The Crying Game

The most alone I’ve ever felt was crying on the F train in New York. Someone handed me a tissue on the way out the door — I didn’t look up to see my benefactor’s face — but no one asked me what was wrong.

I’m not sure how I would have answered — it seemed like a million things at the time. Which is why I’m not satisfied by the rather obvious explanations for a recent spate of public waterworks. Last week, the Bush White House got touchy-feeling as Andy Card’s eyes brimmed while he announced his resignation as Chief of Staff. College basketball players Adam Morrison and J. J. Redick sobbed on the courts after their respective teams, Gonzaga and Duke, were eliminated from the NCAA tournament. And remember poor Mrs. Alito, sniffling through her husband’s confirmation Senate hearings. Of course, the daytime block of network programming has long been synonymous with emotional instability. There’s Oprah and Dr. Phil, of course — and Starting Over, the syndicated group therapy show whose saline output is of biblical proportions.

We know why they’re all crying, right? A farewell, losing, stress and, well, the whole point of daytime chat shows and Starting Over is to exhaust a thesaurus of synonyms for "closure." But there are flavors of sadness and specific qualities of joy, let alone a whole basketful of motivations for tears.

In Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears, Tom Lutz writes that "weeping often occurs at precisely those times when we are least able to fully verbalize complex and overwhelming emotions." We cry when words aren't enough, which suggests that any uptick in public tears may be proportional to a loss in our ability to articulate what we feel.

There are different kinds of tears, too, and some might argue that blubbering will always mean something different for men than it does for women. Certainly, there’s no better time for Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield to be flacking his book on masculine virtue — Manliness — in which he bemoans the gentle decline of men unafraid to be men and praises emotional aloofness.

But the problem with crying in public isn’t that it’s feminine or weak, it’s that weeping will never communicate as much as words. We tend to think of being caught crying in public as being exposed — a raw, unvarnished act. It is a way of being emotional, to be sure, yet crying can be a way of avoiding emotional complications; see Randy "Duke" Cunningham’s pre-indictment press conference, or Sen. Dick Durbin’s oddly excruciating apology for comparing Gitmo interrogators to the Nazis.

To cry is to disengage, to stop the conversation. Some scientists speculate that crying may have developed as a kind of psychic escape hatch — the sheer physicality of it distracting the distraught when mental anguish becomes too much to endure.

I'm not nearly as distressed as Mansfield by our apparently growing acceptance of men’s tears, but I worry that we might accept them in lieu of words. Crying doesn’t bring closure; putting a name to things does. Cunningham’s welling up was not a confession, after all.

For female politicians, tears are, of course, toxic. No one wants to imagine the tragedy grand enough that Hillary Clinton or Condoleezza Rice could let their waterworks flow. I am, however, less confident that this means they are raring to engage in direct debate. Hillary and Condi will never cry in public — but that doesn't mean we'll ever know what they're really thinking, even if we ask.