After four dry-eyed decades, the floodgates have well and truly opened, writes Chris Deerin – and he isn’t alone.
Martin Amis, that master chronicler of masculinity and its discontents, noticed it first.
“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep… Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Women… will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, ‘What is it?’ And the men say, ‘Nothing. No it isn’t anything really. Just sad dreams.'”
When his novel, The Information, which opens with this passage, was published, Amis was in his late 40s, as I am now. It strikes me, therefore, that the onset of male tears might have something to do with being caught in the tractor beam of 50, a milestone that seems to exert a heavy gravity, not just on the body, but on the mind, too.
Recently, I have started to weep. After four dry-eyed decades, the floodgates have well and truly opened.
I cry at the sadder items on the evening news, at maudlin novels, at melancholy melodies and lyrics. Films are a hazard – even the funny ones can ambush me with an unexpected turn to the sorrowful.
In the past month, I have shed tears at a baby photo of our 13-year-old; a documentary about Linda Ronstadt; the cloned children in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go; the fate of a mid-80s indie band called Stump; and the sudden thought of our dog dying (she is five, in vigorous health and, largely, a pain in the ass).
Something fundamental has changed
What has become of me? I wasn’t doing this last year, when the world was every bit as depressing as it is today. I would sit through weepie movies, chucking out sarcastic remarks to my increasingly exasperated wife.
Novels were enjoyed for their intellectual power and sentence construction, not for their lachrymosity. If I thought about death, either mine or others’, I did so phlegmatically, and not for long.
So, something fundamental has changed. I raised the subject – tentatively, of course – with a male friend of the same age, someone who might traditionally be classed as a bit of a hard man. His response was instant. “God, the same thing has happened to me,” he said. “I cry all the time these days. Just sitting on the couch at home, sobbing at something I’ve seen on TV.”
Emboldened, I approached another; a manly, unshaven Glaswegian with a deep baritone. “I can barely listen to music anymore,” he rumbled. “Everything sets me off. That advert where the wee girl buys her mum a bar of chocolate with some plastic rings and a unicorn… They should have a message after it saying: ‘If you’ve been affected by issues raised in that commercial, please call…'”
Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you will mark us, wiping the wet from our eyes with a faintly puzzled air
Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you will mark us, wiping the wet from our eyes with a faintly puzzled air. We all appear to be in it together.
Is it the ‘manopause’?
A bit of poking around online alerts me to something called the “manopause” or the “andropause”, which seems to be a male, less scientifically evidenced, less physically decisive version of what happens to women.
From 35, there is a gradual decline in the amount of testosterone produced by men’s bodies, so that, by the time most hit their 50s, levels are low enough to produce a host of changes. This can include weight gain, loss of libido, diminished memory, reduced muscle bulk, and increased likelihood of depression and fatigue – it can also bring a heightened risk of osteoporosis, heart disease, and possibly Alzheimer’s disease.
So much for the chemicals. There’s more to it than that, though. I also detect among my friends a psychological restlessness that reflects this strange neither-young-nor-old stage of life.
Men of a certain age are newly vulnerable
By 50, more doors have closed than remain to be opened – what were once avenues of possibility are permanently shut off, opportunities not yet taken or delayed have gone for good. You have fewer years ahead of you than behind, and your children are grown, or almost so.
Career-wise, your years as a young thruster are a memory, and a bigger concern might be keeping the job you have as a new generation of young thrusters catches up. Other people simply don’t notice you as much anymore.
Your sense of yourself, your centrality and utility in the world, takes a hammering. The regrets have piled up. A reckoning with mortality is hard to avoid.
Now, I guess, we’re on to the cliché of the midlife crisis, of the racy sports car or the slinky younger girlfriend or the taking up of some physically inadvisable martial art. One looks a bit ahead and thinks: “No chance”, but previous cohorts no doubt did the same before finding themselves inside the MG garage, ooh-ing at the soft-tops.
It’s a curious thing to feel so newly vulnerable, suffused by self-pity, confused by raw emotion, trying to recalibrate your place and purpose. So, keep the hankies nearby this Christmas – even if we manfully struggle through It’s a Wonderful Life, the adverts will finish us off.
Chris Deerin is a leading journalist and commentator who heads independent, non-party think tank, Reform Scotland
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