Are you a ‘Buffer Blubber’?
Today’s men shed more tears than their fathers’ generation but less than their sons – Nick Harding has mixed emotions at finding himself stuck in the middle of the crying game
To weep or not to weep? That, my middle-aged male friends, is the question. Because if ‘‘modern man’’ is far more likely to cry than his forefathers – 14 times in his adult life, according to new research – it seems he is still ashamed to do so.
To my mind, this figure sounds a conservative estimate, given that I can get to double figures in the space of a single episode of Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway (I can’t help myself when someone ‘‘wins the ads’’).
But refreshing as any level of emotional emancipation may be, I am more interested in the fact that we are still beset by deep feelings of discomfort when we blub. Half us make excuses, apparently, blaming the tears on a range of inventive factors such as chilli, tiredness, contact lenses or, in my case, a permanently blocked tear duct.
We are a generation in emotional denial, caught between our stonyfaced fathers with their stiff upper lips that only wobbled when a close family member died and our emotionally intelligent sons who sob along to Sam Smith ballads, hug their male friends and kiss them on both cheeks like continental dandies. We truly do not know whether to laugh or cry.
We have been called the buffer generation, with one foot in each opposing camp of masculinity. As Joe Ferns, Samaritans executive director of policy, research and development, explained: “Behind them they have fathers who are stoic and silent, and in front of them they have progressive, expressive sons. They are caught in a world where they are neither one nor the other and they have lived through a huge level of social change.”
I’ve certainly never been privy to my own father’s tears. I’ve seen him get worked into advanced states of exuberance and dejection at West Ham football matches but I’ve never seen him have a proper sob. I’m not sure I’d want to. His awkwardness would embarrass us both.
My children, on the other hand, are frequently exposed to my outbursts. Just the other week, they had to comfort me during a particularly climactic scene in the PGrated animated movie The Good Dinosaur. The young hero had just lost his own father to a prehistoric tempest fierce enough to dislodge an adult male brontosaurus from a cliff. For me, with my growing children at my side and the dark clouds of advanced age gathering in the distance, it was allegorical – I couldn’t help myself. Even the 3D glasses did not mask the tears.
“Are you crying again, Dad?” frowned my 13-year-old daughter.
Some days later I was emotionally coshed again during a particularly moving episode of DIY SOS, sobbing as the family of an disabled exservicemen were shown around their newly adapted home. My partner succumbed, too, but I was too upset to comfort her and we sat there afterwards dewy-eyed; me ashamed, like a puppy that had just soiled the sofa.
In my defence, I am not alone here. British men are more likely to admit to being reduced to tears by an emotional television scene (nearly 60 per cent) than by hurting a loved one (nearly 50 per cent). I particularly dread television charity appeals such as Sport Relief and Children in Need, structured as they are with sequences of light entertainment and comedy punctuated by heartwrenching footage of dying children. For an emotional man they are nights of bipolarity.
Thankfully, I have nothing to be ashamed of, according to psychologist and behaviour expert Stephanie Davies. “There still remains an unconscious bias – among both men and women – that men should be the stronger sex and that crying is a sign of weakness, which isn’t the case at all,” she reassures me. “Men who talk about emotions and are not afraid to show them are more resilient than men who keep them bottled up.”
As an enlightened father I know this to be the case and encourage my nine-year-old son to be emotionally open. Although in a Larkin-esque contradiction I’m still guilty of telling him to toughen up and turn off the waterworks on occasions when I’ve had enough. Not that it will make much difference in the long run – in a generation’s time, no one will need to cry any more. For those weaned on text and tablets, tears will eventually become as redundant as Betamax and vinyl; instead of emotions, tomorrow’s children will have emoticons (sad face).
I’ve seen my father get worked up at West Ham but I’ve never seen him sob