The Reason Men Cry Less Than Women Might Surprise You

Welcome to How to Live. This weekly newsletter tackles universal questions about the human condition. Drawing on my lifelong experience with panic disorder, extensive self-inquiry, and scholarly research, I simplify material well-known to clinicians that can help alleviate the struggles of being human.

About me: I am the author of 13 books, most recently Little Panic: Dispatches From An Anxious Life. As a mental health advocate, I’ve worked with The Child Mind Institute, The JED Foundation, and I sit on the advisory board of Bring Change to Mind.

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THE REASON MEN CRY LESS THAN WOMEN MIGHT SURPRISE YOU.

Men are not known for their tears.

In our society, crying is, sadly, regarded as feminine and soft, which are seen as weak qualities. A weak and soft argument, if you ask me.

Too many men were raised to believe that “Real men don’t cry,” conditioning future fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers to eschew tears for fear that they aren’t masculine.

But if tears meant that “men were not men,” why would men have emotions? Why would men have the capacity to cry? Or male babies for that matter? Tears are not the appendix of emotions. Is the reason men cry less than women all social stigma? Or is there more to the story?

I wanted to get to the bottom of it, so naturally, I started with the Bible.

The ancient Israelites had no concept of the brain, nor did they have the language to talk about it. They considered the heart the source of human intellectual thought and the place one made sense of the world.

This is why in the Old Testament, the role and rules of the heart make little sense to contemporary humans. The Bible says that when a heart is weakened, it melts (hence, tears). It claims the heart can become depressed, but it’s also where we feel joy.

The heart is to the Old Testament what the mind is to us today. It’s where intellectual, emotional, and physical life originates. It’s the source of affection and ambition.

Because of these beliefs, people thought, for centuries, that tears formed in the heart.

It wasn’t until the 5th century that things shifted. Hippocrates declared that the mind triggered tears, and we rode on this model until the 1600s when we returned to the heart, now rebranded as “hot” instead of weak. The claim went that when we felt strong emotions, our hearts heated up, generating tears during the “cool down” process.

But leave it to a 17th-century scientist to uncover a more rational reason for our tears, and forgoing all poetry, he identified the lacrimal gland. Its purpose, he proclaimed, was to keep the eyes moist. The year was 1662, and the scientist Niels Stensen turned his practical finding into a theory, also stripped of balladry, calling it Stensen’s Theory.

Jonathan Rottenberg, an emotion researcher and professor of psychology at the University of South Florida (and founder of
@depressionarmy) has updated some of these ideas about tears.

He believes tears are necessary because they trigger social bonding and human connection. Most animals are born and can walk almost immediately, but not us humans! We’re ill-equipped even to hold our own heads up. Because infants are so helpless, crying alerts others to needs that infants can’t attend to.

This is one reason that babies cry. It’s a survival tactic.

Yet, once we’re grown, we can help ourselves, and while we still cry, we don’t cry as often. But even so, women are more prone to tears than men.

What I have long called “emotional unavailability” when it comes to the men I’ve dated, scientists call “emotional containment.”

Outside of stigma, there is another reason that men don’t show their emotions as much as women, and like most things that frustrate and confound us, it’s evolutionary.

Back when men were tasked with, well, all the murdering to provide food for their families, they had to find a way to hide their emotions. Their prey could smell fear, which signaled weakness—the tables could turn at any moment. To remain the predator, men had to learn to compartmentalize their fear and urge to cry. This ability grew stronger and deeper over time.

But that’s not all!

Did you know that testosterone inhibits tears?

ME NEITHER!

In times of emotional stress, people with testosterone will be flooded, and their systems will shut down. This is why trying to have a deeply emotional conversation with a person with testosterone can go so awry. When testosterone floods the system, it signals danger, which triggers their fight-or-flight response, which activates a biological response: a rise in blood pressure, a pounding heart, and a surge of adrenaline and sweat. This uncomfortable cascade can easily tip a person into irrational rage or unabiding sorrow. While the flare-up is quick, the recovery is not.

