be the stronger for the time apart.

But, as anyone who has read The Great Gatsby (or seen the film knows), a lost love can also turn into a dangerous obsession. Jay Gatsby has built a mansion where he entertains magnificently every night purely to capture the attention of Daisy Buchanan, the girl who left him because he was poor and obscure. To Gatsby, Daisy is a goddess, but she is also spoilt and selfish and Gatsby’s grand passion ultimately destroys him.

In another of my favourite novels The Age Of Innocence, Newland Archer, who is engaged to May, falls desperately in love with the beautiful tragic Ellen; he wants to run away with Ellen, but she does the noble thing and runs away herself. Newland’s passion for Ellen defines his life, it is his secret shadow, but at the end of the book, when as a widower he is given the chance to meet her again, he doesn’t take it. He would rather live with regret than deal with reality.

I prefer Austen’s — and my grandmother’s — approach: if the attraction is strong, time and wrinkles don’t matter.