Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Denial and Tears.

Gathering from personal experiences and following up with weeding through the internet to find relevant information, I see how little men understand crying. If i don't understand something, I am sure to come up with a million possible explanations. It is how minds work. The sheer volume of possibilities sets the stage for confusion, judgement, minimization of the issue at hand and in later stages, denial.

I read men inherently feel the need to fix things. I have seen it to be true with those men I do know. They go to great lengths attempting to do so even when things do not need 'fixing' as much as there is a need for patience and purely existing, both in body and mind. 


It is a fact that women cry a lot more than men. I remember a conversation with my best friend where she said, "I have observed that i cry in loud sobs when i am angry or frustrated. I do not cry when I am sad."  I have found that to be true in my case too. Sometimes, I cry because I am being forced to feel rueful. I cry at the unfairness of it all but in all fairness, the world is not fair. So I move on.

One issue I dwell upon now is how people forget, very often, that reactions to a stimulus vary from one person to another. I might wince for having scraped in knee while someone might be able to walk away from a bullet wound. ( I do not know about the latter. I am speculating for the purpose of drawing a comparison.) This non-absolute axiom tends to take worse beating when the stimulus turns from being physical to emotional. I might want to cry because my shoe heel came apart. Do not judge the validity of the reaction using your index of emotional response. If you do not understand the other person's incentive to cry or not to cry, if you cannot digest it, then respect it. As a last resort, I might say, flee the scene.


There are worse things you can do:
# Minimizing the problem. Using contorted logic to say how the problem does not warrant crying because the current problem is a wild exaggeration of the tiny issue that engendered it; There by, making the person regret ever exposing themselves to you in his/ her vulnerable position.

# Complete Denial. When minimization does not work, the next step towards the annihilation of the person's integrity is to deny the existence of a problem. Of course, problems can be invented just so the person can cry because life was so good, crying needs to done over things that do not exist.  Any sensible woman i know, who has a shred of integrity, does not invent sad stories, unless it's for her livelihood. Contrary to popular belief, I look to be happy for as much and for as long as possible.

I want to believe the reason men do the things stated above is because of their futile attempts to fix things. When you go all out and try to fix something and it doesn't make anything better, you then re-asses the situation. May be there was nothing to fix in the first place. Denial. Amid someone's tears.