When people with testosterone are caught up in an emotional situation, what’s making them react is not the situation that caused it but the deeply distressing physical signals set off. To everyone involved, it looks and seems irrational, and that’s because we cannot see inside someone else’s body and identify the invisible Ping-Pong of mental anguish.

This is why many men try to avoid emotional conversations, arguments, and confrontations of negative feelings. They may go entirely mute, or they’ll be flooded. Men aren’t always trying to avoid engaging in these conversations; they are trying to maintain their health.

Have you noticed how often men use humor to avoid emotion? There’s a reason for that. (For the record, women do this too. I’m one of them.)

When people use humor as a tool for avoidance, they use it to preserve their sense of safety. Going toward emotion can be so overwhelming and frightening for some people that they’d rather live in comfort and certainty and remain on the wide ledge, away from the emotion. Humor allows them a wide berth, but it’s a tool that, when used too often, will be a disservice to long-term health. If you can’t face what needs to be faced, you will never grow or evolve.

Men learn from a young age to endure mental and physical pain. To swallow their unhappiness and fake their stability. Exposing insecurities or admitting emotional distress in our gender-normative society puts boys and men in emotional danger. So they shut down.

They were built to shut down. 

Because they have fewer neural connections between distant brain regions, men come with a built-in compartmentalization system that can keep them locked out of their emotional warehouse.

Women, on the other hand, are better able to express their emotions because, evolutionarily speaking, we need to be attuned to the cries of our helpless infants. This developed our innate ability to be emotionally in sync with others. Babies take their calming cues from energy, expressions, and sounds, and more expressive women also respond to babies’ cues more frequently than men. This ability to be emotionally expressive has become the providence of women due to inheritance.

At the same time, men’s tear ducts are larger than women’s, which means tears take longer to spill. But women are better built to cry because, with smaller ducts, tears appear on their cheeks faster.

All animals cry, but no one knows why only humans shed tears. Some theorize that social signaling may be one reason. When someone cries, we work to soothe them. When we cry, we are forced to explain and say what we need.

Aging men have less testosterone, so older men cry more easily than younger men. They tend to be better at expressing compassion.

Ad Vingerhoets, a clinical psychologist in the Netherlands, has a special interest in crying. Vingerhoets believes that understanding why people are the only animal to shed tears will teach us more about human beings. He studies such things as gender differences in crying, why people cry when they’re happy, what makes people cry, and what factors have the biggest impact on crying.

When we question boys' masculinity, we teach them early on that who they are is wrong. Human beings have emotions. When we force men to suppress their suppressed emotions, it fosters simmering aggression that can lead to violence.

When we teach a child, they’re not conforming to the status quo; we are sending the message that they are being human in the wrong way. This becomes a secret the child must hide, not because he’s wrong, but because other people are wrong.

The status quo is what’s wrong.

It is worth mentioning that restraining men from showing emotions leads to depression, and in some cases, the consequences can be as grave as suicide.

But here’s the real kicker: Men who tell other men that feeling or showing emotions is weak are projecting. It’s a coping mechanism they use to prevent themselves from feeling, not because doing so is “soft” but because doing so takes tremendous strength, bravery, and courage. Men who believe that emotions are weak rely on a defense mechanism that keeps them feeling safe.

The truth is that facing your emotions and sitting inside their discomfort is one of the hardest things a person can do.

Emotions are the reason we have art and poetry. They’re the reason we create and express ourselves. It’s how we make meaning and create depth in life. It’s how we grow closer to other people.

Without tears, or the courage to face and feel emotion, men will be selling themselves short, believing something untrue, so that they can remain safe and appear strong, when in reality, the longer one goes disconnecting from their inner lives, the more dangerous life will feel, and the weaker they’ll become.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about all this in the comments!

Until next week, I remain…

Amanda