I tear up when I am extremely frustrated, nervous or angry. I turn red and my hands shake, the whole nine yards. It is embarrassing and all that, but so far I’ve never been called out as being unprofessional. I will explain to the other person that I am upset or nervous, but I will continue the discussion. Usually I will know it’s irrational, and will do my best to try to make light of it. I never do it to influence other people.
But I rarely tear up at sad events like funerals. I almost never cry about death.
Stopping the waterworks once the valves are open is indeed hard, but you can prevent it by suppressing the emotion that lead to it in the first place. Extreme feelings like anger, sadness or distress are entirely inapproapriate for the workplace. Learn to compartmentalize and leave the drama at home. If you can’t (say your mom just died or something), take a sick-day.
The male equivalent is a boner. Didn’t ask for it, can’t really control it, don’t want to be put down or considered unprofessional because it ‘just happened’.
Men are just fortunate that it’s not overt, like tears.
That’s a ridiculous comparison. You cannot always physical control what your body does. A mature adult should be able to control their emotions. That’s what maturity is all about.
If you get so upset on a regular basis that you can’t keep yourself from bursting out into tears, you need to see a psychiatrist so that you can get medication that will allow you to do so. If someone’s reaction to getting really angry was to start screaming, that wouldn’t be tolerated in the workplace - even if they weren’t screaming at an individual, it’s still noisy and disruptive, and by making others uncomfortable it reduces everyone’s efficiency.
The workplace is not there to make you feel good, or even to support your emotional derangement. You’re there to do a job. Grow the hell up.
Nobody is asking you to restrain your emotions. You are merely being asked to have an adult-level control of the display of those emotions.
I guess we have to agree to disagree.
Then if I understand correctly, this is about “don’t break down sobbing at work without at least excusing yourself” and not “never shed any tears on the job”? Okay, I suppose that’s reasonable. 
This thread brings back distant memories.
When I first went on the pill, around 1988, it was for the purpose of PMS control. It has been so long ago now that I only have vague memories of the uncontrollable emotions. I do remember complaining to the doctor that I found myself crying over nothing at all, and that I couldn’t stop and that it was debilitating.
Once I started on a low-dose estrogen pill, all of that faded away. I had twenty-two years of being on an even keel, with hardly ever a tear. I didn’t even cry when my mom died, not that I didn’t feel grief, it just didn’t manifest itself in uncontrollable crying.
Then menopause hit and I was taken off the pill. Now that there’s no estrogen at all, my emotions are rather flatlined with the exception of wanting to punch out random people who piss me off. Is that what being a guy feels like?
Hey, I agree. I am waiting for the kinks to get ironed out of hormonal birth control and for male hormonal birth control to make it to the market already. As for the 10 percent of Americans currently on anti-depression meds, here’s hoping they can figure out what works on their own time.
You haven’t met a lot of the people I’ve worked with. They are men, they are raging maniacs, and they are millionaires. No one does anything but tiptoe (except their families). While this may not be acceptable lower down the line, it isn’t exactly commented upon in certain areas (e.g. sales) as long as it’s not too loud).
What job? What line of work? The OP said never to cry at work, not to refrain from doing it every day. I don’t think that’s healthy, but then neither is working 9-8 every day of the week and having a heart attack at 50. So perhaps a workplace balance is in order. Not incredibly compatible with the stereotypical American office, but then that tends not to be a very happy place.
Emotions often are what your body does, aren’t they?
And if you shot your coworkers in the face with a crossbow on a regular basis, you’d be a bad person. But none of these things is what’s being talked about in this thread.
Who in this thread says they do that? It’s almost universally been “I dislike crying, but every once in a while I can’t help tears showing up. It’s embarrassing, but unavoidable.” I’m pretty sure that almost no one in this thread actually cries at work very often. Myself, I remember doing it once, nearly 15 years ago. The point is, many people can’t just decide not to have tears welling up under certain (uncommon) circumstances. That’s all.
Actually I had a boss who screamed on a regular basis. It was awful, but she was the boss, so what was there to do?
I handle tears no better than the average guy, and there’s definitely no Nordic blood in me - lots of my ancestors came from the UK (England, Ireland, Scotland), and the rest from France, Bermuda and The Azores. I don’t know what to do when someone starts crying for what feels like a trivial reason. Mostly I just hand them a box of tissues.
While I cry fairly easily when I’m alone - I tear up over news stories etc - I rarely cry in front of other people. I’ve worked at the same place for almost nine years, and the only time anyone there has seen me cry was the morning after a work friend died - I’d been hoping since the night before that the guy on the news was someone with the same name, but they confirmed it was him. Lots of people cried, though, so that wasn’t too remarkable.
And on the flip side people who are almost always in control of their displays of emotion are put down for being cold and uncaring by the very people who feel bad about being asked to restrain theirs. funny, that.
Wait, wait, wait. So what I am to take away from this thread is that people are just as capable of controlling whether or not they cry as whether or not they get menstrual cramps?