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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Over the holidays, I was trying to explain to my 57-year-old father why faceplant videos are so funny. But, as describing a YouTube video to someone who hasn't seen it may be the modern equivalent of recounting a boring dream, I guess I deserved what happened next.\n\n \"Have you seen the one,\" he began ominously, \"With the dog and the soldier?\"\n\n A dog and a soldier? Uh oh. I hoped this wasn't something filmed on a cell phone in a Mexican border town. Confused, I pressed for details. Again, probably a mistake.\n\n \"This dog is inside this house, and he doesn't know it but his master is coming home from overseas after a tour in Iraq,\" my father explained. \"And then all of the sudden his tail starts going like crazy! You hear a truck in the driveway, and the dog can't even see or smell him! But you can see that he...he just...he just KNOWS.\"\n\n And then my dad did a weird thing. He misted up.\n\n My father is a former athlete. He works in a casino. His dentist has reprimanded him for chaw use. When I dated men in college, my father would demand to speak to them on the phone to grill them about how much they could bench press.\n\n With an unsteady hand, I uncorked the bottle of bourbon I'd gotten for Christmas and held it out to him, grimly, like I was preparing him for frontier surgery. I realized then that I have no idea what to do when men cry.\n\n At first, I thought that maybe this was a female chauvinist thing. I've always agreed with a line I saw once in a Christopher Durang play, where Sigourney Weaver tells her date that she doesn't think men should cry \"unless something falls on them.\" \n\n But on further reflection, I realized I was surrounded with weepy men. My best guy friends have dissolved like otter pops over no less than the Lost finale, or an overly fond description of a long-dead parakeet. I've tended to date graduates of the Nick Hornby School for Maudlin Young Men, and I deal with it poorly. I once ended perhaps one of the most fulfilling sex-only relationships of my life because the guy cried over a soccer game.\n\n I never know what to do during these moments. I tend to view crying in its most literal sense: as fluid squirting involuntarily from an orifice, and I react accordingly. You know, like if you'd severed your femoral artery and blood began spraying everywhere. In both cases, I might offer you a tissue and go, \"Don't...do that.\"\n\n And yet, I've never learned how to deal with it with anybody\u2014male or female. It's not that I have with an issue with men crying, it's that I have a issue with anybody doing it.\n\n Growing up, it was a matter of gender politics. I no longer read women's magazines after learning the hard way that the quotes from \"men on the street\" were faked (\"Oh yeah, there's nothing like a girl who smears a little butterscotch on your perineum\" or \"Don't be self-conscious! We're so happy you're having sex with us, we don't care if you have pendulous breasts or stop during coitus to eat leftover corn on the cob.\") But when I did read them, they always featured \"How to Get Ahead at the Office\" tips that boiled down to \"Don't be such a fucking girl.\"\n\n Who were these phantom women running around the office, being denied raises because they were weeping over excel sheets and drying up the company Sharpies drawing elaborate menstrual calendars on conference room white boards? I never saw them, but I feared they were out there, keeping Murphy Brown from making as much money as the male newscasters.\n\n But the guys had it even worse. And I don't think six months passed during my youth without a reinvention on that awful \"Where Are All the Real Men?\" dating books or that episode of Home Improvement where Tim has to go to sensitivity training because he rubbed his erection on a table saw (pretty sure that happened, it's been awhile). I don't envy you, readers of men's magazines.\n\n On the one hand you're supposed to appreciate the butteriness of a leather accessory, while bemoaning the dwindling number of ice-fishing, zip-lining \"real\" men. You're having your own manliness sold back to you wrapped in a silk kerchief embroidered with the words \"You're kind of a douche for buying this.\"\n\n Many of the people I know aren't weepers. They grew up Catholic or in military families or not in one of those European countries where it's acceptable to flip over a car in tears if your Olympic skiing team takes the bronze. It seems the more depressing the times, the more stoic we want our romantic partners to be. It's totally lacking in emotional maturity and gender parity, and it's something that I'm trying to learn to deal with as I age. For some reason, I expected men to ossify as they age, like dried meat or Nick Nolte. But many of them, unlike me, have fully formed feelings that they're willing to share and confront.\n\n Many of us have been taught not to show emotion outside of the deaths of family members, catastrophic injury, or, OK, really terrible breakups. And I definitely think there are instances in which crying is inappropriate for both genders. At work, in a crowded coffee shop, or a water park\u2014sure, it's good camouflage, but come on, the rest of us are there to have fun.\n\n I find the \"new maleness\" stupid because it's neither new nor changed. I have met bawlers male and female, young and old, and anybody who's seen an old dude in a Ken Burns documentary knows that even guys who crawled over their buddies' bodies at Guadalcanal can get misty about a clarinet solo. It's possible that the facelessness of the Internet and the bizarre way in which we've learned to compartmentalize death and disappointment in our somewhat crappy times have inured many of us to crying.\n\n I still think it's an important skill, separating interior emotion from bald external displays. But it's equally important for us weepers and non-weepers to understand each other. Maybe you lose it during The Voice, and you date a girl who has a \"natural birth plan\" for getting her wisdom teeth pulled. Or maybe you haven't cried since your Nana's funeral, and you fall for one of those girls for who's thrown into an emotional tailspin just thinking about how good it was when McDonald's used to deep-fry their apple pies. The important thing is knowing that crying is subjective for different people, and that if somebody does it in front of you, it's probably because they feel comfortable enough around to you do it. Likewise, I hope those of you with slutty tear ducts understand that some of us have been forced to become hardened to displays of wild emotion for social reasons, personal reasons, sad commercials, or mean Internet commenters.\n\n It's important to respect that we all operate on different demonstrative frequencies. And okay, maybe it's equally important for me to be able to give my father a hug and say, \"It's okay, Pop. Murphy's daddy is home. He's home.\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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