OK, here’s a macho challenge for you big wusses, especially the ones with kids. Watch Losing Isaiah and Lorenzo’s Oil back-to-back.
Last one to break down has a heart made of coal.
I cried when Patrick Swayze was taken by the good guys in Ghost
With me (throwing my own anecdotal hat into the ring), it’s a bit weird…
I can more easily Chuck Norris my way through emotional events like funerals now on the cusp of forty than when I was about eighteen. You want dry eyed, I’ll give you dry eyed. I can be “the Rock” for the others.
But…
There is a lot of effort involved in this. I feel the emotion more than I used to, but I can hide it better.
Short answer: I know how to keep a dry eye, but twenty years ago I didn’t need that skill.
Ah ha! I’d noticed my 60 year old father getting blubbery, but until I saw this thread I thought it was just him. I’m 30 and as of yet I don’t cry about anything.
Peak Banana, it’s funny that you mention Jeremy Clarkson; I was shocked a couple weeks ago when he wiped away tears at the end of a 24-hour race. I thought of my father then, too.
I wonder if it’s down to an increase in life experience?
I broke up with a steady girlfriend when I was 21. She cried for days. I knew I was meant to be upset, but in fact I didn’t really feel much apart from relief. I lacked empathy. So I faked it - even (I am so ashamed to admit this) to the point of splashing water on my eyes to make it look like I’d been crying. Pathetic.
Then when I was 29, I had my heart well and truly broken, for the first time in my life. Sure, I’d been broken up with before, and it hurt, but I got over it relatively quickly. This was different - we’d been together for seven years; I had thought she was a pillar of my future; she was my home; she left me. I was devastated almost to the point of suicide, and cried for weeks on and off, and got drunk a lot.
Since then, the knowledge of what it actually feels like to have my heart smashed into pieces has made me realise the appalling pain it is inevitable that one inflicts on the other person, when breaking up. And knowledge of my inflicting of that feeling in another creates a far greater sense of upset on my part.
It’s just a thought. Maybe it’s merely a diminution of testosterone.
I’m only 20, and this is happening, already.
Yay! My father’s increasing blubberiness has definitely mellowed him out and helped smooth his relationships with the kids. I love that little girls are being taught they can be angry and tough and women are encouraged to be more sexually aggressive, but I really wish more would be done to let little boys and men know it’s all right to cry. Aside from Free to Be You and Me, of course.
***Creator * ** (1985). Okay there’s a lot of good stuff about Nobel Laureate Dr. Wolper teaching 12 units of The Big Picture…there’s good some good stuff about The Love Formula…
…but I defy you to keep your eyes dry when Mr. Spano picks up the No Parking sign and screams “Son! Of! A! Bitch!”
Oh yeah. as I age I turn more and more into an emotional ragbag. Last night we came across Black Beauty on Television and watched it. Big tears rolling down my cheeks but at least I wasn’t sniveling. Then I tried to tell my wife the differences between the film and the picture book I read 40 years ago. “In the book, it wasn’t a dirt road, but a steep cobblestone street, and the wagon was full of heavy barrels, and Beauty was trying as hard as he could, and the man was whipping him and whipping him and he…” (huge lump in throat, lips quivering, eyes welling up.)
Aw Hell.
Oh yes, and it’s not just at sad things either. I remember watching the people of Paris celebrate in their millions on the Champs Elysee, after their victory in the 1998 World Cup, with tears streaming down my face because it was just so damned joyful.
I’ve never had a problem crying at things, so not sure if I’m becoming more prone to crying or not as I grow older. I definitely cried a lot during my viewings of Six Feet Under as it was a very moving show. I cried during Brokeback Mountain (I went to the toilet after the film and it was full of men splashing water of their faces), I’ve become misty eyed at loads of things other than that even if not full on crying about it. I cry at real life things too, but the last time I did that was in 2005 (I was having a very difficult time at my job and was in the process of trying to mend my relationship with my father during therapy - wore me down a bit).